This must be a major change from the way it used to be.
The outsourced tech support place I work at in the US used to have a dell contract (that movied to india) and none of those guys were dell employees in any way.
Also I was under the impression that the outsourcing companies were largly to blame for the move to India. Most call centers everything is graded on metrics, many contracts are written to the point where the contractee doesn't care where support is done, just as long as 80% of all calls are being solved in 8 minutes (and thats a real metric for one of the contracts here!)
Could be like the outsourced tech support place I work for (which is in the US). If you send parts out without doing the required troubleshooting that could be a severe reprimand.
Its probably a good way to go too - in my experience well over 80% of the customers who think they need new parts don't.
Chernobyl is also a good example of a RBMK reactor which is a unique design in that it is graphite rod moderated. The less you cool it the more efficent it gets - what is called a "positive void coefficient" - after Chernobyl many of the same RBMK reactors were fitted with many safety systems including containment. They still don't meet western safety standards, but there are several still in operation today - some of them are even connected to Europe's grid and producing electricity continent wide as a write this. The biggest is one called "Ignalina" in Lithuania.
Chernobyl had a cap on it - in fact when Unit 4 exploded it blew off the 2000 ton shield off the top of the reactor. When it exploded they were doing a test and were impatient with the performance of the control system and had subsequently shut off the safety systems. Oops.
RBMK reactors are kinda cool in the sense they can be refueled while online, but other then that...
I don't think this is very valid. Personally I place far more importance on people who know how to find answers to complex problems instead of knowing the answer almost instantly (or in 15 minutes).
I rather have someone who is good at confronting a problem with no real known or apparent solution (through research, thinking things through etc) than have someone who "seems" knows all the answers to the test. In my experience the latter group are typically better at looking/sounding good then actually performing in a real job environment.
First, being a CEO is damn difficult. The problems a CEO deals with in a day, and the stress he/she manages, and the management abilities, and the ability to handle impossible situations, and the memory required, and the negotiation skills, and the 18-hour days 7 days a week, and so on and so forth, are very rare. Personally, I could not even come CLOSE to what our CEO does.
Gee - this sounds like my Tech Support job at Stream International where I make 10$/per hour.
A) the Verite chip had no opengl support - it could only run vquake - a specialy made version of Quark for the verite. And even then it was slow. Also it was kinda pokey for Direct 3D stuff as well.
B) S3 also had no opengl support - and limited direct 3d support - most direct 3d games did not support it (for instance it didn't support uploading textures...)
C) Matrox - except for high end equipment also wasn't nearly fast enough to play GLQuake. The Mystique is not nealy fast enough to play actual video games.
Why do I keep mentioning Quake? I think in 96 is was the defining game. If your card could run GLQuake smoothly you were in the zone. And the only cards that could run it even near smoothly cost well over 2000 dollars. Don't believe me? This is actually all in the GLQuake readme (more or less)
When my Intel P-120 first started GL Quake on the Voodoo 1 I just about crapped my pants. It was smooth, fluid and it looked awsome! No other video card at the time for 150-200 dollars could deliver those kinds of results.
Everytime I have chosen ATI I've always been bitten in the ass.
With the 8500 I ran into the delayed write failure problem (search google for delayed write failure and ati). I think they have since fixed this problem in their drivers, but its a little too late for that - I got rid of the card.
With the 9500 Pro - I'm on the 3rd board because of a manufacturing defect in the heatsink/shim the sits on the chip (search google for ati and shim - you'll see what I mean). The 3rd card has yet to arrive, but the first two died of overheating. Plus you can't accuse me of lack of ventalation - my case has 6 fans that are currently creating a kind of wind-tunnel.
Mind you when these cards are working they amazingly fast and the visuals are amazing as well. I have no problems with that. It honestly freaks me out thinking about buying another ATI video card at this point though - simply because of sheer pain in calling ATI to get another replacement.
Both of these boards I ran within ATI's specifications and were unmodified.
My room-mate even went through two 9700's. I think they have serious QA problems - which is seriously going to affect my next video card purchase. Sure the new NVidia cards have wacky heatsinks - at least they are honest on what is really needed to cool the card unlike ATI.
More than I can say for the ATI Radeon 9500 Pro - I'm on my 3rd one (and yes I do run them at the default clock speed) because a manufacturing defect ATI has known about for ages (search google for ati and shim...)
In the US we can at least sue said companies for privacy violaitons. I wonder what would happen if a New Zealand or US company outsourced to a company in some south pacific island who was also turning around and selling that information to spammers, and telemarketing companies?
Do you realize that the person you talked to is probably a wage slave working in an outsourcing company you may have never heard of in a country you've never been too? In most cases the agent you talked to probably had no way of actually communicating that request with the actual company they represent.
I work in such a company - while I don't work on a financial contract there are several in the office I'm in for banks everyone of you has heard of.
In many countries they don't have as many privacy laws as the US does. Also some call centers are operated out of prisons (search google for twa and prison sometime). Definately something to think about before your company outsources ehh? Think about the potential for abuse. I'm an honest person - but I know for a fact I could collect well over 32-50 valid email addresses/credit cards and phone numbers per day if I wasn't.
I had a P120 that was mistakeningly overclocked for years - one day it quit working. I noticed that the jumpers were running it at like 90 or 100 mhz - I set the multipliers properly and it booted right up.
It speaks volumes on how much the doj knows about software and technology in general.
If you want to blame someone blame Judiann Roche - she at the very least converted the document to pdf, if not made the corrections herself. Knowing the doj (and most businesses for that matter) you could probably call their operator and ask to be connected.
I took a look at the original - its really not a graphic overlaying the black text. Its a text property. I found that if I used the touchup text tool in Acrobat I could select the text and reverse the colour. The other thing you can do is save the pdf file as a word/rtf/html/text doc - the text comes out just fine that way too. They made that PDF with microsoft word using PDFMaker (which is a macro to convert word links and styles to pdf links and bookmarks) - I'll bet they made all those black lines by using the word highlight tool - which in general is used to highlight text, not removing text. In word there's a nifty tool that does that - its called the delete key.
Possible workaround in Acrobat > they could have certified the document with Acrobat 6. That at the very least would prove much more diffucult to crack to use the touchup text tool and change the font colour like they did in this document.
That's true. However there is a large audience to whom $900 matters a lot. eg: 1. Students 2. Companies that want to purchase several licenses 3. Most of the third world
A) Adobe has educational licenses (as an example you can get the entire cs suite for 300$ as a student - thats well over 5000$ worth of apps normally) B) Adobe has volume lincensing programs C) Yeah you got me there. But then again - where do most pirated apps come from?
I've been there - unemployed looking for work etc. There are plenty of jobs to be had in telemarketing.
I worked in telemarketing for about a month - it was all I could take.
One thing about it is there are better jobs in outsourced tech support and customer service (where people typically call you). Note that these jobs still suck (its what I do now) but they are like vacation compared to telemarketing.
I actually work in tech support - and I support macs (and windows actually). Even though we don't support the os - we did run accross some oddities customers were running into and trying to blame on us. For instance classic not starting, no more network access - stuff like that.
Not to mention about 20% of the G4 silver macs we had no longer had network access after installing the patch.
One thing you'll notice is that all libraries seem to catogorize things differently. My father (who is a real certified librarian) says this is because its ultimately up to the librarian where they are classified. A good example of this is Michael Moore's books - love or hate him - his books seem to be in political commentary or satire, or commedy depending on the library. Personally I would put them in political commentary, but some people might find them funny (and they are) and put them in with the commedy books.
One of the reasons why local libraries and most K-12 public schools use the dewey decimle system is because lc is overkill for the volume of books these groups typically have.
As far as free text searching most modern library index's can actually index books using all three - dds, lc, and free keyword search using computers. But remember that lc and dewey originate on cards which have to be hand searched.
Dewey and LC also help place the books on the shelf - ie where is the book physically? With dewey if its 500 you just go down the row of books until you get that number or series of numbers. You know when you find a book on one topic you can find a book on a similar topic nearby. This is something free-text searching doesn't define really - and the biggest difference between search engines on the internet and search engines at the local library.
I noticed a while back while taking calls at Stream (tech support outsourcing company) that 90% of the people who called always have major issues with their computer. They are the kinds of people who have 12000 fonts, 95 items in the run section of their registry, and 10 filesharing apps running all the time. And some mac users are worse (yes you heard that right).
Sounds fine right? Problem is these same people always assume its my (or the parent companies) fault. I don't know how many times people have screamed at me to fix their broken computers (I mean there's only so much I can do to get the program I support up) when what they really need to do is take it to a service center or learn how to fix it themselves. I honestly wonder if Doctors get yelled at when people have heart attacks because they spent their life eating food at Burger King. Or mechanics who are ripped into when they are replacing clutch plates for drivers who don't know how to drive a manual.
Would you honestly give a linux machine to a user who has to ask me where the start button is (hint - its the button that says start on it)? Or how about users who call up because they don't know how to install a font into Windows (Microsoft in this case has made it beyond easy to do - I mean how many of you could describe how to install an opentype font on Linux? Or better yet how many people who tell me the 4 locations Mac OS X can read fonts from and why it does this)
In many ways I think Windows machines are just as secure as Linux machines - I mean I've never been compromised. I know thats an evil thing to say on Slashdot. But if Linux or OS X had much wider adoption with End Users I'm sure we'd be seeing the same thing - maybe not through email, but something. For one thing idiot end users would all adopt the simplest email program - or the one that comes with the desktop - all a virus writer would have to do is exploit that.
You'd think that even the most ardent Microsoft Windows critic would think there's something amiss about "Microsoft" sending out 10 messages per minute about security updates.
Thats better than nothing. I felt so sick a few weekends back I would have done almost anything to get better, but I didn't have 120$ just to see a doctor:(.
Slashdot Mirror
This must be a major change from the way it used to be.
The outsourced tech support place I work at in the US used to have a dell contract (that movied to india) and none of those guys were dell employees in any way.
Also I was under the impression that the outsourcing companies were largly to blame for the move to India. Most call centers everything is graded on metrics, many contracts are written to the point where the contractee doesn't care where support is done, just as long as 80% of all calls are being solved in 8 minutes (and thats a real metric for one of the contracts here!)
Could be like the outsourced tech support place I work for (which is in the US). If you send parts out without doing the required troubleshooting that could be a severe reprimand.
Its probably a good way to go too - in my experience well over 80% of the customers who think they need new parts don't.
Chernobyl is also a good example of a RBMK reactor which is a unique design in that it is graphite rod moderated. The less you cool it the more efficent it gets - what is called a "positive void coefficient" - after Chernobyl many of the same RBMK reactors were fitted with many safety systems including containment. They still don't meet western safety standards, but there are several still in operation today - some of them are even connected to Europe's grid and producing electricity continent wide as a write this. The biggest is one called "Ignalina" in Lithuania.
Chernobyl had a cap on it - in fact when Unit 4 exploded it blew off the 2000 ton shield off the top of the reactor. When it exploded they were doing a test and were impatient with the performance of the control system and had subsequently shut off the safety systems. Oops.
RBMK reactors are kinda cool in the sense they can be refueled while online, but other then that...
I don't think this is very valid. Personally I place far more importance on people who know how to find answers to complex problems instead of knowing the answer almost instantly (or in 15 minutes).
I rather have someone who is good at confronting a problem with no real known or apparent solution (through research, thinking things through etc) than have someone who "seems" knows all the answers to the test. In my experience the latter group are typically better at looking/sounding good then actually performing in a real job environment.
First, being a CEO is damn difficult. The problems a CEO deals with in a day, and the stress he/she manages, and the management abilities, and the ability to handle impossible situations, and the memory required, and the negotiation skills, and the 18-hour days 7 days a week, and so on and so forth, are very rare. Personally, I could not even come CLOSE to what our CEO does.
Gee - this sounds like my Tech Support job at Stream International where I make 10$/per hour.
1) I pity the poor Level 1 techs at Belken who are going to have to walk all the Mom & Pop users through flashing the firmware.
I've been there.
Some companies actually bill these sorts of calls to the department repsonsible for the call (in this case that would be marketing).
Talk about revising history here's a few facts.
A) the Verite chip had no opengl support - it could only run vquake - a specialy made version of Quark for the verite. And even then it was slow. Also it was kinda pokey for Direct 3D stuff as well.
B) S3 also had no opengl support - and limited direct 3d support - most direct 3d games did not support it (for instance it didn't support uploading textures...)
C) Matrox - except for high end equipment also wasn't nearly fast enough to play GLQuake. The Mystique is not nealy fast enough to play actual video games.
Why do I keep mentioning Quake? I think in 96 is was the defining game. If your card could run GLQuake smoothly you were in the zone. And the only cards that could run it even near smoothly cost well over 2000 dollars. Don't believe me? This is actually all in the GLQuake readme (more or less)
When my Intel P-120 first started GL Quake on the Voodoo 1 I just about crapped my pants. It was smooth, fluid and it looked awsome! No other video card at the time for 150-200 dollars could deliver those kinds of results.
Everytime I have chosen ATI I've always been bitten in the ass.
With the 8500 I ran into the delayed write failure problem (search google for delayed write failure and ati). I think they have since fixed this problem in their drivers, but its a little too late for that - I got rid of the card.
With the 9500 Pro - I'm on the 3rd board because of a manufacturing defect in the heatsink/shim the sits on the chip (search google for ati and shim - you'll see what I mean). The 3rd card has yet to arrive, but the first two died of overheating. Plus you can't accuse me of lack of ventalation - my case has 6 fans that are currently creating a kind of wind-tunnel.
Mind you when these cards are working they amazingly fast and the visuals are amazing as well. I have no problems with that. It honestly freaks me out thinking about buying another ATI video card at this point though - simply because of sheer pain in calling ATI to get another replacement.
Both of these boards I ran within ATI's specifications and were unmodified.
My room-mate even went through two 9700's. I think they have serious QA problems - which is seriously going to affect my next video card purchase. Sure the new NVidia cards have wacky heatsinks - at least they are honest on what is really needed to cool the card unlike ATI.
More than I can say for the ATI Radeon 9500 Pro - I'm on my 3rd one (and yes I do run them at the default clock speed) because a manufacturing defect ATI has known about for ages (search google for ati and shim...)
In the US we can at least sue said companies for privacy violaitons. I wonder what would happen if a New Zealand or US company outsourced to a company in some south pacific island who was also turning around and selling that information to spammers, and telemarketing companies?
Just like Scientology!
Do you realize that the person you talked to is probably a wage slave working in an outsourcing company you may have never heard of in a country you've never been too? In most cases the agent you talked to probably had no way of actually communicating that request with the actual company they represent.
I work in such a company - while I don't work on a financial contract there are several in the office I'm in for banks everyone of you has heard of.
In many countries they don't have as many privacy laws as the US does. Also some call centers are operated out of prisons (search google for twa and prison sometime). Definately something to think about before your company outsources ehh? Think about the potential for abuse. I'm an honest person - but I know for a fact I could collect well over 32-50 valid email addresses/credit cards and phone numbers per day if I wasn't.
I had a P120 that was mistakeningly overclocked for years - one day it quit working. I noticed that the jumpers were running it at like 90 or 100 mhz - I set the multipliers properly and it booted right up.
It speaks volumes on how much the doj knows about software and technology in general.
If you want to blame someone blame Judiann Roche - she at the very least converted the document to pdf, if not made the corrections herself. Knowing the doj (and most businesses for that matter) you could probably call their operator and ask to be connected.
I took a look at the original - its really not a graphic overlaying the black text. Its a text property. I found that if I used the touchup text tool in Acrobat I could select the text and reverse the colour. The other thing you can do is save the pdf file as a word/rtf/html/text doc - the text comes out just fine that way too. They made that PDF with microsoft word using PDFMaker (which is a macro to convert word links and styles to pdf links and bookmarks) - I'll bet they made all those black lines by using the word highlight tool - which in general is used to highlight text, not removing text. In word there's a nifty tool that does that - its called the delete key.
Possible workaround in Acrobat > they could have certified the document with Acrobat 6. That at the very least would prove much more diffucult to crack to use the touchup text tool and change the font colour like they did in this document.
It should be pointed out that the small via board for this project doesn't actually use an AMD cpu.
That's true. However there is a large audience to whom $900 matters a lot. eg:
1. Students
2. Companies that want to purchase several licenses
3. Most of the third world
A) Adobe has educational licenses (as an example you can get the entire cs suite for 300$ as a student - thats well over 5000$ worth of apps normally)
B) Adobe has volume lincensing programs
C) Yeah you got me there. But then again - where do most pirated apps come from?
I've been there - unemployed looking for work etc. There are plenty of jobs to be had in telemarketing.
I worked in telemarketing for about a month - it was all I could take.
One thing about it is there are better jobs in outsourced tech support and customer service (where people typically call you). Note that these jobs still suck (its what I do now) but they are like vacation compared to telemarketing.
It was more a matter of personal improvement. I was depressed big time and needed to do something - anything.
Now that I'm back working I know now that I can do most anything I set out to do - even learn something like morse code.
I learned morse code and got my extra class amateur radio license. I'd never have the time to do that if it wasn't for unemployment.
On the other hand unemployment can be frightening. I never made much before unemployment and I had a hard time paying my bills.
I actually work in tech support - and I support macs (and windows actually). Even though we don't support the os - we did run accross some oddities customers were running into and trying to blame on us. For instance classic not starting, no more network access - stuff like that.
Not to mention about 20% of the G4 silver macs we had no longer had network access after installing the patch.
One thing you'll notice is that all libraries seem to catogorize things differently. My father (who is a real certified librarian) says this is because its ultimately up to the librarian where they are classified. A good example of this is Michael Moore's books - love or hate him - his books seem to be in political commentary or satire, or commedy depending on the library. Personally I would put them in political commentary, but some people might find them funny (and they are) and put them in with the commedy books.
One of the reasons why local libraries and most K-12 public schools use the dewey decimle system is because lc is overkill for the volume of books these groups typically have.
As far as free text searching most modern library index's can actually index books using all three - dds, lc, and free keyword search using computers. But remember that lc and dewey originate on cards which have to be hand searched.
Dewey and LC also help place the books on the shelf - ie where is the book physically? With dewey if its 500 you just go down the row of books until you get that number or series of numbers. You know when you find a book on one topic you can find a book on a similar topic nearby. This is something free-text searching doesn't define really - and the biggest difference between search engines on the internet and search engines at the local library.
I noticed a while back while taking calls at Stream (tech support outsourcing company) that 90% of the people who called always have major issues with their computer. They are the kinds of people who have 12000 fonts, 95 items in the run section of their registry, and 10 filesharing apps running all the time. And some mac users are worse (yes you heard that right).
Sounds fine right? Problem is these same people always assume its my (or the parent companies) fault. I don't know how many times people have screamed at me to fix their broken computers (I mean there's only so much I can do to get the program I support up) when what they really need to do is take it to a service center or learn how to fix it themselves. I honestly wonder if Doctors get yelled at when people have heart attacks because they spent their life eating food at Burger King. Or mechanics who are ripped into when they are replacing clutch plates for drivers who don't know how to drive a manual.
Would you honestly give a linux machine to a user who has to ask me where the start button is (hint - its the button that says start on it)? Or how about users who call up because they don't know how to install a font into Windows (Microsoft in this case has made it beyond easy to do - I mean how many of you could describe how to install an opentype font on Linux? Or better yet how many people who tell me the 4 locations Mac OS X can read fonts from and why it does this)
In many ways I think Windows machines are just as secure as Linux machines - I mean I've never been compromised. I know thats an evil thing to say on Slashdot. But if Linux or OS X had much wider adoption with End Users I'm sure we'd be seeing the same thing - maybe not through email, but something. For one thing idiot end users would all adopt the simplest email program - or the one that comes with the desktop - all a virus writer would have to do is exploit that.
Same here.
You'd think that even the most ardent Microsoft Windows critic would think there's something amiss about "Microsoft" sending out 10 messages per minute about security updates.
call sign lookup is rather useful when exchanging qsl cards - either here or abroad.
Thats better than nothing. I felt so sick a few weekends back I would have done almost anything to get better, but I didn't have 120$ just to see a doctor :(.