Everything about the idea that Microsoft hasn't run the numbers on this thing is stupid.
Very true, but Ms has a long history of failing to anticipate important consequences of their actions. The one I foresee with this is that with millions of extra users testing the OS in a "beta" state, they will see it at its less-than-finest. You can argue all you want to that its a beta, but first impressions count. If the beta isnt very close to fully stable, then they will leave a bad taste in peoples mouths. With early adopters, thats not really a big deal as they expect it. With people now signing up just to get the free license, you get end users who get to experience a beta environment, and they wont like it.
No, this would be a maintenance contract not a subscription plan.
Under a subscription plan, you stop paying, it stops working. Under a maintenance contract, it keeps working, you just stop getting updates.
In any event, MS would be ill advised to open source anything. As soon as they do, they are no longer the only source for updates, and once they are no longer the only source for updates, they will no longer be the *best* source for updates, since it is likely that a young upstart company with some intelligence behind it is going to be able to run rings around MS. The only advantage MS has is exclusive access to the source code. If they give that up, its sayonara sucker.
If this had been done with Windows 8, would it have been successful?
This would not have helped windows 8.
People only get an OS update for three reasons
New hardware comes with it. Windows 8 (can to a lesser extent Microsoft itself) had such a bad reputation that people would avoid new hardware purchases to avoid windows 8. Corporate customers refused to retrain their workforce, so windows 8 was out of the question. Had windows 7 not been an option, One of the Linux variants might have had a real shot...
Microsoft fanbois buy the new OS (or join the beta testing programs) to stay abreast of the latest and greatest. This category includes (whether they like it or not) tech journalists.
Some people need a new version of the OS because the old one did not do something they felt they needed. Hard core gamers tend to fall into this category which is why the directX program was so vital to Microsoft for the last 15+ years.
Microsoft is finding it harder and harder to generate new *must have* features with each new version of windows. That is why Windows XP enjoyed such a long run. Based on features alone, there would be no compelling reason to move to windows 8. This keeps Microsoft continually off balance. They have to continue creating new OS's so they don't get left behind, which costs a great deal of money, and runs the risk of breaking legacy programs. When they do, they need to convince people to buy the new OS (which most people really don't want to do). Microsoft can force the issue by discontinuing support for old versions (like XP), but each forced transition causes some percentage of windows customers to migrate away from windows. Microsoft is dying by inches, but like most things tech, once the avalanche lets go, the transition will be fast, powerful and will leave companies dying 15' under. People give Balmer a lot of shit, but he managed to avoid this fate for Microsoft, so all other things aside, he managed to avoid making any fatal mistakes which is more than can be said of many other tech companies.
I wonder if his own propaganda department is trying to be insubordinate by making claims that are so fantastic and provably false. A claim like this is likely to be widely discredited within N. Korea, as everyone who dies of one of these diseases is proof against the claims. His PR people have to know that, so why make the claim in the first place? My suspicion is that they actually want The claims to be proven false, and for Kim Jong to be discredited. Active insubordination without having done anything they can, or will, be executed for.
As an MM, I am not sure I would really want to work for someone who finds the pictures of me holding a tray of shots or chilling with my cross-dressing friends offensive.
Like most reasonably progressive people, your employer doesn't really care one way or another about anything you do on your own time except under a narrow set of circumstances where it negatively affects the company. The point of view from which they approach the problem is: What happens if someone from the general public finds these pictures and the association with our company is made. Capable business people are risk averse. If they have two candidates that are more or less equal in all other respects, the one that brings baggage like this will be rejected out of hand because they pose a higher risk. As such, any marginally competent HR department will work to weed out these kinds of risks as an early elimination criteria for weeding out resumes. For them its a matter of personal risk. If they let something like that through and the hiring manager finds out, there will be some fall out for the HR manager. Except in a CYA sort of way, no one actually cares one way or another about the individual, the only thing they care about is the impact on the company (leading to impact on their own careers).
The average starting salary for CS graduates in 2014 is $60,000.
Those average starting salary statistics are quite misleading. Those entry level tech jobs are largely only available in the tech northeast, Atlanta and silicon valley. In those places, an apartment alone will cost you $24,000 / year in rent. You will have to live an hour from where you work. The overall average salary in those places is 2x-3x the national average. That $60k isnt so spectacular when you look at it that way.
Where I live is far more representative of the country as a whole. There are very few tech jobs here at all in spite of this being called "tech valley". the last entry level person we hired was for a technician job: $29k (He is massively overqualified, and we expect he will leave when he eventually finds something better). Experienced engineers here make less than those starting salaries you listed because this isn't California and the cost of living isn't nearly so high, but there are nowhere near as many entry level positions outside of the coastal areas. Put another way, the cost of living adjusted starting salaries are around $35k to $40k. This is the number that would accurately compare with the national family income average of $20k.
And this is what the OP and the people you replied to are talking about, public-facing technical support queues, not internal helpdesks. The difference in call volume is enormous when comparing for example, Microsoft's internal helpdesk calls versus Comcast public facing customer service and technical support, and the need for a group of unskilled checklist readers is very real to keep support times manageable.
Just because it is prevailing wisdom doesn't mean its right. Unlike most of my contemporaries, I understand both sides of the IT / operations interaction. I can tell you that as a general rule, IT doesn't get it. There are a few exceptions, but most customer facing IT is about reducing cost, when they should be concentrating on minimizing the cost to customer satisfaction ratio. Improving customer satisfaction is more valuable to companies than reducing help desk cost. Just because the majority of todays companies don't understand that doesn't make it not true. The first priority of my IT departments is customer service. It barely edges out product improvement. Cost isn't even on the top 5. If your product is so crappy that you are spending enough on help desk to affect your margins, then you really need to concentrate on product improvement.
As a side note, why in the hell would you have help desk employees doing billings job of verifying accounts?
To continue the example that the original poster used, Having a tier 2 guy answer a call relating to something "dumb", the first thing to do is verify the unit is on ( all of 5 seconds of time). Second: Is the unit connected to the central office? (another 5 seconds of time). Having a tier 2 answer the phone for something simple may cost twice as much, but customer (even the ignorant ones) know when they are talking to tier one, and they don't like it. Even if it can ultimately fix their problem less expensively than having tier 2s answering the phones, they feel like 2nd class citizens when a tier 1 can fix their problem. No one likes feeling like an idiot, even if they are.
TL:DR, any company that feels that having unskilled people answering a phone and working from a script to solve customer problems is missing the entire customer service concept. They are so centered on cutting costs that they havent realized that having tier 2 answering all calls, and tasking them with fixing root causes will result in better customer service, and will cut costs in the long run by reducing help desk calls in the first place.
As an example, we recently had a password issue where users were required to change passwords every 90 days. It was a dumb idea, and I'm not entirely sure why I agreed to it in the first place, but my front line techs tell me that it is not working. People are choosing lousy passwords and forgetting them anyways. One of my better project managers suggesting switching to an authenticated computer system whereby a user could indicate that a computer was trusted, and thereby bypass the login system. We decided to go with a partial measure, and allow the user first level access, but no change authority without the need to enter credentials, but only when accessing from a known location that the user had indicated was trustworthy. Many of our users access the system in a read only fashion. This change reduced our help desk calls by 10%, and the pen testing guys said it had no effect on the security of the system. In part because users no longer had to change passwords every 90 days, and as such didn't pick such dumb passwords.
I am an IT professional, and even I make simple mistakes sometimes. There is a reason rubber-duck debugging is a thing. Tier 1 is a rubber duck. Deal with it, you self-important asshole.
I met a jackass like you once. I told my CIO to do a little house cleaning because if I ever ran into him or another like him it was the CIOs ass I would put on the street. IT is a cost center. If they cost me a little more than they need to, nobodys perfect, If they cost me my time, I get very unhappy. If they cost me customers, thats unforgivable.
My time, my managers time, and especially operations time is vastly more important than your time. If that weren't true, I would fix problems myself, or hire for operations positions that could do so. The whole point of having an IT department is so that I can save money by *not* having my operators and managers dealing with IT related problems. When they have to spend their time anyway on the phone with some dumb shit like you, then what benefit am I getting by having two peoples time spent on a simple problem?
OTOH if one of my managers is so incompetent to be repeatedly calling the help desk for dumb ass tier 1 shit, then I have to wonder why I employ them at all. I expect my managers to be at least functionally literate with a computer. If by some chance they aren't, they better have one hell of a talent for something else that I need a lot of...
The entire point of employees is to get the job done as quickly, effectively and cheaply as possible. When a tier 1 tech goes through a dumb ass script without showing the least ability to trouble shoot on their own, then they are costing me more than they save. I could just hand the damn script out to all of the manager, have them read it themselves, and fire the whole damn IT department. You dont have a fucking clue how business actually works do you?
It's very rare to get a caller who knows what they're talking about - so rare, that it's much more time efficient to ignore every caller's suggestions. Sorry, for the insult. Newbie techs who listen to their callers usually run down the wrong bunny trail and waste a lot of time and money.
From the perspective of a company wishing to save money on tech support, wasting customers time with tier 1 is absolutely the dumbest thing to do. The process should instead be geared towards an overall reduction in tier 1 calls. These calls are a waste of everyones time. First, examine your call center statistics. What are you getting the most calls about. Look hard and long for ways to modify your product to eliminate these calls. If you're company is getting 100 of these calls a week, its worth paying for an entire engineers salary for a year to fix just that one issue in the new designs. Properly done, the number of customer calls to the help desk will decrease over time saving a great deal of money. There are intangible benefits as well, such as increased customer satisfaction (A customer who never has to call the help desk in the first place is going to be far more satisfied than one who calls, no matter how well the help desk deals with the problem). This translates into free advertising in the form of satisfied customer, and a reduction in unsatisfied customers telling people your company is shite.
The problem with having an auto-escalation path is that it allows problems that never should have escalated to get escalated. Yes, you may have a fairly specific problem that requires a T3 tech, but the T1 doesn't know that, and the majority of [Company]'s customers don't know that either, but every single other customer think's their issue requires a T3 tech. The scripts and the tree exist to keep some order and structure going. Think about it this way - suppose you were a business customer who had a T3 question - do you really want your call being queued up behind someone who insists that Internet Explorer is the only way to get to their email? When I managed a first response desk, we had people calling in for the Sysadmin, Enterprise Manager, DBAs, Senior Devs, pretty much every upper-level employee, insisting that "Only they can solve this". Most of the time it turned out to be basic desktop troubleshooting or password resets or just basic "how to" questions.
All of this is predicated on two things. First, that the value of tier 2+ time - tier 1 time is greater than the value of the time wasted by having these stupid trees in the first place. Second, There is no easy way to determine whether or not a problem is tier 2+ or not.
In my experience, when it comes to corporate intra-functions, the first precondition is almost never true. Typically, they will keep a division manager or operations manager waiting while a minimum wage flunky follows a script to avoid wasting some else’s time who makes less than the manager whos time they are wasting. Maybe ten+ years ago the managers would call with dumb ass crap and the company could save a little money by having tier 1 support running interference. Thats not true any more. These days, you can provide an automated way to reset passwords and other dumb crap, and people will use that before calling the help desk. As for the second item, the advent of big data allows you to track things like average escalation per user, so that if a person is almost always escalated when they call the help desk, offer them the magic menu shortcut. Then, they can decide if they need 2+ or not, and everyone saves a little time and money.
For companies, the costs of tier 1 support are hidden. Badly done support (wasting peoples time with tier 1 support when they need teir 2+) caries with it the hidden cost of loosing customers. There is no good way to track this metric, so companies don't understand that not escalating quickly when appropriate costs the company money.
Many company IT departments are still operating like its the 1950's. We are entering an age when kids have grown up with technology, and don't make half the dumb mistakes their elders did. I have worked with a number of IT departments, some good, some bad. The good ones have just the kind of shortcut to tier2+ that we have been talking about. The bad ones don't. Some of the worst outsourced one or more of the tiers to save money, and ended loosing money and not even knowing that they were.
Systemd doesn’t throw away stdout or stderr. If you have a case where you believe there is a bug, and those streams are being lost, submit the bug report. You might have found a legitimate bug. You might not. A lot of logging changed with Systemd, and some things are less than obvious. This is nothing intrinsic to Systemd, its just different from what you're used to. Drop any newbie into CentOS, and they would have just as much trouble finding the logs...
There have been several bugs that have cropped up from time to time relating to logging, but they get fixed as soon as they are found. The far more common problem is that by default the logging now goes through journald, and rather than rtfm, people often seem inclined to claim its broken rather than seek out the answers. You can find a good description for how to find the logs here
Poettering instead has his minions make personal attacks
Here is a sample bug report relating to the stderr/stdout problem I see nothing by the way of personal attacks. In fact all I see are genuine interest in a bug, and a quick bug fix being pushed upstream. In fact, the only personal attacks I have seen on anyones part have come from anti-sysetmd people who are clearly not involved in any way in the decision making process, nor the systemd code maintenance process.
He does not understand UNIX. stderr output should never be ignored, much less deleted
Here is a link to a bug report dealing with the stdout / stderr problem. If you read through it, you will find that the systemd folks are very responsive, and fully agree that the bug existed and quickly had a fix.
I'm sorry that you lost customers relating to systemd, but if they switched to systemd, and the only failures they had were your code, then I have to ask why that is. If they had other failures in the conversion, and still insisted that you were the problem (enough to drop you as a service provider), then I would worry that there was some other agenda going on.
If, on the other hand, you were the one who switched to systemd, and managed to have unstable code make it to a client... Thats a whole other ball game.
that could open up a lot of possibilities to the more adventurous enthusiasts/hobbyists/developers.
Those doors are already open. What you want is a Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone Black, or one of the variants. If you need something with some real programmable logic, get a Cypress PSOC. The top of the line PSOC eval board is $100. The development environment is free for all of the above solutions. The PSOCs even come with some amount of programmable analog.
Waiting for an x86 chip with built in FPGA is a pipe dream, and a stupid one at that. Anything they made would be hideously expensive because it would be low volume (They wouldn’t waste their time putting it into their high volume chips, because the Dells, HPs, etc... of the world wouldn't pay the premium for something that doesn’t improve their bottom line). If you really want compute power and an FPGA, get a Pi2 and an FPGA daughter board. Together they will cost you less than anything Intel will ever be able to build. The only way you can get processor+FPGA to be cost effective is if there is a huge market for the devices, and deep pockets to pay for huge runs. There is only one market like that in our world, and thats phones / tablets. Cypress pretty much owns the processor+programmable market for portable devices. Intel has tried unsuccessfully for years to break into that market, but they cant be cost competitive because they showed up way too late to the party and cant gain enough market share to afford economies of scale, so their solutions remain priced out of the market. Xilinx is in trouble, and no amount of AMD or not can fix that. Intel + Altera is a last ditch effort at the otherwise impossible on Intels part.
we could also grow up as a species and fulfill the desires without the needless stigma.
As long as men and women harbour different attitudes and behaviours concerning sex, there will be strife in that regard. There is wisdom in the old adage: "Women need a reason to have sex. Men need a location". As long as that serious disconnect exists, there will be a gender gap in everything.
employers are entitled to setup policies as they see fit
No, No they are not. The company has no right to control (by any coercive action) an employees behaviour outside of the workplace and unrelated to the company. By that same token, the employee has the responsibility to perform work for the company during the period for which their time has been paid for by the company. That in no way permits the undertaking of non-company sanctioned actions which have no economic or negative economic value to the company. The company could, and would be right to, take legal action against the employee.
"Just deal with it like grownups" is a cop-out philosophy of managers not wanting to do their jobs
No, its a simple matter of: The company is paying for your time right now. How you spend your own time, and with whom you spend it is your own affair, but on company time, it is not acceptable to be actively engaged in anything other than business. Acting like an adult means recognizing that your rights to become emotionally involved with any consenting adult caries with it the companies right to not suffer economic loss when you are incapable of keeping your private affairs private.
Triple the cost of electricity and then no one will want to buy an Electric Vehicle or use it for anything else.
As opposed to what? gasoline? You probably didn't notice while you were so busy trying to support your idiotic American centric beliefs , but in much of Europe, gas costs many times what it does in the US. This is not a result of economics, but a result of regulation. It is deliberate, and the German people like it that way. Whether it fits with your world view or not, there are whole countries of people who actually like clean air and unpolluted land. The German people are one such people, which is why they are *actively* switching to renewable energy. They know it costs more. This is what they have chosen to buy with their wealth. But its OK, you're American. you can drive that SUV to the local convenience store to pick up a bag of Doritos and you'll fit right in with your neighbours, and fuck everyone else. You can use the money you saved to buy a new sprinkler system to water that lush green lawn that uses more water every year than Bangladesh.
To all Americans, the world is not about money, fucktards. Money is an evil upon our world. Whether it is a necessary evil is open for debate, but it is evil none-the-less.
Yup. Pair of Pioneers going on 45 years here. They don't make 'em like they used to.
The hell they don't. I bought a single channel Bluetooth at Radioshack during the post mortem, and the sound quality out of it is every bit as good as the pair of cerwin vegas my parents bought back in the 70's. Granted it wont handle 200Watts, but the sound quality is awesome for a piece of equipment that was supposed to retail for $99.95.
I also defy anyone to find car audio speakers from the 70s that can beat a decent pair of modern kenwood for raw power or sound quality.
Even Bose speakers put out incredible sound compared with the stuff you could get back in the 70s and 80s. Speakers today are smaller, louder, higher fidelity and cheaper.
In a blind test, you wouldn't be able to tell a difference. It's placebo and you are an idiot.
There are specific circumstances where various types of amplifiers sound different. Tube amplifiers when driven beyond their ratings tend to degrade somewhat gracefully meaning they distort the sound less than other types of transistors. That having been said, if you're using your amplifier in such a way that you are noticing this actual behavior, your amp is too small and you should get a bigger one. At 100 dB, a 25kW amp is going to sound massively better than a 50W amp no matter what kind of amp it is.
because only a fool buys anything electric that's not UL listed.
Yeah, the first thing I look for when I'm out shopping is that good ol' UL logo. I don't trust any of that CE shit, and god help em if all its got is CES.
People dont have the first clue what the hell any of them are. If you were to ask five random strangers off the street, you would have a better chance of one of them knowing the capital of Uzbekistan than of knowing what one of those marks means. The likely closest you'd get would be a general description of the FCC.
LOL Microsoft might suck but I do not recall them actually having a product that could kill you and your family (and neighbors if you live in an apartment).
That might have something to do with the fact that they are largely a software company that does some hardware. Assuming you were comparing them to apple, apple is primarily a hardware company that does some software...
Slashdot Mirror
Everything about the idea that Microsoft hasn't run the numbers on this thing is stupid.
Very true, but Ms has a long history of failing to anticipate important consequences of their actions. The one I foresee with this is that with millions of extra users testing the OS in a "beta" state, they will see it at its less-than-finest. You can argue all you want to that its a beta, but first impressions count. If the beta isnt very close to fully stable, then they will leave a bad taste in peoples mouths. With early adopters, thats not really a big deal as they expect it. With people now signing up just to get the free license, you get end users who get to experience a beta environment, and they wont like it.
But this would be *gasp* a SUBSCRIPTION plan!!!
No, this would be a maintenance contract not a subscription plan.
Under a subscription plan, you stop paying, it stops working. Under a maintenance contract, it keeps working, you just stop getting updates.
In any event, MS would be ill advised to open source anything. As soon as they do, they are no longer the only source for updates, and once they are no longer the only source for updates, they will no longer be the *best* source for updates, since it is likely that a young upstart company with some intelligence behind it is going to be able to run rings around MS. The only advantage MS has is exclusive access to the source code. If they give that up, its sayonara sucker.
If this had been done with Windows 8, would it have been successful?
This would not have helped windows 8.
People only get an OS update for three reasons
New hardware comes with it. Windows 8 (can to a lesser extent Microsoft itself) had such a bad reputation that people would avoid new hardware purchases to avoid windows 8. Corporate customers refused to retrain their workforce, so windows 8 was out of the question. Had windows 7 not been an option, One of the Linux variants might have had a real shot...
Microsoft fanbois buy the new OS (or join the beta testing programs) to stay abreast of the latest and greatest. This category includes (whether they like it or not) tech journalists.
Some people need a new version of the OS because the old one did not do something they felt they needed. Hard core gamers tend to fall into this category which is why the directX program was so vital to Microsoft for the last 15+ years.
Microsoft is finding it harder and harder to generate new *must have* features with each new version of windows. That is why Windows XP enjoyed such a long run. Based on features alone, there would be no compelling reason to move to windows 8. This keeps Microsoft continually off balance. They have to continue creating new OS's so they don't get left behind, which costs a great deal of money, and runs the risk of breaking legacy programs. When they do, they need to convince people to buy the new OS (which most people really don't want to do). Microsoft can force the issue by discontinuing support for old versions (like XP), but each forced transition causes some percentage of windows customers to migrate away from windows. Microsoft is dying by inches, but like most things tech, once the avalanche lets go, the transition will be fast, powerful and will leave companies dying 15' under. People give Balmer a lot of shit, but he managed to avoid this fate for Microsoft, so all other things aside, he managed to avoid making any fatal mistakes which is more than can be said of many other tech companies.
I wonder if his own propaganda department is trying to be insubordinate by making claims that are so fantastic and provably false. A claim like this is likely to be widely discredited within N. Korea, as everyone who dies of one of these diseases is proof against the claims. His PR people have to know that, so why make the claim in the first place? My suspicion is that they actually want The claims to be proven false, and for Kim Jong to be discredited. Active insubordination without having done anything they can, or will, be executed for.
As an MM, I am not sure I would really want to work for someone who finds the pictures of me holding a tray of shots or chilling with my cross-dressing friends offensive.
Like most reasonably progressive people, your employer doesn't really care one way or another about anything you do on your own time except under a narrow set of circumstances where it negatively affects the company. The point of view from which they approach the problem is: What happens if someone from the general public finds these pictures and the association with our company is made. Capable business people are risk averse. If they have two candidates that are more or less equal in all other respects, the one that brings baggage like this will be rejected out of hand because they pose a higher risk. As such, any marginally competent HR department will work to weed out these kinds of risks as an early elimination criteria for weeding out resumes. For them its a matter of personal risk. If they let something like that through and the hiring manager finds out, there will be some fall out for the HR manager. Except in a CYA sort of way, no one actually cares one way or another about the individual, the only thing they care about is the impact on the company (leading to impact on their own careers).
Your bank covers any and all malicious charges with a single call, barely any questions asked.
Only for credit transactions. For Checking and savings accounts you're basically screwed.
The average starting salary for CS graduates in 2014 is $60,000.
Those average starting salary statistics are quite misleading. Those entry level tech jobs are largely only available in the tech northeast, Atlanta and silicon valley. In those places, an apartment alone will cost you $24,000 / year in rent. You will have to live an hour from where you work. The overall average salary in those places is 2x-3x the national average. That $60k isnt so spectacular when you look at it that way.
Where I live is far more representative of the country as a whole. There are very few tech jobs here at all in spite of this being called "tech valley". the last entry level person we hired was for a technician job: $29k (He is massively overqualified, and we expect he will leave when he eventually finds something better). Experienced engineers here make less than those starting salaries you listed because this isn't California and the cost of living isn't nearly so high, but there are nowhere near as many entry level positions outside of the coastal areas. Put another way, the cost of living adjusted starting salaries are around $35k to $40k. This is the number that would accurately compare with the national family income average of $20k.
And this is what the OP and the people you replied to are talking about, public-facing technical support queues, not internal helpdesks. The difference in call volume is enormous when comparing for example, Microsoft's internal helpdesk calls versus Comcast public facing customer service and technical support, and the need for a group of unskilled checklist readers is very real to keep support times manageable.
Just because it is prevailing wisdom doesn't mean its right. Unlike most of my contemporaries, I understand both sides of the IT / operations interaction. I can tell you that as a general rule, IT doesn't get it. There are a few exceptions, but most customer facing IT is about reducing cost, when they should be concentrating on minimizing the cost to customer satisfaction ratio. Improving customer satisfaction is more valuable to companies than reducing help desk cost. Just because the majority of todays companies don't understand that doesn't make it not true. The first priority of my IT departments is customer service. It barely edges out product improvement. Cost isn't even on the top 5. If your product is so crappy that you are spending enough on help desk to affect your margins, then you really need to concentrate on product improvement.
As a side note, why in the hell would you have help desk employees doing billings job of verifying accounts?
To continue the example that the original poster used, Having a tier 2 guy answer a call relating to something "dumb", the first thing to do is verify the unit is on ( all of 5 seconds of time). Second: Is the unit connected to the central office? (another 5 seconds of time). Having a tier 2 answer the phone for something simple may cost twice as much, but customer (even the ignorant ones) know when they are talking to tier one, and they don't like it. Even if it can ultimately fix their problem less expensively than having tier 2s answering the phones, they feel like 2nd class citizens when a tier 1 can fix their problem. No one likes feeling like an idiot, even if they are.
TL:DR, any company that feels that having unskilled people answering a phone and working from a script to solve customer problems is missing the entire customer service concept. They are so centered on cutting costs that they havent realized that having tier 2 answering all calls, and tasking them with fixing root causes will result in better customer service, and will cut costs in the long run by reducing help desk calls in the first place.
As an example, we recently had a password issue where users were required to change passwords every 90 days. It was a dumb idea, and I'm not entirely sure why I agreed to it in the first place, but my front line techs tell me that it is not working. People are choosing lousy passwords and forgetting them anyways. One of my better project managers suggesting switching to an authenticated computer system whereby a user could indicate that a computer was trusted, and thereby bypass the login system. We decided to go with a partial measure, and allow the user first level access, but no change authority without the need to enter credentials, but only when accessing from a known location that the user had indicated was trustworthy. Many of our users access the system in a read only fashion. This change reduced our help desk calls by 10%, and the pen testing guys said it had no effect on the security of the system. In part because users no longer had to change passwords every 90 days, and as such didn't pick such dumb passwords.
I am an IT professional, and even I make simple mistakes sometimes. There is a reason rubber-duck debugging is a thing. Tier 1 is a rubber duck. Deal with it, you self-important asshole.
I met a jackass like you once. I told my CIO to do a little house cleaning because if I ever ran into him or another like him it was the CIOs ass I would put on the street. IT is a cost center. If they cost me a little more than they need to, nobodys perfect, If they cost me my time, I get very unhappy. If they cost me customers, thats unforgivable.
My time, my managers time, and especially operations time is vastly more important than your time. If that weren't true, I would fix problems myself, or hire for operations positions that could do so. The whole point of having an IT department is so that I can save money by *not* having my operators and managers dealing with IT related problems. When they have to spend their time anyway on the phone with some dumb shit like you, then what benefit am I getting by having two peoples time spent on a simple problem?
OTOH if one of my managers is so incompetent to be repeatedly calling the help desk for dumb ass tier 1 shit, then I have to wonder why I employ them at all. I expect my managers to be at least functionally literate with a computer. If by some chance they aren't, they better have one hell of a talent for something else that I need a lot of...
The entire point of employees is to get the job done as quickly, effectively and cheaply as possible. When a tier 1 tech goes through a dumb ass script without showing the least ability to trouble shoot on their own, then they are costing me more than they save. I could just hand the damn script out to all of the manager, have them read it themselves, and fire the whole damn IT department. You dont have a fucking clue how business actually works do you?
It's very rare to get a caller who knows what they're talking about - so rare, that it's much more time efficient to ignore every caller's suggestions. Sorry, for the insult. Newbie techs who listen to their callers usually run down the wrong bunny trail and waste a lot of time and money.
From the perspective of a company wishing to save money on tech support, wasting customers time with tier 1 is absolutely the dumbest thing to do. The process should instead be geared towards an overall reduction in tier 1 calls. These calls are a waste of everyones time. First, examine your call center statistics. What are you getting the most calls about. Look hard and long for ways to modify your product to eliminate these calls. If you're company is getting 100 of these calls a week, its worth paying for an entire engineers salary for a year to fix just that one issue in the new designs. Properly done, the number of customer calls to the help desk will decrease over time saving a great deal of money. There are intangible benefits as well, such as increased customer satisfaction (A customer who never has to call the help desk in the first place is going to be far more satisfied than one who calls, no matter how well the help desk deals with the problem). This translates into free advertising in the form of satisfied customer, and a reduction in unsatisfied customers telling people your company is shite.
The problem with having an auto-escalation path is that it allows problems that never should have escalated to get escalated. Yes, you may have a fairly specific problem that requires a T3 tech, but the T1 doesn't know that, and the majority of [Company]'s customers don't know that either, but every single other customer think's their issue requires a T3 tech. The scripts and the tree exist to keep some order and structure going. Think about it this way - suppose you were a business customer who had a T3 question - do you really want your call being queued up behind someone who insists that Internet Explorer is the only way to get to their email? When I managed a first response desk, we had people calling in for the Sysadmin, Enterprise Manager, DBAs, Senior Devs, pretty much every upper-level employee, insisting that "Only they can solve this". Most of the time it turned out to be basic desktop troubleshooting or password resets or just basic "how to" questions.
All of this is predicated on two things. First, that the value of tier 2+ time - tier 1 time is greater than the value of the time wasted by having these stupid trees in the first place. Second, There is no easy way to determine whether or not a problem is tier 2+ or not.
In my experience, when it comes to corporate intra-functions, the first precondition is almost never true. Typically, they will keep a division manager or operations manager waiting while a minimum wage flunky follows a script to avoid wasting some else’s time who makes less than the manager whos time they are wasting. Maybe ten+ years ago the managers would call with dumb ass crap and the company could save a little money by having tier 1 support running interference. Thats not true any more. These days, you can provide an automated way to reset passwords and other dumb crap, and people will use that before calling the help desk. As for the second item, the advent of big data allows you to track things like average escalation per user, so that if a person is almost always escalated when they call the help desk, offer them the magic menu shortcut. Then, they can decide if they need 2+ or not, and everyone saves a little time and money.
For companies, the costs of tier 1 support are hidden. Badly done support (wasting peoples time with tier 1 support when they need teir 2+) caries with it the hidden cost of loosing customers. There is no good way to track this metric, so companies don't understand that not escalating quickly when appropriate costs the company money.
Many company IT departments are still operating like its the 1950's. We are entering an age when kids have grown up with technology, and don't make half the dumb mistakes their elders did. I have worked with a number of IT departments, some good, some bad. The good ones have just the kind of shortcut to tier2+ that we have been talking about. The bad ones don't. Some of the worst outsourced one or more of the tiers to save money, and ended loosing money and not even knowing that they were.
Systemd doesn’t throw away stdout or stderr. If you have a case where you believe there is a bug, and those streams are being lost, submit the bug report. You might have found a legitimate bug. You might not. A lot of logging changed with Systemd, and some things are less than obvious. This is nothing intrinsic to Systemd, its just different from what you're used to. Drop any newbie into CentOS, and they would have just as much trouble finding the logs...
It doesn't save stderr messages to the journal.
It most certainly does.
There have been several bugs that have cropped up from time to time relating to logging, but they get fixed as soon as they are found. The far more common problem is that by default the logging now goes through journald, and rather than rtfm, people often seem inclined to claim its broken rather than seek out the answers. You can find a good description for how to find the logs here
Poettering instead has his minions make personal attacks
Here is a sample bug report relating to the stderr/stdout problem I see nothing by the way of personal attacks. In fact all I see are genuine interest in a bug, and a quick bug fix being pushed upstream. In fact, the only personal attacks I have seen on anyones part have come from anti-sysetmd people who are clearly not involved in any way in the decision making process, nor the systemd code maintenance process.
He does not understand UNIX. stderr output should never be ignored, much less deleted
Here is a link to a bug report dealing with the stdout / stderr problem. If you read through it, you will find that the systemd folks are very responsive, and fully agree that the bug existed and quickly had a fix.
I'm sorry that you lost customers relating to systemd, but if they switched to systemd, and the only failures they had were your code, then I have to ask why that is. If they had other failures in the conversion, and still insisted that you were the problem (enough to drop you as a service provider), then I would worry that there was some other agenda going on.
If, on the other hand, you were the one who switched to systemd, and managed to have unstable code make it to a client... Thats a whole other ball game.
that could open up a lot of possibilities to the more adventurous enthusiasts/hobbyists/developers.
Those doors are already open. What you want is a Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone Black, or one of the variants. If you need something with some real programmable logic, get a Cypress PSOC. The top of the line PSOC eval board is $100. The development environment is free for all of the above solutions. The PSOCs even come with some amount of programmable analog.
Waiting for an x86 chip with built in FPGA is a pipe dream, and a stupid one at that. Anything they made would be hideously expensive because it would be low volume (They wouldn’t waste their time putting it into their high volume chips, because the Dells, HPs, etc... of the world wouldn't pay the premium for something that doesn’t improve their bottom line). If you really want compute power and an FPGA, get a Pi2 and an FPGA daughter board. Together they will cost you less than anything Intel will ever be able to build. The only way you can get processor+FPGA to be cost effective is if there is a huge market for the devices, and deep pockets to pay for huge runs. There is only one market like that in our world, and thats phones / tablets. Cypress pretty much owns the processor+programmable market for portable devices. Intel has tried unsuccessfully for years to break into that market, but they cant be cost competitive because they showed up way too late to the party and cant gain enough market share to afford economies of scale, so their solutions remain priced out of the market. Xilinx is in trouble, and no amount of AMD or not can fix that. Intel + Altera is a last ditch effort at the otherwise impossible on Intels part.
we could also grow up as a species and fulfill the desires without the needless stigma.
As long as men and women harbour different attitudes and behaviours concerning sex, there will be strife in that regard. There is wisdom in the old adage: "Women need a reason to have sex. Men need a location". As long as that serious disconnect exists, there will be a gender gap in everything.
employers are entitled to setup policies as they see fit
No, No they are not. The company has no right to control (by any coercive action) an employees behaviour outside of the workplace and unrelated to the company. By that same token, the employee has the responsibility to perform work for the company during the period for which their time has been paid for by the company. That in no way permits the undertaking of non-company sanctioned actions which have no economic or negative economic value to the company. The company could, and would be right to, take legal action against the employee.
"Just deal with it like grownups" is a cop-out philosophy of managers not wanting to do their jobs
No, its a simple matter of: The company is paying for your time right now. How you spend your own time, and with whom you spend it is your own affair, but on company time, it is not acceptable to be actively engaged in anything other than business. Acting like an adult means recognizing that your rights to become emotionally involved with any consenting adult caries with it the companies right to not suffer economic loss when you are incapable of keeping your private affairs private.
Triple the cost of electricity and then no one will want to buy an Electric Vehicle or use it for anything else.
As opposed to what? gasoline? You probably didn't notice while you were so busy trying to support your idiotic American centric beliefs , but in much of Europe, gas costs many times what it does in the US. This is not a result of economics, but a result of regulation. It is deliberate, and the German people like it that way. Whether it fits with your world view or not, there are whole countries of people who actually like clean air and unpolluted land. The German people are one such people, which is why they are *actively* switching to renewable energy. They know it costs more. This is what they have chosen to buy with their wealth. But its OK, you're American. you can drive that SUV to the local convenience store to pick up a bag of Doritos and you'll fit right in with your neighbours, and fuck everyone else. You can use the money you saved to buy a new sprinkler system to water that lush green lawn that uses more water every year than Bangladesh.
To all Americans, the world is not about money, fucktards. Money is an evil upon our world. Whether it is a necessary evil is open for debate, but it is evil none-the-less.
Ultimately, we bought the lie; question is, how do we avoid buying into a new one?
Too late...
Yup. Pair of Pioneers going on 45 years here. They don't make 'em like they used to.
The hell they don't. I bought a single channel Bluetooth at Radioshack during the post mortem, and the sound quality out of it is every bit as good as the pair of cerwin vegas my parents bought back in the 70's. Granted it wont handle 200Watts, but the sound quality is awesome for a piece of equipment that was supposed to retail for $99.95.
I also defy anyone to find car audio speakers from the 70s that can beat a decent pair of modern kenwood for raw power or sound quality.
Even Bose speakers put out incredible sound compared with the stuff you could get back in the 70s and 80s. Speakers today are smaller, louder, higher fidelity and cheaper.
In a blind test, you wouldn't be able to tell a difference. It's placebo and you are an idiot.
There are specific circumstances where various types of amplifiers sound different. Tube amplifiers when driven beyond their ratings tend to degrade somewhat gracefully meaning they distort the sound less than other types of transistors. That having been said, if you're using your amplifier in such a way that you are noticing this actual behavior, your amp is too small and you should get a bigger one. At 100 dB, a 25kW amp is going to sound massively better than a 50W amp no matter what kind of amp it is.
because only a fool buys anything electric that's not UL listed.
Yeah, the first thing I look for when I'm out shopping is that good ol' UL logo. I don't trust any of that CE shit, and god help em if all its got is CES.
People dont have the first clue what the hell any of them are. If you were to ask five random strangers off the street, you would have a better chance of one of them knowing the capital of Uzbekistan than of knowing what one of those marks means. The likely closest you'd get would be a general description of the FCC.
LOL Microsoft might suck but I do not recall them actually having a product that could kill you and your family (and neighbors if you live in an apartment).
That might have something to do with the fact that they are largely a software company that does some hardware. Assuming you were comparing them to apple, apple is primarily a hardware company that does some software...