...when the Apple engineers tell you: "Unplug the device from your Macintosh."
I used to have a Mac at work (and I liked it!) But this statement simply isn't true. Take a usb pen drive plug it in - shows up on your mac desktop right? Simply unplug it gives you a warning about possible data loss. No the correct method to unplugging your usb pen drive, firewire drive, ipod etc is ironically to eject it or drag it the trash - just like in OS9 - or oddly enough linux and windows.
BTW - windows has similar technology - just left click the safely remove hardware icon in your sys-tray, pick the device, pull the device out - and thats only for read-write media. For any other usb/firewire device you only need to unplug it - I do this to my sony digital 8 camera all the time.
That ranks right up there with their classic first question "do you have a firewall?" Answer "yes," and that IMMEDIATELY becomes the problem (despite the fact that it's been running for months with no change in configuration).
So what are tech support agents supposed to do when some idiot has a 3rd party firewall they've never heard of and that really is the cause of their connection problems?
Speaking from experience in working in these places support policies always cater to the lowest common demoninator for a very good reason.
To me the one big problem with gt3 (and many racing games) is the ai opponents. They consistantly drive like they are on rails. They always take the same exact line on every single corner - and they never make any mistakes. Increasing the diffuculty just makes them increase the speed at which they take the predefined lines they take for corners.
Also - does anyone know anybody who completed all the licensing tests?
While it is true a good number of games programmed the hardware directly (mainly because commodore documented it quite well for this purpose) not all do.
Good example of this is Quake and Quake 2 on AmigaDOS - both use standard libs:
Are you serious? Every ATI video card I've ever had has had serious quality control problems. If it wasn't the drivers it was the physical hardware.
I bought a 9500 Pro a year ago and I've only ever been able to use it for a month. I'm on card number 4 now because of a flaw in the way the heatsink/heatsink shim was made (something their customer service reps admit to). I was so burned by the 9500 that I could honestly never bring myself to by another ATI card for as long as I live. Much in the same way it would be hard to bring yourself to stick your finger in a light socket. The third card (which came straight from ATI) I gave to my brother, was DOA - it had garbage all over the screen long before we even tried to install the drivers for it.
Its not the only ATI card I've had problems with - the Rage 128 had the worst drivers on earth, and the Raedon 8500 drivers gave me delayed write failures on my hdd (search google for this - its a pretty funny problem - especially if you work in tech support like me).
I went out and bought a NVidia 5900 and I'll never look back. Its been the most problem free (I haven't had any problems with it actually) video I've ever owned since I got into computers.
I still respond to this the same way I always have about everything ATI.
About a year ago I bought an ATI 9500 Pro because of rave reviews, and friends who liked them. I've actually only ever been able to use the card for a month - as I'm on card #4 now. Because of a manufacturing flaw in the card itself it tends to overheat and damage the card permanently. Check out this article to see what I'm talking about.
Around card number 3 I bought a NVidia 5900 and I haven't looked back - its brutally fast, 100% reliable and it looks great. ATI will never get my business again. Card #4 btw I gave to my brother died less that 15 seconds after powering on the machine - didn't even get to install the drivers. Maybe card #5 will work - but I've basically written off the price of this worthless piece of junk.
This isn't the only ATI video card though I've had quality control problems with - I had an 8500 that between the worthless drivers, and poor QA on the actual card itself was mostly unusable.
No clue? I've seen how these things are programmed - they have settings for payout and how much the casino keeps - this is regulated by state law (in places like Nevada). This is true for Mechanical slot machines too. One thing is certian though there's no state law on how fair the slot machine actually has to be - just how much it has to pay out.
How is this any different than slot machines which easily dominate the vast majority of any floor at any casino? Its basically a computer thats rigged to take your money - not all unlike an online casino.
The only garentee as far as I know is the machines are checked for minimum payout. I have no idea what checks are done on India Casinos
There was a version of Frame for Linux - version 5.5. As I recall the beta for it never made it as a final product because surveys basically stated there was no market for it and the market that did want it - wanted it for free.
As far as I know its the only graphical "layout app" to grace the linux desktop.
I actually used to do technical support for Framemaker (and I had a lot of fun doing it too) if you don't believe me reply to this and I can send plenty of references that prove this fact.
I haven't worked there in a while - but a lot of the other teams supported products that probably had fewer calls with products that had far more problems. Well over 75% of all the calls I took were tech writers using windows - the rest of them Unix (usually Solaris) and Mac - even then I didn't have to take very many calls on the product.
Even then it suprises me they stopped supporting it - since I never recalled any real support issues other then the fact it was an OS8/OS9 app (it ran just fine in X) its not like it was hard to support or anything and it really didn't have any major issues. The Unix version was pretty monolithic compared to many Unix apps. A great example of this is adding fonts to Framemaker which also shows how Frame handles fonts (this doc applies to Frame 7 and 7.1 too except they can use opentype fonts as well)
Assigns: Shortcuts basically. Windows only gets halfway with its shortcut - I can't include the shortcut in a filename, I can only use the shortcut on its own (eg, c:\shortcut\dir_inside_shortcut) - was this fixed in XP?
Actually assigns are more like windows drive maps. On the amiga you could have the folling path,
dh0:incoming/ - making an assign to incoming which makes a new "drive" of sorts called incoming: that goes back to dh0:incoming
(and as a general reply to the parent above you)
You can do all kinds of nifty tricks with this - one of them is volume named floppies - I've quite literally seen programs install off 4 floppy disks at the same time because disks were labeled disk1:, disk2:, disk3: etc and could be accessed via df0: or disk1: - if disk1 was in dh2: you could still type disk1: and it would just go there.
AmigaDOS also has aliases which are the same as shortcuts in Windows.
Thats just one example of the Amiga doing it right - every single aspect of the OS seemed powerful, yet streamline and easy to use - which is something I don't see in Mac OSX, Windows or Linux (although Mac OSX comes closer than most).
Not to mention I still have my A1200 kicking around. This computer was purchased new in 1992 for 500$ and it has a 68020 14 MHz cpu with 8 megs of ram - I can get 10-12 tasks running at once and switch between them literally as fast as I can click the mouse (most apps on the amiga occupy seperate screens) - some of these apps could be rendering/animation programs like lightwave (yes Lightwave 3.5 runs great on this computer). Only my most recent windows machine can barely do this - and its a 2600 mhz Athlon with 1000 megs of ram.
Ooh - one more neat OS feature that lots of people forget. AmigaDOS always had a ram disk - and it was dynamic. It was called RAM: and you could put anything you liked in there (as long as you had memory) - if there was nothing in there it didn't use any system memory. Thats something even the most modern release of OSX or Linux don't have.
There are of course a lot of things it never did right - like no memory protection, no out of the box real network support (unless you could get your hands on a copy of AS225) and only in OS 3.x did they have the ability to actually use graphics cards other than the chipset.
also she said that the damage was probably caused by our use of third party wax ink cartridges
Just as a matter of fact - Tektronix techs always always always say that. I had one say that and I opened a drawer full of actual xerox/tektronix wax "cartridges" - several lifetimes worth of the things and I said something "like these?". Basically proved to this guy I had no reason to use 3rd party anything on this printer.
I'd like to know what experience you back this claim up with. This article pretty much sums up my 2 year experience at Stream International word for word. Except we called it AHT (average handle time) - which was talk time plus wrap. In my experience to get the low 14-13 minute calls you can have maybe one or two long calls that entire day...
I had two breaks of 15 minutes each - the state only requires 10 minutes each - the reason why I know this is because Stream would send out emails
Also - at Stream if you went over the required AHT on an individual call someone would drop by your desk to find out what was going on.
And for client review there's a trick they use for that too - the first year Stream would always do the best they could (not worry about aht, solve problems get customer satisfaction up) then they move in a SDM (service delivery manager) who is a closer and gets the results talked about in this article. Once a contract is locked into a company like Stream its kinda hard to move. So they keep the metrics just good enough to justify leaving things the way they are.
But... almost every contract I saw come and go at Stream came or went to one of our competitors. Some contracts I had heard have been to more than one outsourcer too...
Some accounts at outsourced call centers this really does work - but for companies who could care less (Dell for instance - since they own most of the market) it really doesn't do any good unless the responce to bad tech support is overwhelming.
And when you work in a call center that can handle over 20,000 calls per day it would have to be very very very overwhelming.
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...when the Apple engineers tell you: "Unplug the device from your Macintosh."
I used to have a Mac at work (and I liked it!) But this statement simply isn't true. Take a usb pen drive plug it in - shows up on your mac desktop right? Simply unplug it gives you a warning about possible data loss. No the correct method to unplugging your usb pen drive, firewire drive, ipod etc is ironically to eject it or drag it the trash - just like in OS9 - or oddly enough linux and windows.
BTW - windows has similar technology - just left click the safely remove hardware icon in your sys-tray, pick the device, pull the device out - and thats only for read-write media. For any other usb/firewire device you only need to unplug it - I do this to my sony digital 8 camera all the time.
You could always use Framemaker :) - I've never seen its sylesheet get screwed up even after several thousand pages.
There's a little known program thats pretty good for this job called Acrobat Capture - it uses isis compatible scanners.
That ranks right up there with their classic first question "do you have a firewall?" Answer "yes," and that IMMEDIATELY becomes the problem (despite the fact that it's been running for months with no change in configuration).
So what are tech support agents supposed to do when some idiot has a 3rd party firewall they've never heard of and that really is the cause of their connection problems?
Speaking from experience in working in these places support policies always cater to the lowest common demoninator for a very good reason.
To me the one big problem with gt3 (and many racing games) is the ai opponents. They consistantly drive like they are on rails. They always take the same exact line on every single corner - and they never make any mistakes. Increasing the diffuculty just makes them increase the speed at which they take the predefined lines they take for corners.
Also - does anyone know anybody who completed all the licensing tests?
While it is true a good number of games programmed the hardware directly (mainly because commodore documented it quite well for this purpose) not all do.
Good example of this is Quake and Quake 2 on AmigaDOS - both use standard libs:
Anyone familiar with Terminal services or Citrix should be familiar with this licensing model
:). Not to nitpick but XP Pro and 2000 Pro come with a TSCAL. So you'd only need two licenses of Office etc.
That I am
Are you serious? Every ATI video card I've ever had has had serious quality control problems. If it wasn't the drivers it was the physical hardware.
I bought a 9500 Pro a year ago and I've only ever been able to use it for a month. I'm on card number 4 now because of a flaw in the way the heatsink/heatsink shim was made (something their customer service reps admit to). I was so burned by the 9500 that I could honestly never bring myself to by another ATI card for as long as I live. Much in the same way it would be hard to bring yourself to stick your finger in a light socket. The third card (which came straight from ATI) I gave to my brother, was DOA - it had garbage all over the screen long before we even tried to install the drivers for it.
Its not the only ATI card I've had problems with - the Rage 128 had the worst drivers on earth, and the Raedon 8500 drivers gave me delayed write failures on my hdd (search google for this - its a pretty funny problem - especially if you work in tech support like me).
I went out and bought a NVidia 5900 and I'll never look back. Its been the most problem free (I haven't had any problems with it actually) video I've ever owned since I got into computers.
I have a Nvidia 5900 and its a perfectly quiet video card. I think the power supply fan is lounder actually.
Personally I'll probably get a 6800 because nvidia can be counted on for reliable hardware, drivers and software support.
In my company I have to train my potential replacements every day.
Hey how's life at Stream International?
I still respond to this the same way I always have about everything ATI.
About a year ago I bought an ATI 9500 Pro because of rave reviews, and friends who liked them. I've actually only ever been able to use the card for a month - as I'm on card #4 now. Because of a manufacturing flaw in the card itself it tends to overheat and damage the card permanently. Check out this article to see what I'm talking about.
Around card number 3 I bought a NVidia 5900 and I haven't looked back - its brutally fast, 100% reliable and it looks great. ATI will never get my business again. Card #4 btw I gave to my brother died less that 15 seconds after powering on the machine - didn't even get to install the drivers. Maybe card #5 will work - but I've basically written off the price of this worthless piece of junk.
This isn't the only ATI video card though I've had quality control problems with - I had an 8500 that between the worthless drivers, and poor QA on the actual card itself was mostly unusable.
Have to?
No clue? I've seen how these things are programmed - they have settings for payout and how much the casino keeps - this is regulated by state law (in places like Nevada). This is true for Mechanical slot machines too. One thing is certian though there's no state law on how fair the slot machine actually has to be - just how much it has to pay out.
How is this any different than slot machines which easily dominate the vast majority of any floor at any casino? Its basically a computer thats rigged to take your money - not all unlike an online casino.
The only garentee as far as I know is the machines are checked for minimum payout. I have no idea what checks are done on India Casinos
Ironically it sounds like you need Framemaker - which has all those things.
There was a version of Frame for Linux - version 5.5. As I recall the beta for it never made it as a final product because surveys basically stated there was no market for it and the market that did want it - wanted it for free.
As far as I know its the only graphical "layout app" to grace the linux desktop.
I actually used to do technical support for Framemaker (and I had a lot of fun doing it too) if you don't believe me reply to this and I can send plenty of references that prove this fact.
I haven't worked there in a while - but a lot of the other teams supported products that probably had fewer calls with products that had far more problems. Well over 75% of all the calls I took were tech writers using windows - the rest of them Unix (usually Solaris) and Mac - even then I didn't have to take very many calls on the product.
Even then it suprises me they stopped supporting it - since I never recalled any real support issues other then the fact it was an OS8/OS9 app (it ran just fine in X) its not like it was hard to support or anything and it really didn't have any major issues. The Unix version was pretty monolithic compared to many Unix apps. A great example of this is adding fonts to Framemaker which also shows how Frame handles fonts (this doc applies to Frame 7 and 7.1 too except they can use opentype fonts as well)
I think one of the reasons there won't be any G5 Imac anytime soon probably related to thermal problems.
Plus the Mac can't multitask.
Assigns: Shortcuts basically. Windows only gets halfway with its shortcut - I can't include the shortcut in a filename, I can only use the shortcut on its own (eg, c:\shortcut\dir_inside_shortcut) - was this fixed in XP?
Actually assigns are more like windows drive maps. On the amiga you could have the folling path,
dh0:incoming/ - making an assign to incoming which makes a new "drive" of sorts called incoming: that goes back to dh0:incoming
(and as a general reply to the parent above you)
You can do all kinds of nifty tricks with this - one of them is volume named floppies - I've quite literally seen programs install off 4 floppy disks at the same time because disks were labeled disk1:, disk2:, disk3: etc and could be accessed via df0: or disk1: - if disk1 was in dh2: you could still type disk1: and it would just go there.
AmigaDOS also has aliases which are the same as shortcuts in Windows.
Thats just one example of the Amiga doing it right - every single aspect of the OS seemed powerful, yet streamline and easy to use - which is something I don't see in Mac OSX, Windows or Linux (although Mac OSX comes closer than most).
Not to mention I still have my A1200 kicking around. This computer was purchased new in 1992 for 500$ and it has a 68020 14 MHz cpu with 8 megs of ram - I can get 10-12 tasks running at once and switch between them literally as fast as I can click the mouse (most apps on the amiga occupy seperate screens) - some of these apps could be rendering/animation programs like lightwave (yes Lightwave 3.5 runs great on this computer). Only my most recent windows machine can barely do this - and its a 2600 mhz Athlon with 1000 megs of ram.
Ooh - one more neat OS feature that lots of people forget. AmigaDOS always had a ram disk - and it was dynamic. It was called RAM: and you could put anything you liked in there (as long as you had memory) - if there was nothing in there it didn't use any system memory. Thats something even the most modern release of OSX or Linux don't have.
There are of course a lot of things it never did right - like no memory protection, no out of the box real network support (unless you could get your hands on a copy of AS225) and only in OS 3.x did they have the ability to actually use graphics cards other than the chipset.
also she said that the damage was probably caused by our use of third party wax ink cartridges
Just as a matter of fact - Tektronix techs always always always say that. I had one say that and I opened a drawer full of actual xerox/tektronix wax "cartridges" - several lifetimes worth of the things and I said something "like these?". Basically proved to this guy I had no reason to use 3rd party anything on this printer.
Is this is a satellite though? Just curious.
Kind of like GainaX?
A sensasional artical than it is factual
I'd like to know what experience you back this claim up with. This article pretty much sums up my 2 year experience at Stream International word for word. Except we called it AHT (average handle time) - which was talk time plus wrap. In my experience to get the low 14-13 minute calls you can have maybe one or two long calls that entire day...
I had two breaks of 15 minutes each - the state only requires 10 minutes each - the reason why I know this is because Stream would send out emails
Also - at Stream if you went over the required AHT on an individual call someone would drop by your desk to find out what was going on.
And for client review there's a trick they use for that too - the first year Stream would always do the best they could (not worry about aht, solve problems get customer satisfaction up) then they move in a SDM (service delivery manager) who is a closer and gets the results talked about in this article. Once a contract is locked into a company like Stream its kinda hard to move. So they keep the metrics just good enough to justify leaving things the way they are.
But... almost every contract I saw come and go at Stream came or went to one of our competitors. Some contracts I had heard have been to more than one outsourcer too...
Some accounts at outsourced call centers this really does work - but for companies who could care less (Dell for instance - since they own most of the market) it really doesn't do any good unless the responce to bad tech support is overwhelming.
And when you work in a call center that can handle over 20,000 calls per day it would have to be very very very overwhelming.