My former college roommate had an old DataGeneral portable computer with Windows 1.0.
when i was in college, i did a lot of my work on an old zenith supersport 286 laptop with windows 1.04 and ms-works for dos (2? 3?). it's amazing how far windows has come since then... sort of like when i figured out how to use kde instead of twm.
It could even recommend a movie based on what you liked and didn't like in the past -- and, by the way, it's playing three blocks away, starts in half an hour and only a few tickets are left, so would you like to purchase one now with your credit card?
so, essentially, i'm expected to give up chunks of information about my life because it's too inconvenient to ask for directions? yeah, right.
please tell me there's other motivations.
also, why is it that mr mcnealy assumes that the information will be secure if you just want it to be? the example of the medical records at the beginning assumes everything is stored and retrieved perfectly according to plan. i would think that with his experience, he realizes that everything breaks and that there is no real security either.
'course, that probably wouldn't sell too many sun boxen...
can anyone point me to something like this for other architectures? i run all ppc at home, and a friend of mine is looking at getting an alpha... a fairly complete comparison like this would be a godsend.
one of the colleges here in buffalo has a special night program for continuing education. the deal is that you take 2 classes 2 nights a week and get 12 credits toward your B.A.
...and so there's billboards all over the nickel city that say "2 + 2 = 12".
i certainly hope they're not trying to advertise anything even vaguely related to math education.
It's inevitable that Linux, because of the fact it's the only true cross-platform, scalable mainstream OS on the market, will eventually gain a greater number of desktop users than Apple.
It's inevitable that BeOS, because of the fact it's the only true cross-platform, scalable mainstream OS on the market, will eventually gain a greater number of desktop users than Apple.
hm. doesn't appear history's on your side this time out.
yeah, those bastards. only their os runs on their hardware. well, netbsd does, too. and so does openbsd. and linux. and beos. and darwin, if you want to count that. and then there's the little guys, like mac06 or macmint or minix, or old apple stuff like a/ux.
The funny thing is that when this company was just known a Bell Atlantic (before they merged with GTE) I never had a problem.
and if the slightest nod toward planning the future corporation's organization had been in the works last year, you'd still never have a problem.
unfortunately, the needs of the customer have taken a back seat (if not put in the next car back) while the directors and managers fight for their jobs. real pretty.
The cost of DSL should be raised to include paying for competent tech support.
yeah. i hear northpoint's support was great.
so was covad's, before they pulled completely out of buffalo due to lack of customers.
i recognize that there was more going on there, but you get my point. as so many others have already pointed out in this thread, people are cheap and dumb and won't pay extra for something intangible and that they might not need. quality tech support as a surcharge is up there with "extended warranties" that the twit at best buy keeps trying to sell me every time i buy a mouse to most people.
It's a rather arrogant, elitist attitude, wouldn't you agree?
i would characterize it more as "heartless" than elitist. but i think jon was implying that this is on the part of tech support. it's not. for one thing, you've probably never actually talked to someone who worked for the company whose product they support - outsourcing is the norm. for another, techs on the phones tend to _like_ the customer and want to fix their problems. its the parent company whose product we have to support that is so "arrogant."
nothing used to make me happier than actually fixing a customer - but it was so goddamned difficult most of the time to get the parent company to admit anything was wrong that it was almost impossible. i lay any charge or arrogance squarely at their feet.
That's because we're arrogant enough to assume our products are usable without support, and elitist enough to not care whether the people who need support get it or not.
no, it's because companies are cheap, and don't see customers as people. rather, they are simply a number at the bottom of an excel spreadsheet somewhere. the quality of the service doesn't matter, it's how low you can bring the end user price to sucker them in.
case in point...
i used to do Verizon DSL tech support. It was a miserable, thankless job. the day after our 500,000th customer signed up, the entire call center i worked in was laid off. why? because we had the highest-priced, best trained techs in their support hierarchy. but now that there's half a million customers, the service doesn't count any more. no matter how many cancel the service, they've achieved a critical mass that keeps them from losing money as long as they can keep suckering people in with the low monthly price.
and as long as they can pay undertrained phone monkeys half what they paid us, the monthly price stays low.
_that's_ why tech support sucks. because people are too fucking lazy to tell a company to go screw and hurt the bottom line - they'd rather bitch about it on slashdot.
I use verizon as my DSL provider, and when you sign up, you choose a "GSP," which is either qwest or some other company I don't remember. I recall at the time being told by someone that it didn't matter which one I chose, so I think I chose qwest. Anyone know what kind of impact this deal will have on someone in my situation?
won't make any different... verizon's leasing bandwidth from qwest, but this only affects the customers using qwest to provide their isp service. you are, i assume, using verizon online, so you won't be affected.
(briefly roused from his slumber, laid-off verizon tech support man now returns to sleep and dreams of strangling ivan with his bare fucking hands.)
one of those monolithic Linux ISP's, oh wait, there are none.
there was a small one in rochester, ny, several years ago. ez-net. they went under. nobody would pay for an account, since everyone in the damned county had r00t.
Registrant:
Mind Over Machines, Inc. (MOM2-DOM)
1300 York Road, Suite 30
Baltimore, MD 21093
US
Domain Name: MOM.COM
Administrative Contact, Billing Contact:
Bafford, Bill (BBU80) bill@MOMINC.COM
Mind Over Machines, Inc.
1300 York Road
Suite 190
Baltimore , MD 21093
410 321-4700 (FAX) 410 321-4780
Technical Contact:
DNS, Charm Net (CND4) dns@CHARM.NET
Charm Net, Incorporated
2200 E. Lombard St.
Baltimore, MD 21231
(410)558-3900 (FAX) (410)558-3901
i find it tough to believe that anyone would seriously consider doing away with payphones. not everyone is a silicon valley dotcom rich kid, you know... i'm doing a little bit of travelling right now, and pay phones are the only way to catch up with people i know in different cities. get rid of those, i'll have no way to get in touch when i roll into town. bad idea.
a lot of people in this world don't even have a computer or a tv, let alone a new nokia to fuck around with.
Is Catherine MacKinnon a conservative? Is Andrea Dworkin?
no. andrea dworkin is a fucking monster. no matter how many papers you write about sex being "evil and contemptuous," guess what, that's how we're plumbed. tough shit, chubby wumpkins.
It's a nice idea - just a shame it's unworkable until it's accepted by the current top level authorities, which of course it never will unless they can screw money out of it...
do what i do - start small. if everyone on slashdot can turn on half a dozen people to these alternate roots, they may actually start seeing some traffic.
for example - i run a small network at home, hooked up to the internet through a cable modem. i've got a linksys router set up to share the connection and handle NAT, but since i've got ports forwarded to a couple of different machines i've got my netbsd box set up to handle the dhcp for the network. which is nice, because it's pushing the orsc root rather than the dns address for my cable provider. there's three people on the network - that's three more people who know that there is a choice.
every time you set up a network for someone (and don't tell me you don't do it all the damn time, if you're on slashdot you're on call to half a dozen lusers and their families) do something like this. educate the people whose machines you fix. start small.
Of course, my examples are in reference to hardware. Software is slightly different. Most users will like the automatic upgrades. They don't know enough to try it themselves, and when they do they spend most of their time on the phone with tech support.
software, so far as i can tell, isn't different at all. everyone wants the newest thing with the highest number.
case in point: my father has a 133 mhz pentium. now, i had an old oem copy of win 95c for him when he wanted to upgrade his machine, but instead he went with win98. why? because the number is higher.
"newer is better" is a fucking _mantra_. look at cars, movies, books, hardware, software - at least in america, if it's more than a year old nobody wants to see it.
Slashdot Mirror
My former college roommate had an old DataGeneral portable computer with Windows 1.0.
when i was in college, i did a lot of my work on an old zenith supersport 286 laptop with windows 1.04 and ms-works for dos (2? 3?). it's amazing how far windows has come since then... sort of like when i figured out how to use kde instead of twm.
--saint----
It could even recommend a movie based on what you liked and didn't like in the past -- and, by the way, it's playing three blocks away, starts in half an hour and only a few tickets are left, so would you like to purchase one now with your credit card?
so, essentially, i'm expected to give up chunks of information about my life because it's too inconvenient to ask for directions? yeah, right.
please tell me there's other motivations.
also, why is it that mr mcnealy assumes that the information will be secure if you just want it to be? the example of the medical records at the beginning assumes everything is stored and retrieved perfectly according to plan. i would think that with his experience, he realizes that everything breaks and that there is no real security either.
'course, that probably wouldn't sell too many sun boxen...
--saint----
can anyone point me to something like this for other architectures? i run all ppc at home, and a friend of mine is looking at getting an alpha... a fairly complete comparison like this would be a godsend.
--saint----
hmm. looks like "High-performance TCP/IP stack" is a planned feature. i wonder if it does any sort of networking right now?
--saint----
one of the colleges here in buffalo has a special night program for continuing education. the deal is that you take 2 classes 2 nights a week and get 12 credits toward your B.A.
i certainly hope they're not trying to advertise anything even vaguely related to math education.
--saint----
if i understand properly, amazon did this based on some sort of cookie-mojo in the client's machine.
how much is my new dell going to cost if i wipe all the cookies from my box except theirs?
(not that i'd buy one anyway, but for example...)
hey, maybe apple will start doing this. then they'll realize what poor motherfuckers most of their customers are and finally drop their prices.
--saint----
red hat linux - now three and a half days without an exploit!
--saint----
It's inevitable that Linux, because of the fact it's the only true cross-platform, scalable mainstream OS on the market, will eventually gain a greater number of desktop users than Apple.
It's inevitable that BeOS, because of the fact it's the only true cross-platform, scalable mainstream OS on the market, will eventually gain a greater number of desktop users than Apple.
hm. doesn't appear history's on your side this time out.
--saint----
. Only their OS can run on their hardware
yeah, those bastards. only their os runs on their hardware. well, netbsd does, too. and so does openbsd. and linux. and beos. and darwin, if you want to count that. and then there's the little guys, like mac06 or macmint or minix, or old apple stuff like a/ux.
sure wish i could run something else.
--saint----
i work zero hours per week... i've been laid off. thanks, new economy!
--saint----
GPL'd codec running on Linux/*BSD/Solaris boxes, their marketshare will certainly increase!
yeah, i'm sure apple's just dying to port their software to the only platform doing worse in the consumer space than the mac os.
(posted from an imac)
--saint----
The funny thing is that when this company was just known a Bell Atlantic (before they merged with GTE) I never had a problem.
and if the slightest nod toward planning the future corporation's organization had been in the works last year, you'd still never have a problem.
unfortunately, the needs of the customer have taken a back seat (if not put in the next car back) while the directors and managers fight for their jobs. real pretty.
--saint----
The cost of DSL should be raised to include paying for competent tech support.
yeah. i hear northpoint's support was great.
so was covad's, before they pulled completely out of buffalo due to lack of customers.
i recognize that there was more going on there, but you get my point. as so many others have already pointed out in this thread, people are cheap and dumb and won't pay extra for something intangible and that they might not need. quality tech support as a surcharge is up there with "extended warranties" that the twit at best buy keeps trying to sell me every time i buy a mouse to most people.
--saint----
It's a rather arrogant, elitist attitude, wouldn't you agree?
i would characterize it more as "heartless" than elitist. but i think jon was implying that this is on the part of tech support. it's not. for one thing, you've probably never actually talked to someone who worked for the company whose product they support - outsourcing is the norm. for another, techs on the phones tend to _like_ the customer and want to fix their problems. its the parent company whose product we have to support that is so "arrogant."
nothing used to make me happier than actually fixing a customer - but it was so goddamned difficult most of the time to get the parent company to admit anything was wrong that it was almost impossible. i lay any charge or arrogance squarely at their feet.
--saint----
The ordinary home user wants real, live, effective human support. I'm just not sure how they're going to get it.
by not screaming incoherently at the tech support for the wrong product?
--saint----
That's because we're arrogant enough to assume our products are usable without support, and elitist enough to not care whether the people who need support get it or not.
no, it's because companies are cheap, and don't see customers as people. rather, they are simply a number at the bottom of an excel spreadsheet somewhere. the quality of the service doesn't matter, it's how low you can bring the end user price to sucker them in.
case in point...
i used to do Verizon DSL tech support. It was a miserable, thankless job. the day after our 500,000th customer signed up, the entire call center i worked in was laid off. why? because we had the highest-priced, best trained techs in their support hierarchy. but now that there's half a million customers, the service doesn't count any more. no matter how many cancel the service, they've achieved a critical mass that keeps them from losing money as long as they can keep suckering people in with the low monthly price.
and as long as they can pay undertrained phone monkeys half what they paid us, the monthly price stays low.
_that's_ why tech support sucks. because people are too fucking lazy to tell a company to go screw and hurt the bottom line - they'd rather bitch about it on slashdot.
--saint----
laid-off verizon tech support to the rescue!
I use verizon as my DSL provider, and when you sign up, you choose a "GSP," which is either qwest or some other company I don't remember. I recall at the time being told by someone that it didn't matter which one I chose, so I think I chose qwest. Anyone know what kind of impact this deal will have on someone in my situation?
won't make any different... verizon's leasing bandwidth from qwest, but this only affects the customers using qwest to provide their isp service. you are, i assume, using verizon online, so you won't be affected.
(briefly roused from his slumber, laid-off verizon tech support man now returns to sleep and dreams of strangling ivan with his bare fucking hands.)
--saint----
one of those monolithic Linux ISP's, oh wait, there are none.
there was a small one in rochester, ny, several years ago. ez-net. they went under. nobody would pay for an account, since everyone in the damned county had r00t.
--saint----
who gets mom.com?
Registrant: Mind Over Machines, Inc. (MOM2-DOM) 1300 York Road, Suite 30 Baltimore, MD 21093 US Domain Name: MOM.COM Administrative Contact, Billing Contact: Bafford, Bill (BBU80) bill@MOMINC.COM Mind Over Machines, Inc. 1300 York Road Suite 190 Baltimore , MD 21093 410 321-4700 (FAX) 410 321-4780 Technical Contact: DNS, Charm Net (CND4) dns@CHARM.NET Charm Net, Incorporated 2200 E. Lombard St. Baltimore, MD 21231 (410)558-3900 (FAX) (410)558-3901
yeah, i know. hypothetical. right.
--saint----
How many kids acutally paid for doom?
i won a copy free from id for some sweepstakes or another when i was about fifteen years old.
uh, oh. hope i don't get subpoenaed as another raving sociopath.
--saint----
i find it tough to believe that anyone would seriously consider doing away with payphones. not everyone is a silicon valley dotcom rich kid, you know... i'm doing a little bit of travelling right now, and pay phones are the only way to catch up with people i know in different cities. get rid of those, i'll have no way to get in touch when i roll into town. bad idea.
a lot of people in this world don't even have a computer or a tv, let alone a new nokia to fuck around with.
--saint----
Is Catherine MacKinnon a conservative? Is Andrea Dworkin?
no. andrea dworkin is a fucking monster. no matter how many papers you write about sex being "evil and contemptuous," guess what, that's how we're plumbed. tough shit, chubby wumpkins.
--saint----
It's a nice idea - just a shame it's unworkable until it's accepted by the current top level authorities, which of course it never will unless they can screw money out of it...
do what i do - start small. if everyone on slashdot can turn on half a dozen people to these alternate roots, they may actually start seeing some traffic.
for example - i run a small network at home, hooked up to the internet through a cable modem. i've got a linksys router set up to share the connection and handle NAT, but since i've got ports forwarded to a couple of different machines i've got my netbsd box set up to handle the dhcp for the network. which is nice, because it's pushing the orsc root rather than the dns address for my cable provider. there's three people on the network - that's three more people who know that there is a choice.
every time you set up a network for someone (and don't tell me you don't do it all the damn time, if you're on slashdot you're on call to half a dozen lusers and their families) do something like this. educate the people whose machines you fix. start small.
--saint----
Of course, my examples are in reference to hardware. Software is slightly different. Most users will like the automatic upgrades. They don't know enough to try it themselves, and when they do they spend most of their time on the phone with tech support.
software, so far as i can tell, isn't different at all. everyone wants the newest thing with the highest number.
case in point: my father has a 133 mhz pentium. now, i had an old oem copy of win 95c for him when he wanted to upgrade his machine, but instead he went with win98. why? because the number is higher.
"newer is better" is a fucking _mantra_. look at cars, movies, books, hardware, software - at least in america, if it's more than a year old nobody wants to see it.
--saint----
"I'll take obscure code snippets for a thousand, alex."
(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(t m(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm( tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm (tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(t m(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm( tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm (tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(tm(t
"what is... lisp?"
-saint----