I worked at a call center in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada. Let me tell you that people like you made my day working there. The way it worked is that as long as the customer kept giving you excuses why they can't buy the product you had to keep giving them reasons around it. Once the customer repeats an objection you can then just end the call.
I've had calls like yours and the whole time I sat there with a grin on my face trying to come up with ways around your insane compaints. These calls were so much fun and most people there would trade these stories with each other and laugh. The rest of the time your job is mind numbing and repeditive.
Added to this I would like to say that annoying telemarkers may seem fun but these people are almost always in a bind and do not want to work there either. Making a single mother's life hell when she's resorted to working for a call center because she can not find anything else is not going to solve the problem.
From all the online gaming I have played I can say one thing. I.. HATE.. cheaters absolutly nothing ruins a game more then having a couple people with a patch here or there that lets them dominate. Having see-though-walls that is one of the better cheats if you play CS (not as much in UT and quake but whatever). In CS you can shoot though walls.. I know of someone that had beta drivers a while back that let him see though walls and he completly dominated because of it.
I know that you cannot get rid of cheating.. there will allways be cheating.. but that doesn't mean that somehow making it more easy is fine. If everyone has a option to see though walls in the normal setup then more people are going to use it. The more people are cheating the more regular people hate it.. the more people that are GOOD get fingered as cheaters. I have shot people though walls and doors and had people accuse me of cheating. I wasn't. I just try for it when I see someone duck behind a obstacle and I get a good frag once in a while.
With online games everything possible should be done to make cheating hard. Its not about making cheating impossible, its about making it the exception when playing. If there are good reasons to have see though walls enabled at least have it so EVERYONE can see who has it enabled.. there are hacks and cheats of games that make it fun but that is ONLY when everyone knows what is going on.
While I am a canadian I do take alot of intrest in the US elections, since the US hardly affects just its own people. This questions will be in 2 parts.. one for the major 2 candiadates (in the off chance that they answer) and then the others that arn't so lucky to get massive amounts of air time (pity)
Gore & Bush: Do you really believe that the needs of your people are served with only a 2 party system where you just have to be better then one other person to get elected? Especially considering that so few people come out and vote on election day?
Other Candidates: I am assuming that you don't like how the political system is set up now.. how would you like to see it set up?
The last I heard when AMD and Intel were demoing their newest Ghz chips is that AMD was going to beat intel to the punch again and have a Athlon out much before Intel had their PIII. Sure enough:
Intel will release Pentium IIIs running at 1 GHz or faster by the second half of the year as well as the next-generation Willamette chips running at the same speed, Yu said. Quote here
Now isn't the second half of the year starting around July, August? Intel hasn't been doing well meeting its deadlines much less breaking them by months. I seem to remeber something simmiliar happening when both AMD and Intel were comming out with 600Mhz processors, AMD demoed theirs and then Intel came out a close second with their chip that, while it did run at 600Mhz did it using a little more voltage the usual and didn't seem to be as stable and their regular batch of PIIIs.
Remembering my comments about failures of PIII 600 CPUs, actually also reported by several other publications in Germany and the UK, should give you an idea how hard it was to run all the benchmarks with an even overclocked PIII 650. Quote here
It will be interesting to see tests on these 2 new processors to see how good they actually are, but this just seems to be a release by Intel to show that they arn't lagging AMD even though they really could be if AMD can produce good 1Ghz chips in mass when Intel is suck with declaring that there ARE 1Ghz PIIIs but if you actually wanted to find one it would be as easy as finding a Athlon and motherboard when they were`released'.
Its not that there is no standard to java, there is. All that this is saying (I think) is that they won't give up copywrites to Java just to have a organisation label them as a standard. This is different from them actually being a standard or not and I think that Sun controling Java is a safe bet that they will stick to a Java standard since one of the only things that Java has going for it is that is it cross-platform. If you have ever programmed in java you will know that it is not a very FAST language. In fact it is one of the slowest that I have seen. The reason that Java is popular is that you can write the code once and then you can run it on any platform (Which has a Java VM. but that is a different post:) )
You see alot of fuss about online shopping these days and well. it is probably the new wave of the future but I don't agree with most of the reports that it will totally replace nomal shopping.
There are a couple of sites where you can buy cars online, not find a deal on cars but BUY one. I can't imagine a worse thing to buy on the net, there is so much that you have to see and consider when getting a new car, especially used. Amazon.com CDnow.com have the idea, the kind of product that you can buy over the net is somthing that can be completely described in a couple words or less. A book is a book and a CD is a CD and you know what you are getting when you order it online but ordering cloths? Does it fit? even if you have your measurments that doesn't guarrentee that it will fit WELL. In any mall clothes stores are the majority.
As a general rule the online things that really work selling online are things like books and CDs wich are all identical. It also has to be somthing that the person doesn't need in a hurry. Plus the fact that returning somthing to a online store and getting something else is a much bigger deal with shipping and such then anything that is bought localy
"...but SETI is not about processing data as quickly as possible...
Absolutely, positively false.
If that were the case, then SETI@home would simply do all the computations on their own machines, and not ask for help from thousands of systems distributed all over the world. "
Ehh.. no. The only thing that matters in SETI is getting the packets processed with the highest probability that all the packets are secure as possible. Why don't they process them all on their machines? Because if they did it that way it would take the next 10 of so years, That is the POINT of a distributed computing project.
No matter what having the client open source makes it more likely to get faked positive or negaitve results. If they open sourced the client everyone could process 2x 3x more packets but the project would be useless as a whole.
OH PLEASE. In all the articles I have ever read that were trying to bring up a good point that article is way down on my list. The author of it is basicly pissed because they gave the client to Intel to optimise for SSE and not to them to optimise for 3Dnow! I don't blame them. Intel would have agreed to not let their source out and didn't, they would have more reason to trust them since its a major company that can inforce something like that and would never want to let it leek out and get all the bad press. That is not the same as some small time group that wants the source just given to them and at most can give their promise that they won't send it out.
The author also doesn't want to just stick to the points. He has many many statments that are just pushing the point. Complaining about lost CPU cycles and its effect on the enviroment and such.
"They make their dedicated volunteers use massive amount of electricity to run their machines at full throttle while this goes on - it is not unjustified to say that SETI@Home may make a measurable impact on the CO2 buildup in the atmosphere that way. Charming."
All in all this is a article by a guy who didn't get the source he shouldn't have and flamed SETI without even doing so much as reading the FAQ where they explain most of his arguments.
If people would read the FAQ on SETI@HOME it tells why they are NOT open sourcing it. If the client is open source then the data that is sent back to the servers can be faked, and even if it can be faked that calls the whole study into question since anyone could send back a bad packet to get points (and it would probably happen) and they would have no way of knowing.
For another thing there is no advantage to open sourcing the client since last I heard they had more people then they need to process the data and the bottleneck is from them receiving data from the telescope and not data back from the users.
"Neil Kirton, a former colleague of Professor Leech, told the New Zealand Herald that the experiments involved laying a pattern of explosives underwater to create a tidal wave"
It wasn't a nuke but conventional bombs that they were using to make the title wave. Although it says in the article that they were going to send him to the Bikini islands to watch the nuclear tests to see if it was praticle to their wave bomb.
This does't seem very suprising to me, alot of weapons and ideas on how to make mass destruction of an enemy that were far sillier then this came out of WW2 and the Cold War. Doesn't even seem that stupid, causing a small one could wipe out a island or clear a beachead.. somthing that cost many many lives when fighting for islands around Japan.
"and public education shouldn't exist (you can't give children a moral education when everyone has to pay for it, since people can't agree on what's moral and if you don't give children a moral education, you get what we've gotten"
What? please explain the morality questions that arrise from 1+1=2. If there is no public education then there is only private. If there is only private education then only the rich get a education, if you can't afford school then you don't get a education and its would be very hard to get any kind of job. I am not saying that our public education is doing a good job.. but it should not be droped.. in fact, it would be better if it was longer, more strict and harder. The more educated everyone is the better.
Yes, it does seem that every week (day) a new story comes out where MS is found in something like this. The problem is.. beside all of us that come to this site at least once every day and read everthing.. who knows about it? Even when every Hotmail account was open I found that the vast vast majority of people didn't know about it, and these are the same people that don't know why people are making such a big deal about Microsoft and the DOJ.
The usual sources this news come in to the mass audience is the small section in the local news where they will put a technology story or two but I guarrentee that this story won't make it to most news programs. Ideas?
Slashdot Mirror
I worked at a call center in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada. Let me tell you that people like you made my day working there. The way it worked is that as long as the customer kept giving you excuses why they can't buy the product you had to keep giving them reasons around it. Once the customer repeats an objection you can then just end the call.
I've had calls like yours and the whole time I sat there with a grin on my face trying to come up with ways around your insane compaints. These calls were so much fun and most people there would trade these stories with each other and laugh. The rest of the time your job is mind numbing and repeditive.
Added to this I would like to say that annoying telemarkers may seem fun but these people are almost always in a bind and do not want to work there either. Making a single mother's life hell when she's resorted to working for a call center because she can not find anything else is not going to solve the problem.
I know that you cannot get rid of cheating.. there will allways be cheating.. but that doesn't mean that somehow making it more easy is fine. If everyone has a option to see though walls in the normal setup then more people are going to use it. The more people are cheating the more regular people hate it.. the more people that are GOOD get fingered as cheaters. I have shot people though walls and doors and had people accuse me of cheating. I wasn't. I just try for it when I see someone duck behind a obstacle and I get a good frag once in a while.
With online games everything possible should be done to make cheating hard. Its not about making cheating impossible, its about making it the exception when playing. If there are good reasons to have see though walls enabled at least have it so EVERYONE can see who has it enabled.. there are hacks and cheats of games that make it fun but that is ONLY when everyone knows what is going on.
Gore & Bush:
Do you really believe that the needs of your people are served with only a 2 party system where you just have to be better then one other person to get elected? Especially considering that so few people come out and vote on election day?
Other Candidates:
I am assuming that you don't like how the political system is set up now.. how would you like to see it set up?
Intel will release Pentium IIIs running at 1 GHz or faster by the second half of the year as well as the next-generation Willamette chips running at the same speed, Yu said. Quote here
Now isn't the second half of the year starting around July, August? Intel hasn't been doing well meeting its deadlines much less breaking them by months. I seem to remeber something simmiliar happening when both AMD and Intel were comming out with 600Mhz processors, AMD demoed theirs and then Intel came out a close second with their chip that, while it did run at 600Mhz did it using a little more voltage the usual and didn't seem to be as stable and their regular batch of PIIIs.
Remembering my comments about failures of PIII 600 CPUs, actually also reported by several other publications in Germany and the UK, should give you an idea how hard it was to run all the benchmarks with an even overclocked PIII 650. Quote here
It will be interesting to see tests on these 2 new processors to see how good they actually are, but this just seems to be a release by Intel to show that they arn't lagging AMD even though they really could be if AMD can produce good 1Ghz chips in mass when Intel is suck with declaring that there ARE 1Ghz PIIIs but if you actually wanted to find one it would be as easy as finding a Athlon and motherboard when they were`released'.
Its not that there is no standard to java, there is. All that this is saying (I think) is that they won't give up copywrites to Java just to have a organisation label them as a standard. This is different from them actually being a standard or not and I think that Sun controling Java is a safe bet that they will stick to a Java standard since one of the only things that Java has going for it is that is it cross-platform. If you have ever programmed in java you will know that it is not a very FAST language. In fact it is one of the slowest that I have seen. The reason that Java is popular is that you can write the code once and then you can run it on any platform (Which has a Java VM. but that is a different post :) )
There are a couple of sites where you can buy cars online, not find a deal on cars but BUY one. I can't imagine a worse thing to buy on the net, there is so much that you have to see and consider when getting a new car, especially used. Amazon.com CDnow.com have the idea, the kind of product that you can buy over the net is somthing that can be completely described in a couple words or less. A book is a book and a CD is a CD and you know what you are getting when you order it online but ordering cloths? Does it fit? even if you have your measurments that doesn't guarrentee that it will fit WELL. In any mall clothes stores are the majority.
As a general rule the online things that really work selling online are things like books and CDs wich are all identical. It also has to be somthing that the person doesn't need in a hurry. Plus the fact that returning somthing to a online store and getting something else is a much bigger deal with shipping and such then anything that is bought localy
Absolutely, positively false.
If that were the case, then SETI@home would simply do all the computations on their own machines, and not ask
for help from thousands of systems distributed all over the world. "
Ehh.. no. The only thing that matters in SETI is getting the packets processed with the highest probability that all the packets are secure as possible. Why don't they process them all on their machines? Because if they did it that way it would take the next 10 of so years, That is the POINT of a distributed computing project.
No matter what having the client open source makes it more likely to get faked positive or negaitve results. If they open sourced the client everyone could process 2x 3x more packets but the project would be useless as a whole.
You didn't read the article. Its NOT AMD its a small group that optimizes things for 3Dnow!
The author also doesn't want to just stick to the points. He has many many statments that are just pushing the point. Complaining about lost CPU cycles and its effect on the enviroment and such.
"They make their dedicated volunteers use massive amount of
electricity to run their machines at full throttle while this goes on - it
is not unjustified to say that SETI@Home may make a measurable
impact on the CO2 buildup in the atmosphere that way. Charming."
All in all this is a article by a guy who didn't get the source he shouldn't have and flamed SETI without even doing so much as reading the FAQ where they explain most of his arguments.
For another thing there is no advantage to
open sourcing the client since last I heard they had more people then they need to process the data and the bottleneck is from them receiving data from the telescope and not data back from the users.
It wasn't a nuke but conventional bombs that they were using to make the title wave. Although it says in the article that they were going to send him to the Bikini islands to watch the nuclear tests to see if it was praticle to their wave bomb.
This does't seem very suprising to me, alot of weapons and ideas on how to make mass destruction of an enemy that were far sillier then this came out of WW2 and the Cold War. Doesn't even seem that stupid, causing a small one could wipe out a island or clear a beachead.. somthing that cost many many lives when fighting for islands around Japan.
"and public education shouldn't exist (you can't give children a moral education when everyone has to pay for it, since people can't agree on what's moral and if you don't give children a moral education, you get what we've gotten"
What? please explain the morality questions that arrise from 1+1=2. If there is no public education then there is only private. If there is only private education then only the rich get a education, if you can't afford school then you don't get a education and its would be very hard to get any kind of job. I am not saying that our public education is doing a good job.. but it should not be droped.. in fact, it would be better if it was longer, more strict and harder. The more educated everyone is the better.
They probably do. I know you can get some beatifull posters of images like this from NASA. unfortunately they are hard to find.
The usual sources this news come in to the mass audience is the small section in the local news where they will put a technology story or two but I guarrentee that this story won't make it to most news programs. Ideas?