programmers *aren't* professionals in the sense that doctors, lawyers or engineers in more mature fields are. Generally speaking, they work for someone else
If working for someone else makes you not a professional, then most engineers aren't. Engineers are much less independent than doctors and lawyers, but are still professionals. I'm not sure what an ME would do if his employer insisted on using an unsafe design --it's not often an issue anymore, since out of control lawsuits mean that companies can't afford to do anything that could be ever construed as unsafe, whether or not it really is...
I am an electrical engineer, with a bachelor's degree (from a long, long time ago). There is a professional licensing program for EE's, although not many EE's outside of power-related industries bother to go through it. The problem is that the PE board cannot keep it's standards and tests up with the rapid change in electronics. And very few electronics designers ever get the chance to make a mistake that kills someone, or even costs anyone but their employers large amounts of money. But still, we are trained in a design discipline including techniques to reduce the chance of introducing errors, and extensive checking to catch most of them that did occur.
However, the EE schools do not teach everything an electronics designer needs. I can tell that by all the untestable and nearly unmanufacturable designs that come into the contract electronics assembler where I work. At school, the only mention I ever saw of testing was in a graduate student's thesis. Nor was there any discussion of the characteristics of printed circuit boards, let alone the spacing requirements to allow placing and soldering parts on them. So we get these EE's out of school and they maybe can make a prototype work, but it cannot be built!
Getting back to the topic, most programmers seem to lack the discipline characteristic of engineers -- and that includes many engineers when they do programming. It's not hard to find articles giving effective means for reducing errors, but programmers don't want to use them. A
And I have my doubts about the techniques taught in school -- planning the whole project out from the beginning, programming top to bottom, etc. The one thing no one has figured out is how to tell what your customer really wants, and so many well-planned programs wind up mangled by major changes after the customer has seen the alpha running. It's also not clear how top-down programming coexists with code re-use. So it might well work better to start from the bottom, identify existing code that can do parts of the job, code just enough to have something to show the customer, and then go from there. BUT YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE SLOPPY WHILE YOU ARE DOING THAT.
OK, there is good reason for not releasing the source for military applications. But how about the social security administration's data processing codes (not the data, but the programs used to process it)? Or the IRS's code, aside from the algorithms used to spot cheaters? A little sunlight here 10 years ago might well have avoided the mess their data centers are in now...
This is one time when a repost is justified -- for those who have a life on weekends and missed it. The Peruvian Congressman's letter is a truly great job of writing up the advantages of open source for (open) government.
Of course, the repost should have included a link to the old post. Or would it be better to just reset the clock on the old post so it stayed on the front page?
What I loved was how _polite_ this Peruvian is. That is, where I would say "Can't you even keep your damned lies straight?", he says something like "You seem to be unaware...". Yeah, Gates is really unaware that the guarantee in his own EULA is no guarantee at all...
After the Spaniards had ethnically cleaned Europe of Muslims there was one other place to open a war front. That was India, which was known to be under the control of the Muslims at the time.
The problem with that theory is that the Spanish had to sail only about 10 miles (to Africa) if all they wanted was to fight Muslims. Or a much easier voyage than an Atlantic crossing would bring them to the current center of Muslim temporal power (Istanbul) or to the Holy Land -- except by that time everyone know that attacking the Turks on their own turf was suicidal. So why would they have thought the Mogul (Mongol/Turkish Muslims) rulers of India would be vulnerable to a small company of soldiers staggering off a tiny ship after a voyage of months?
Of course, Marco Polo's tale left reason to hope that the Chinese were still non-Islam and susceptible to conversion. (The Khan then ruling China actually asked for priests, but the papacy was too mired in internal conflicts to respond.) There might also have been some thought that there might be islands and smaller nations that were vulnerable to a military takeover, but I think the ostensible goal -- trade in spices, tea, and silk, bypassing the Turks, etc. -- was really the primary one. Of course, once they figured out that these "Indians" were different, and did not have the desired trade goods, but were getting gold from somewhere and were remarkably inept at warfare, the way to profits became obvious...
It's unlikely that Columbus specifically knew the saga of Lief Ericson, but there were plenty of things available to indicate there was land within reach. There are maps from before 1492 showing a continent across the Atlantic. There is the legend of St Brendan, among others. And there is evidence that the English were cod-fishing on the Grand Banks a decade earlier. (For one thing, there was no impact on cod prices in England when due to a war Denmark barred the English from the Iceland fisheries.) It would take remarkable navigation for that age to sail around the Grand Banks for weeks and never veer a little west and discover land. Fishermen like to keep the best spots secret, but might have talked to someone who clearly was no competitor...
I just think it a lot more likely that Columbus's research turned up at least one of these possible sources than that he persuaded the quite hard-headed Isabella to finance his expedition based on an unsupported claim that everyone else was wrong about the size of the world...
That might not be the most beautiful experiment, but it's got to be the simplest beautiful one. Of course, as performed by that student, it's an intelligence test (or at least, a test for understanding of some very basic physics)...
I think the mountaintop one is also possible for today's students, what with GPS and all, or even a really good topo map (+/- a few feet gets you close-enough-for-proof-of-concept).
With a topo map, maybe, depending on the quality of the surveys. But GPS depends on the speed of light to work (it uses the delays in radio signals sent out at precise times from satellites, so when you use it to measure your baseline you are relying on someone else's measurement.
OTOH, survey out a long baseline with enough precision (say across Kansas and neighboring flat lands), measure the GPS delays at each end, and you should be able to calculate the speed of light from that.
Turns out, unbeknownst to anyone, that Columbus' ass was saved because there was a land mass closer than halfway.
It's pretty clear that Columbus knew that the Vikings, and possibly others, had journeyed out into the Atlantic, and found a continent on the other side, within reach of an open longboat from Greenland. Columbus also _assumed_ that continent was Asia. From the evidence available at the time, this was less of a leap of faith than believing the old legends in the first place was. Putting those two beliefs together, the world had to be much smaller than Eratosthenes estimate.
I don't know why Columbus never considered the possibility that there was an unknown continent out there, except that he would have had considerable trouble selling the notion that, based only on ancient legends, he wanted to spend most of the king and queen's money to sail out across the apparently endless sea and if the ships and all that investment didn't go down somewhere out there, find a continent inhabited by savages who were tough enough to run the Vikings out and had little or nothing worth stealing.
Spaniards might not have been daunted by tough natives -- in Ferdinand's and Isabella's life time, spaniards had ended 600+ years of Moslem kingdoms in spain, and then defeated the Turks, who had been terrorizing Italy and Eastern Europe for over a century. Compared to Turks, savages without guns or steel weapons weren't much of a threat. But Spanish soldiers were rarely interested in farming, and they expected to get a whole lot more plunder than corn, pemmican, and beads...
I would like to see OSS obtain some patents and fight fire with fire.
Note that at least in electronics, corporations use patents to force other corporations to cross-license their patents far more often than they can collect significant royalties or maintain a monopoly using the patent.
So how could the OSS community use the same principle? Maybe we write a GPL-like patent license -- in exchange for a license to use the OSS patents, you have to put the same or a less restrictive license onto your patents in the same area. The trick is defining "same area"...
The article more or less said that -- they are running a very unusual application, trying to capture everything on a network and log it to disk. That's a single-user application running the HD's harder than most servers ever do. So yeah, raw speed was what counted there, but things are probably different for whatever you are doing...
He is most famous for co-authoring the book mostly called "Madnick and Donovan" which was some sort of IBM 360 OS bible back in the way-back days of punch cards.
I think I have a copy of that -- somewhere in those boxes I haven't opened since 1990... IIRC, in that book the _compiler_ was considered part of the OS (it was perfectly normal in 1974 for commercial programs to be sold as source code and compiled for the particular application), but certainly no OS at that time included a GUI at all, and usually even a teletype-style interface for on-line users was considered an add-on, not an integral part of the OS.
4. You can replace KDE's built-in browser (Konqueror) with a competitive program such as Mozilla and have everything work. Microsoft OTOH has somehow rigged Windows such that even if you plug in a different browser with the same general functionality, many things break, and other things will still call IE. One example is the help files, which require a browser but are somehow non-standard so other browsers can't read them. And from the stories I've heard, apparently when IE is activated through one of these hidden paths, it is apt to go and change the file-type bindings so things which were working with Netscape will suddenly start launching IE instead...
Next week Time Magazine will require you to read pages 1-36 before reading the article you want on page 37. Don't complain, it's their copyright;)
Rather, they'll sue requiring you to read the ADS before you read the articles. And NBC is going to sue to install a video camera on your TV to verify that you aren't going to the bathroom during the commercials...
That's what this is about. They don't want you skipping the ads on the homepage and going straight to the article you are interested in. And notice that they aren't harassing Google, but some tiny company few people ever heard of...
Now, there are a number of sites out there where deep links just don't work. I am no webmaster and I don't know the details, but since your browser sends the site you are coming from, it doesn't take a genius to check this and re-direct to the home page. This sucks in many ways (you can't cite an article and be sure your readers can find it on badly organized websites -- strangely, those who can organize their sites well don't often feel this compulsion to block deep links -- and you can't even bookmark it and go back to it later yourself without navigating the damned site), but if they really want to block deep links, it's much cheaper and more effective than hiring lawyers.
So what does Belo do instead? They sue someone for including in his site a text string following internet standards, which can be sent to their server to ask it to call up an article directly. No one is _making_ their server dish up these articles. So what's their claim -- an internet standard string format _tricks_ them into violating their own copyright? B.S. Maybe even barratry. They should pay Barking Dog's legal fees, court costs, and get beaten with the clue stick...
backup the thing every week to 9" floppies. I don't think they ever considered that there wouldn't be anything to restore to.
Unfortunately, that's not at all unusual. (Forgetting to consider where you're going to restore your tapes/WORM disks/whatever to, not using 8" floppies as the backup medium.) Rather few small to medium sized corporations have a back-up plan that would actually work to get them back on-line in less than weeks if the computer room were torched, and too many of them are backing up to some antiquated tape format such that if the drive goes, you're going to be hunting for a data conversion service if you ever have to read back a tape...
GM does not have to have a help line to explain to idiot customers that the reason their car stopped after 300 miles is that they did not put any more gas in it.
About 50 years ago, my Dad was running an auto shop. One customer got so irate when his nearly new car wouldn't start, he pounded on it with a sledge hammer. It was out of gas. He knew his car needed gasoline, (and religiously bought Shell gas from Dad), but that morning he forgot to check for the basics....
Cars have a reasonably simple user interface, and the biggest change in it since the 1920's was the automatic transmission. Still, every car comes with a manual that explains all about running the car, for instance how to put gas in it. Software is much more complex and lacks a standard well-known user interface, and yet too often nowadays it is shipped without a manual! Yes, there is on-line help, if you can get enough of the product installed to reach it, and if it's any help. Too often it's so badly indexed you cannot find the right page unless you know exactly what the programmer called the function (which is not what it's called on error messages referring to it), or the help page is just plain wrong.
But the software is usually marketed as being installable and usable by anyone at all. Even the guy who calls the help desk because his screen is dark during a power failure... If the company is going to come anywhere near fulfilling what it promised when it sold the software, it's going to need a help desk that is capable of dealing with morons and ignoramuses, and teaching them to use the product. It really takes more than script bunnies, but attitude and communications skills are a lot more important at this level than technical knowledge.
Of course, the second problem is what happens when it's a knowledgeable caller with a real bug. Do you put him through an inquisition starting with "Is there power on the wall socket", and then chop it off at the 15 minute timer? Or does the front line person quickly recognize that here is a problem beyond his scripts and escalate it to a real tech? Does the company even have good techs available?
Third, sometimes the clueless have actually run into the serious bugs that are hard to solve even with skilled geeks on both ends of the line. Not much chance of solving that short of a house call, until some skilled geek calls with the same problem. But after it's been solved once, how do the other reps find out about it? And does the company discourage the frontliners from admitting to the known problems?
bandwidth caps aren't a tech support question. True, you can't fix them, BUT:
1. Customers generally cannot tell that's the reason they are not getting a good connection. It looks like something's broken, so they'll call tech support. (Obviously, it should be the ISP and not Dell they call, but unless they have an alternative ISP, there's no way to tell...)
2. In the parent post, some ISP TS moron or asshole wanted Skurk to do all sorts of system troubleshooting. He either didn't know or wasn't admitting that the problem was at their end.
3. And if Skurk had called about a Dell system running the OEM-installed Windows, what are the chances that, after wasting Skurk's time for hours checking on his setup, that ISP asshole would have told him to call Dell tech support???
Eric Flint is a science fiction writer who is apparently actually trying to make a living from the royalties on his books. That in itself isn't much of a recommendation, but after reading 1632, I think Flint has a pretty good understanding of history and economics. So I think he has the experience and background knowledge to comment knowledgeably on the economics of SF writing. And, in addition he has kept track of the sales of his books month by month, before and after he posted them on the web. Each time, sales went up.
And when Napster was shut down, music CD sales dropped. Is there a pattern developing here?
Harlan Ellison, who is on the opposite side here, is IMHO a former SF writer who appears to be living off of stuff he wrote -- and other people's work he collected in the Dangerous Visions books -- 20 to 30 years ago. If he's done anything since then, I haven't noticed it -- but then, I got very sick of Ellison a long, long time ago. Basically, I think Ellison is an idiot who thinks that every time someone reads one of his old books without paying him again, he lost a sale. Compare that to Flint, who has actual experimental evidence that giving e-books away increases sales of printed books...
I haven't seen any actual new work of his in 20 years. I probably have a bunch of his old books stored somehow -- but I wasn't in any hurry to take them out and read them again anyhow.
A long time ago, I decided that Harlan Ellison was clever, but he wasn't sufficiently hooked into _reality_ to write sci-fi that survived five seconds of critical thinking. Which is a pretty good reason not to take what he says about the economics of writing seriously...
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't this the sort of thing the anti-trust trial was (is) about?
programmers *aren't* professionals in the sense that doctors, lawyers or engineers in more mature fields are. Generally speaking, they work for someone else
If working for someone else makes you not a professional, then most engineers aren't. Engineers are much less independent than doctors and lawyers, but are still professionals. I'm not sure what an ME would do if his employer insisted on using an unsafe design --it's not often an issue anymore, since out of control lawsuits mean that companies can't afford to do anything that could be ever construed as unsafe, whether or not it really is...
I am an electrical engineer, with a bachelor's degree (from a long, long time ago). There is a professional licensing program for EE's, although not many EE's outside of power-related industries bother to go through it. The problem is that the PE board cannot keep it's standards and tests up with the rapid change in electronics. And very few electronics designers ever get the chance to make a mistake that kills someone, or even costs anyone but their employers large amounts of money. But still, we are trained in a design discipline including techniques to reduce the chance of introducing errors, and extensive checking to catch most of them that did occur.
However, the EE schools do not teach everything an electronics designer needs. I can tell that by all the untestable and nearly unmanufacturable designs that come into the contract electronics assembler where I work. At school, the only mention I ever saw of testing was in a graduate student's thesis. Nor was there any discussion of the characteristics of printed circuit boards, let alone the spacing requirements to allow placing and soldering parts on them. So we get these EE's out of school and they maybe can make a prototype work, but it cannot be built!
Getting back to the topic, most programmers seem to lack the discipline characteristic of engineers -- and that includes many engineers when they do programming. It's not hard to find articles giving effective means for reducing errors, but programmers don't want to use them. A
And I have my doubts about the techniques taught in school -- planning the whole project out from the beginning, programming top to bottom, etc. The one thing no one has figured out is how to tell what your customer really wants, and so many well-planned programs wind up mangled by major changes after the customer has seen the alpha running. It's also not clear how top-down programming coexists with code re-use. So it might well work better to start from the bottom, identify existing code that can do parts of the job, code just enough to have something to show the customer, and then go from there. BUT YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE SLOPPY WHILE YOU ARE DOING THAT.
OK, there is good reason for not releasing the source for military applications. But how about the social security administration's data processing codes (not the data, but the programs used to process it)? Or the IRS's code, aside from the algorithms used to spot cheaters? A little sunlight here 10 years ago might well have avoided the mess their data centers are in now...
This is one time when a repost is justified -- for those who have a life on weekends and missed it. The Peruvian Congressman's letter is a truly great job of writing up the advantages of open source for (open) government.
Of course, the repost should have included a link to the old post. Or would it be better to just reset the clock on the old post so it stayed on the front page?
What I loved was how _polite_ this Peruvian is. That is, where I would say "Can't you even keep your damned lies straight?", he says something like "You seem to be unaware...". Yeah, Gates is really unaware that the guarantee in his own EULA is no guarantee at all...
After the Spaniards had ethnically cleaned Europe of Muslims there was one other place to open a war front. That was India, which was known to be under the control of the Muslims at the time.
The problem with that theory is that the Spanish had to sail only about 10 miles (to Africa) if all they wanted was to fight Muslims. Or a much easier voyage than an Atlantic crossing would bring them to the current center of Muslim temporal power (Istanbul) or to the Holy Land -- except by that time everyone know that attacking the Turks on their own turf was suicidal. So why would they have thought the Mogul (Mongol/Turkish Muslims) rulers of India would be vulnerable to a small company of soldiers staggering off a tiny ship after a voyage of months?
Of course, Marco Polo's tale left reason to hope that the Chinese were still non-Islam and susceptible to conversion. (The Khan then ruling China actually asked for priests, but the papacy was too mired in internal conflicts to respond.) There might also have been some thought that there might be islands and smaller nations that were vulnerable to a military takeover, but I think the ostensible goal -- trade in spices, tea, and silk, bypassing the Turks, etc. -- was really the primary one. Of course, once they figured out that these "Indians" were different, and did not have the desired trade goods, but were getting gold from somewhere and were remarkably inept at warfare, the way to profits became obvious...
It's unlikely that Columbus specifically knew the saga of Lief Ericson, but there were plenty of things available to indicate there was land within reach. There are maps from before 1492 showing a continent across the Atlantic. There is the legend of St Brendan, among others. And there is evidence that the English were cod-fishing on the Grand Banks a decade earlier. (For one thing, there was no impact on cod prices in England when due to a war Denmark barred the English from the Iceland fisheries.) It would take remarkable navigation for that age to sail around the Grand Banks for weeks and never veer a little west and discover land. Fishermen like to keep the best spots secret, but might have talked to someone who clearly was no competitor...
I just think it a lot more likely that Columbus's research turned up at least one of these possible sources than that he persuaded the quite hard-headed Isabella to finance his expedition based on an unsupported claim that everyone else was wrong about the size of the world...
That might not be the most beautiful experiment, but it's got to be the simplest beautiful one. Of course, as performed by that student, it's an intelligence test (or at least, a test for understanding of some very basic physics)...
I think the mountaintop one is also possible for today's students, what with GPS and all, or even a really good topo map (+/- a few feet gets you close-enough-for-proof-of-concept).
With a topo map, maybe, depending on the quality of the surveys. But GPS depends on the speed of light to work (it uses the delays in radio signals sent out at precise times from satellites, so when you use it to measure your baseline you are relying on someone else's measurement.
OTOH, survey out a long baseline with enough precision (say across Kansas and neighboring flat lands), measure the GPS delays at each end, and you should be able to calculate the speed of light from that.
Turns out, unbeknownst to anyone, that Columbus' ass was saved because there was a land mass closer than halfway.
It's pretty clear that Columbus knew that the Vikings, and possibly others, had journeyed out into the Atlantic, and found a continent on the other side, within reach of an open longboat from Greenland. Columbus also _assumed_ that continent was Asia. From the evidence available at the time, this was less of a leap of faith than believing the old legends in the first place was. Putting those two beliefs together, the world had to be much smaller than Eratosthenes estimate.
I don't know why Columbus never considered the possibility that there was an unknown continent out there, except that he would have had considerable trouble selling the notion that, based only on ancient legends, he wanted to spend most of the king and queen's money to sail out across the apparently endless sea and if the ships and all that investment didn't go down somewhere out there, find a continent inhabited by savages who were tough enough to run the Vikings out and had little or nothing worth stealing.
Spaniards might not have been daunted by tough natives -- in Ferdinand's and Isabella's life time, spaniards had ended 600+ years of Moslem kingdoms in spain, and then defeated the Turks, who had been terrorizing Italy and Eastern Europe for over a century. Compared to Turks, savages without guns or steel weapons weren't much of a threat. But Spanish soldiers were rarely interested in farming, and they expected to get a whole lot more plunder than corn, pemmican, and beads...
Yes. I suspect that with a photomultiplier tube, you could do the one photon at a time experiment on a $1,000 budget now.
I would like to see OSS obtain some patents and fight fire with fire.
Note that at least in electronics, corporations use patents to force other corporations to cross-license their patents far more often than they can collect significant royalties or maintain a monopoly using the patent.
So how could the OSS community use the same principle? Maybe we write a GPL-like patent license -- in exchange for a license to use the OSS patents, you have to put the same or a less restrictive license onto your patents in the same area. The trick is defining "same area"...
The article more or less said that -- they are running a very unusual application, trying to capture everything on a network and log it to disk. That's a single-user application running the HD's harder than most servers ever do. So yeah, raw speed was what counted there, but things are probably different for whatever you are doing...
He is most famous for co-authoring the book mostly called "Madnick and Donovan" which was some sort of IBM 360 OS bible back in the way-back days of punch cards.
I think I have a copy of that -- somewhere in those boxes I haven't opened since 1990... IIRC, in that book the _compiler_ was considered part of the OS (it was perfectly normal in 1974 for commercial programs to be sold as source code and compiled for the particular application), but certainly no OS at that time included a GUI at all, and usually even a teletype-style interface for on-line users was considered an add-on, not an integral part of the OS.
4. You can replace KDE's built-in browser (Konqueror) with a competitive program such as Mozilla and have everything work. Microsoft OTOH has somehow rigged Windows such that even if you plug in a different browser with the same general functionality, many things break, and other things will still call IE. One example is the help files, which require a browser but are somehow non-standard so other browsers can't read them. And from the stories I've heard, apparently when IE is activated through one of these hidden paths, it is apt to go and change the file-type bindings so things which were working with Netscape will suddenly start launching IE instead...
shouldn't that headline read: "Witness for MS caught dissembling"?
Only by pretending to be an expert when the only OS he knows is Windows...
Next week Time Magazine will require you to read pages 1-36 before reading the article you want on page 37. Don't complain, it's their copyright ;)
Rather, they'll sue requiring you to read the ADS before you read the articles. And NBC is going to sue to install a video camera on your TV to verify that you aren't going to the bathroom during the commercials...
That's what this is about. They don't want you skipping the ads on the homepage and going straight to the article you are interested in. And notice that they aren't harassing Google, but some tiny company few people ever heard of...
Now, there are a number of sites out there where deep links just don't work. I am no webmaster and I don't know the details, but since your browser sends the site you are coming from, it doesn't take a genius to check this and re-direct to the home page. This sucks in many ways (you can't cite an article and be sure your readers can find it on badly organized websites -- strangely, those who can organize their sites well don't often feel this compulsion to block deep links -- and you can't even bookmark it and go back to it later yourself without navigating the damned site), but if they really want to block deep links, it's much cheaper and more effective than hiring lawyers.
So what does Belo do instead? They sue someone for including in his site a text string following internet standards, which can be sent to their server to ask it to call up an article directly. No one is _making_ their server dish up these articles. So what's their claim -- an internet standard string format _tricks_ them into violating their own copyright? B.S. Maybe even barratry. They should pay Barking Dog's legal fees, court costs, and get beaten with the clue stick...
For example, most web pages linked to in slashdot articles.
No, the poster DID not know that it was a bandwidth cap. He wasn't getting connected at all.
Hope you do a better job of listening to the people you support.
Microsoft is a Software company. They make their money selling software. Over and over again to the same person, if they have their way...
backup the thing every week to 9" floppies. I don't think they ever considered that there wouldn't be anything to restore to.
Unfortunately, that's not at all unusual. (Forgetting to consider where you're going to restore your tapes/WORM disks/whatever to, not using 8" floppies as the backup medium.) Rather few small to medium sized corporations have a back-up plan that would actually work to get them back on-line in less than weeks if the computer room were torched, and too many of them are backing up to some antiquated tape format such that if the drive goes, you're going to be hunting for a data conversion service if you ever have to read back a tape...
GM does not have to have a help line to explain to idiot customers that the reason their car stopped after 300 miles is that they did not put any more gas in it.
About 50 years ago, my Dad was running an auto shop. One customer got so irate when his nearly new car wouldn't start, he pounded on it with a sledge hammer. It was out of gas. He knew his car needed gasoline, (and religiously bought Shell gas from Dad), but that morning he forgot to check for the basics....
Cars have a reasonably simple user interface, and the biggest change in it since the 1920's was the automatic transmission. Still, every car comes with a manual that explains all about running the car, for instance how to put gas in it. Software is much more complex and lacks a standard well-known user interface, and yet too often nowadays it is shipped without a manual! Yes, there is on-line help, if you can get enough of the product installed to reach it, and if it's any help. Too often it's so badly indexed you cannot find the right page unless you know exactly what the programmer called the function (which is not what it's called on error messages referring to it), or the help page is just plain wrong.
But the software is usually marketed as being installable and usable by anyone at all. Even the guy who calls the help desk because his screen is dark during a power failure... If the company is going to come anywhere near fulfilling what it promised when it sold the software, it's going to need a help desk that is capable of dealing with morons and ignoramuses, and teaching them to use the product. It really takes more than script bunnies, but attitude and communications skills are a lot more important at this level than technical knowledge.
Of course, the second problem is what happens when it's a knowledgeable caller with a real bug. Do you put him through an inquisition starting with "Is there power on the wall socket", and then chop it off at the 15 minute timer? Or does the front line person quickly recognize that here is a problem beyond his scripts and escalate it to a real tech? Does the company even have good techs available?
Third, sometimes the clueless have actually run into the serious bugs that are hard to solve even with skilled geeks on both ends of the line. Not much chance of solving that short of a house call, until some skilled geek calls with the same problem. But after it's been solved once, how do the other reps find out about it? And does the company discourage the frontliners from admitting to the known problems?
bandwidth caps aren't a tech support question. True, you can't fix them, BUT:
1. Customers generally cannot tell that's the reason they are not getting a good connection. It looks like something's broken, so they'll call tech support. (Obviously, it should be the ISP and not Dell they call, but unless they have an alternative ISP, there's no way to tell...)
2. In the parent post, some ISP TS moron or asshole wanted Skurk to do all sorts of system troubleshooting. He either didn't know or wasn't admitting that the problem was at their end.
3. And if Skurk had called about a Dell system running the OEM-installed Windows, what are the chances that, after wasting Skurk's time for hours checking on his setup, that ISP asshole would have told him to call Dell tech support???
Eric Flint is a science fiction writer who is apparently actually trying to make a living from the royalties on his books. That in itself isn't much of a recommendation, but after reading 1632, I think Flint has a pretty good understanding of history and economics. So I think he has the experience and background knowledge to comment knowledgeably on the economics of SF writing. And, in addition he has kept track of the sales of his books month by month, before and after he posted them on the web. Each time, sales went up.
And when Napster was shut down, music CD sales dropped. Is there a pattern developing here?
Harlan Ellison, who is on the opposite side here, is IMHO a former SF writer who appears to be living off of stuff he wrote -- and other people's work he collected in the Dangerous Visions books -- 20 to 30 years ago. If he's done anything since then, I haven't noticed it -- but then, I got very sick of Ellison a long, long time ago. Basically, I think Ellison is an idiot who thinks that every time someone reads one of his old books without paying him again, he lost a sale. Compare that to Flint, who has actual experimental evidence that giving e-books away increases sales of printed books...
I haven't seen any actual new work of his in 20 years. I probably have a bunch of his old books stored somehow -- but I wasn't in any hurry to take them out and read them again anyhow.
A long time ago, I decided that Harlan Ellison was clever, but he wasn't sufficiently hooked into _reality_ to write sci-fi that survived five seconds of critical thinking. Which is a pretty good reason not to take what he says about the economics of writing seriously...