In each test, the scratch was radial, made by dragging a pair of scissors from the center to the edge. Of course, this sort of scratch probably accounts for less than half of all unintentional CD scratches in practice.
He was able to make it deep enough to trigger a failure in his test equipment, but radial scratches are probably the simplest flaws to correct for.
Try pulling that Sharpie trick on a scratch that is more with-the-track than one that is orthogonal to it. It works on a radial scratch because it's such a relatively short blip on the track read.
Also, I don't agree with the seemingly growing sentiment that text would solve the language problems. Maybe this would be fine for India, but not all offshoring destinations have the characteristic that the English speakers have strange accents but impeccable spelling and grammar.
This most definitely is a problem with some companies but in my own experiences the people I have talked to usually had no problem at all getting what I wanted done... (Dell good, Comcast bad...)
What I think is likely the difference here is the distinction between offshoring and outsourcing (an ignored distinction in the corporate world that betrays their ignorance of customer service needs). Dell's offshored call center is a Dell-owned operation, whereas Comcast's is a contractor.
Even still, it seems like US-based call center contractors are more willing to direct you to the vendor's corporate office when their efforts have been exhausted, unlike offshore contractors which IME simply will/can not do this.
Not really. The problem with offshored call centers is less so much that they don't understand English, though there may be a few strange idioms, if you're the sort of person who thinks it's fun to talk to call center operators in riddles and clever witticisms, instead of just getting to the point.
The main problem I continually run into with offshored customer support (etc.) is that they are so far removed from the corporate core of responsibility that they can't actually *do* anything. Not only that, but they can't even connect you with someone who can, no matter what you say. It's quite a bear to reach someone (onshore, of course) that actually can really fix your real problem. At very least, an onshored call center can either transfer you or give you a number of someone who is better equipped to handle you. With offshored customer service, "escalate" never means more than "add a note to the account entry that no one will read".
Now, for offshored work that is not specifically tailored to communication with Westerners, the communication problems are greater, since there is not a focus on the communication aspect of the work function. But that's not what we're talking about here.
Look, now, it's *vampires* that are from Transylvania, not werewolves. Silver bullets work on werewolves, not vampires. Vampires need a stake through the heart or sunlight. Now get it right, dammit, or everything else you say is meaningless.
"For the record, I think electric can work extremely well for short range commuting (5-10 miles on city streets), but if you travel far, you'll realistically be looking at gas."
I'm inclined to think that this isn't so terribly damnable. Most of the places where one can drive at "highway speeds" are places outside dense areas, where the highways are straighter, there is lots of vast land, and I'm betting that no matter how you slice it, any square section of suburban or rural land containing a highway or interstate has less car travel (and therefore emissions) per sq. mi. than any given urban area.
Meanwhile, smog is a problem in dense areas where cars hardly ever can go at highways speeds except in the middle of the night, due to urban traffic congestion. Thousands of cars idling and not moving are dropping stagnant pollution in the same place for a longer period of time, on a near-daily basis.
An electric mode for low speeds and city driving, and a gas mode for higher speeds and highway driving wouldn't be a bad idea. It wouldn't be perfect, but it would probably go far to reduce urban air pollution.
I have to admit, pure-electric cars sound like they wouldn't work well for anyone who uses their car for anything other than commuting and in-town driving, and for anyone who doesn't own their own home (which is not most urban drivers). Driving any distance over half your one-charge capacity would be fraught with danger, since in current EV cars you have to have a special 220V-fed charging station (which requires having your own garage). If you drive over 150 miles away, where exactly are you going to recharge? Better haul out the trusty old gas guzzler for that weekend trip. (To be fair, this is probably also true of ethanol, CNG and hydrogen vehicles, for the foreseeable future.)
Maybe Google doesn't need one killer app to draw people in. Maybe that's a brain-dead idea, and one that has a really short half-life. Maybe the fact that with so many apps, each app can pull in maybe 5% of people. All of them together bring in more people not only to the apps but of course to the search. No competitor integrates search into its side apps as reliably as Google.
My personal favorites right now are IG, Maps, and to a lesser extent Gmail, Groups, Calc and Froogle. I don't use Desktop, Base, Picasa, or Blogger much at all. So what? The ones I do like are enough to keep me coming to Google branded pages and the ubiquitously useful search box. Divide, attract, and conquer.
To answer your pedantry, I would be looking for open source. It just so happens that if I'm in the mindset of trying to introduce F/OSS into the small-nonprofit world, then that mindset would almost certainly also be inclined towards Linux.
I know someone will come up with a dozen examples, but really, I think one would be hard pressed to find broadly useful open source software that only has a Windows port.
The original title of my post was "How does FSF do its 990?" It's fair to argue that the learning/adapting curve would not be terribly steep to do chartered accounts in an alternate software, considering the ongoing learning curve of QuickBooks in the first place. But one of the killer features of QuickBooks is that it can do tax forms for you, and by that I don't just mean 1040{A,X,EZ}, but specific-purpose ones (such as 990). This is one feature I think a lot of groups and their probably-non-techie treasurers take great advantage of.
That is sort of the ideal. I can't pin it down, but there's a Stallmanian philosophical bent in me that believes that F/OSS engenders freedom and community effort and frugality, and all these things are right in line with what most nonprofits are about, so it should be easy to make a happy marriage between F/OSS and nonprofits and charities. But there's these sticking issues of limited functional availability, or difficulty in adaptability, and this IMHO is a big area for them.
alternative software usually doesn't mean cloned software
I realize that, of course; but an OSS app that is to QuickBooks what Gimp is to Photoshop, or what OOo is to MSO, would be about the desired neighborhood of similarity. It doesn't have to clone, but it can't be so arcane, esoteric, or alien that the user has to be entirely retrained on how to navigate to everything they need. I figure it takes a person who knows Word maybe half an hour to understand their most commonly used functions OOo Writer.
Won't it be hilarious when Sony suddenly prices the PS3 at $300 and floods the market with them.
They must know that competing with PCs is a bad idea (with a $600 tag it is, anyway), and that set-top boxes are a losing industry. So what else can the PS3 be? A glorified modern-day Commodore?
They do have a lowest price guarantee, which I used to be able to use a $50 BB gift card to get a Tivo Wifi-G adapter ($50 at Fry's, $65! at BB). On the other hand, BB's customer-fine-tuning rumors say the more you get them to follow their lowest price guarantee, the more they will try to dump you as a customer.
The enduring Interstate system showcases the last great example of a Republican who believed in the government taking public monies and using them to create great, massive public works projects that would provide for the common good and the growth of the nation despite the temporary inconveniences of its construction, in a rarely-seen exhibition of a long-view vision as opposed to a short-term ROI mentality.
Sorry, but if I'm to get mugged or defrauded by a desperate criminal, I'd much rather lose my wallet than my thumb or index finger. Just a thought. I can get new credit cards. I can't get a new finger quite as easily.
Most GSM phones can handle two calls at once (a la call waiting/etc.), so overlapping times doesn't prove cloning.
The only theoretical way I am aware of to clone a GSM phone is to copy the SIM or have a SIM with the same subscriber number.
A simple fix would be to get a new SIM card. You can get your existing number transferred over to the new card. If its a card clone, then a new card will solve the problem.
Dunno why the customer service kept hanging up on you (was it really a hangup or a dropped call?), considering they supposedly have the best customer service in the business.
MPU. Slashdot articles are pro-neutrality, but slashdot's pockets are fed by anti-neutrality shysters with a shameless astroturf campaign. If this weren't Slashdot, with the "its just a blog" copout, people would cry conflict of interest.
Agreed, but is it nice enough to have justified the expense of including it, and at the cost of other improvements? PSP is doing quite well commercially with only one screen... Frankly the second screen is another cute addition that I'm not sure has that much value. Half the time the second screen is a pseudo-controller to make the stylus useful, and the other half the time the second screen is either a map, or a glorified 320x200 status bar. Note also that half the time, this low-interaction view of map and/or status is the one taking up the touchscreen!
Urbz DS is a good example. The gameplay takes place almost entirely in the non-touchscreen view. You use the stylus like a mouse to click on things in the status/choice view at the bottom, most of which don't need stylus or mouse control at all. Pointer control would be most useful in the gameplay view, a la every other Sims game. But the developers decided it would be more gimmicky to squander the second screen so that the game decision interface could be point-and-touch. And it doesn't even need to be.
The good: The Wiimote is perhaps the most innovative controller for home console gaming since the EyeToy (which only a few studios have picked up on and even less have been able to do something more with it than custom avatar heads). And it's really just a scaled-down Light Gun with more buttons.
The bad: Nintendo will squander this by using it to do stupid gimmicky things within their existing tired product themes. See list of example games at the GW site. (Excite Truck? OMGWTFLOL.) As further evidence, I present the entire line of DS games, nearly all of which do something stupid with the touchscreen and stylus (True Swing Golf being probably the only decent and actually gameplay-enhancing example I've seen, with perhaps also Missile Command in Retro Atari), only one or two use the microphone, and a paltry few use the WiFi for more than demo-version multiplayer.
1. Trade is working! The Chinese are learning from Americans. Results are more important than ability.
2. Underqualified students overseas sneaking into technical schools will keep overall aptitude balanced. Maybe we'll even start seeing the spread of frat parties and College Republicans. Again, trade works!
In terms of subscribers, GSM is approaching par with CDMA in North America. OTOH, there tends to be handset network locking, at least for a while after purchase, but that's because the providers subsidize the phones.
Slashdot Mirror
In each test, the scratch was radial, made by dragging a pair of scissors from the center to the edge. Of course, this sort of scratch probably accounts for less than half of all unintentional CD scratches in practice.
He was able to make it deep enough to trigger a failure in his test equipment, but radial scratches are probably the simplest flaws to correct for.
Try pulling that Sharpie trick on a scratch that is more with-the-track than one that is orthogonal to it. It works on a radial scratch because it's such a relatively short blip on the track read.
Also, I don't agree with the seemingly growing sentiment that text would solve the language problems. Maybe this would be fine for India, but not all offshoring destinations have the characteristic that the English speakers have strange accents but impeccable spelling and grammar.
This most definitely is a problem with some companies but in my own experiences the people I have talked to usually had no problem at all getting what I wanted done... (Dell good, Comcast bad...)
What I think is likely the difference here is the distinction between offshoring and outsourcing (an ignored distinction in the corporate world that betrays their ignorance of customer service needs). Dell's offshored call center is a Dell-owned operation, whereas Comcast's is a contractor.
Even still, it seems like US-based call center contractors are more willing to direct you to the vendor's corporate office when their efforts have been exhausted, unlike offshore contractors which IME simply will/can not do this.
Not really. The problem with offshored call centers is less so much that they don't understand English, though there may be a few strange idioms, if you're the sort of person who thinks it's fun to talk to call center operators in riddles and clever witticisms, instead of just getting to the point.
The main problem I continually run into with offshored customer support (etc.) is that they are so far removed from the corporate core of responsibility that they can't actually *do* anything. Not only that, but they can't even connect you with someone who can, no matter what you say. It's quite a bear to reach someone (onshore, of course) that actually can really fix your real problem. At very least, an onshored call center can either transfer you or give you a number of someone who is better equipped to handle you. With offshored customer service, "escalate" never means more than "add a note to the account entry that no one will read".
Now, for offshored work that is not specifically tailored to communication with Westerners, the communication problems are greater, since there is not a focus on the communication aspect of the work function. But that's not what we're talking about here.
"Start-Up Delivers Open Source Offerings to Build User Base"
Yeah. Quick, think of ten other software houses that this could have ever been said about.
Look, now, it's *vampires* that are from Transylvania, not werewolves. Silver bullets work on werewolves, not vampires. Vampires need a stake through the heart or sunlight. Now get it right, dammit, or everything else you say is meaningless.
"For the record, I think electric can work extremely well for short range commuting (5-10 miles on city streets), but if you travel far, you'll realistically be looking at gas."
I'm inclined to think that this isn't so terribly damnable. Most of the places where one can drive at "highway speeds" are places outside dense areas, where the highways are straighter, there is lots of vast land, and I'm betting that no matter how you slice it, any square section of suburban or rural land containing a highway or interstate has less car travel (and therefore emissions) per sq. mi. than any given urban area.
Meanwhile, smog is a problem in dense areas where cars hardly ever can go at highways speeds except in the middle of the night, due to urban traffic congestion. Thousands of cars idling and not moving are dropping stagnant pollution in the same place for a longer period of time, on a near-daily basis.
An electric mode for low speeds and city driving, and a gas mode for higher speeds and highway driving wouldn't be a bad idea. It wouldn't be perfect, but it would probably go far to reduce urban air pollution.
I have to admit, pure-electric cars sound like they wouldn't work well for anyone who uses their car for anything other than commuting and in-town driving, and for anyone who doesn't own their own home (which is not most urban drivers). Driving any distance over half your one-charge capacity would be fraught with danger, since in current EV cars you have to have a special 220V-fed charging station (which requires having your own garage). If you drive over 150 miles away, where exactly are you going to recharge? Better haul out the trusty old gas guzzler for that weekend trip. (To be fair, this is probably also true of ethanol, CNG and hydrogen vehicles, for the foreseeable future.)
Maybe Google doesn't need one killer app to draw people in. Maybe that's a brain-dead idea, and one that has a really short half-life. Maybe the fact that with so many apps, each app can pull in maybe 5% of people. All of them together bring in more people not only to the apps but of course to the search. No competitor integrates search into its side apps as reliably as Google.
My personal favorites right now are IG, Maps, and to a lesser extent Gmail, Groups, Calc and Froogle. I don't use Desktop, Base, Picasa, or Blogger much at all. So what? The ones I do like are enough to keep me coming to Google branded pages and the ubiquitously useful search box. Divide, attract, and conquer.
I guess now I know why exactly the tax code is so complicated. So as to stimulate the economy.
To answer your pedantry, I would be looking for open source. It just so happens that if I'm in the mindset of trying to introduce F/OSS into the small-nonprofit world, then that mindset would almost certainly also be inclined towards Linux.
I know someone will come up with a dozen examples, but really, I think one would be hard pressed to find broadly useful open source software that only has a Windows port.
The original title of my post was "How does FSF do its 990?" It's fair to argue that the learning/adapting curve would not be terribly steep to do chartered accounts in an alternate software, considering the ongoing learning curve of QuickBooks in the first place. But one of the killer features of QuickBooks is that it can do tax forms for you, and by that I don't just mean 1040{A,X,EZ}, but specific-purpose ones (such as 990). This is one feature I think a lot of groups and their probably-non-techie treasurers take great advantage of.
So the Gub'mint should make it available in machine-readable form
Open format readable form, too.
That is sort of the ideal. I can't pin it down, but there's a Stallmanian philosophical bent in me that believes that F/OSS engenders freedom and community effort and frugality, and all these things are right in line with what most nonprofits are about, so it should be easy to make a happy marriage between F/OSS and nonprofits and charities. But there's these sticking issues of limited functional availability, or difficulty in adaptability, and this IMHO is a big area for them.
alternative software usually doesn't mean cloned software
I realize that, of course; but an OSS app that is to QuickBooks what Gimp is to Photoshop, or what OOo is to MSO, would be about the desired neighborhood of similarity. It doesn't have to clone, but it can't be so arcane, esoteric, or alien that the user has to be entirely retrained on how to navigate to everything they need. I figure it takes a person who knows Word maybe half an hour to understand their most commonly used functions OOo Writer.
Won't it be hilarious when Sony suddenly prices the PS3 at $300 and floods the market with them.
They must know that competing with PCs is a bad idea (with a $600 tag it is, anyway), and that set-top boxes are a losing industry. So what else can the PS3 be? A glorified modern-day Commodore?
They do have a lowest price guarantee, which I used to be able to use a $50 BB gift card to get a Tivo Wifi-G adapter ($50 at Fry's, $65! at BB). On the other hand, BB's customer-fine-tuning rumors say the more you get them to follow their lowest price guarantee, the more they will try to dump you as a customer.
MediaWiki, as an example, does essentially the same thing.
includes/DefaultSettings.php:
$wgImageMagickConvertCommand = '/usr/bin/convert';
includes/Image.php:
$cmd = $wgImageMagickConvertCommand .
" -quality 85 -background white -geometry {$width} ".
escapeshellarg($this->imagePath) . " " .
escapeshellarg($thumbPath);
$conv = shell_exec( $cmd );
Otherwise, when ImageMagick is not installed/configured, it too reverts to PHP's GD calls, using imagecopyresampled().
The enduring Interstate system showcases the last great example of a Republican who believed in the government taking public monies and using them to create great, massive public works projects that would provide for the common good and the growth of the nation despite the temporary inconveniences of its construction, in a rarely-seen exhibition of a long-view vision as opposed to a short-term ROI mentality.
So what the fuck happened?
Sorry, but if I'm to get mugged or defrauded by a desperate criminal, I'd much rather lose my wallet than my thumb or index finger. Just a thought. I can get new credit cards. I can't get a new finger quite as easily.
Most GSM phones can handle two calls at once (a la call waiting/etc.), so overlapping times doesn't prove cloning.
The only theoretical way I am aware of to clone a GSM phone is to copy the SIM or have a SIM with the same subscriber number.
A simple fix would be to get a new SIM card. You can get your existing number transferred over to the new card. If its a card clone, then a new card will solve the problem.
Dunno why the customer service kept hanging up on you (was it really a hangup or a dropped call?), considering they supposedly have the best customer service in the business.
MPU. Slashdot articles are pro-neutrality, but slashdot's pockets are fed by anti-neutrality shysters with a shameless astroturf campaign. If this weren't Slashdot, with the "its just a blog" copout, people would cry conflict of interest.
its nice to have the map on a seperate screen
Agreed, but is it nice enough to have justified the expense of including it, and at the cost of other improvements? PSP is doing quite well commercially with only one screen... Frankly the second screen is another cute addition that I'm not sure has that much value. Half the time the second screen is a pseudo-controller to make the stylus useful, and the other half the time the second screen is either a map, or a glorified 320x200 status bar. Note also that half the time, this low-interaction view of map and/or status is the one taking up the touchscreen!
Urbz DS is a good example. The gameplay takes place almost entirely in the non-touchscreen view. You use the stylus like a mouse to click on things in the status/choice view at the bottom, most of which don't need stylus or mouse control at all. Pointer control would be most useful in the gameplay view, a la every other Sims game. But the developers decided it would be more gimmicky to squander the second screen so that the game decision interface could be point-and-touch. And it doesn't even need to be.
The good: The Wiimote is perhaps the most innovative controller for home console gaming since the EyeToy (which only a few studios have picked up on and even less have been able to do something more with it than custom avatar heads). And it's really just a scaled-down Light Gun with more buttons.
The bad: Nintendo will squander this by using it to do stupid gimmicky things within their existing tired product themes. See list of example games at the GW site. (Excite Truck? OMGWTFLOL.) As further evidence, I present the entire line of DS games, nearly all of which do something stupid with the touchscreen and stylus (True Swing Golf being probably the only decent and actually gameplay-enhancing example I've seen, with perhaps also Missile Command in Retro Atari), only one or two use the microphone, and a paltry few use the WiFi for more than demo-version multiplayer.
1. Trade is working! The Chinese are learning from Americans. Results are more important than ability.
2. Underqualified students overseas sneaking into technical schools will keep overall aptitude balanced. Maybe we'll even start seeing the spread of frat parties and College Republicans. Again, trade works!
In terms of subscribers, GSM is approaching par with CDMA in North America. OTOH, there tends to be handset network locking, at least for a while after purchase, but that's because the providers subsidize the phones.