That is a culture related statement. Frex, I do believe in working extra hours to help the employer out, but I also believe in direct compensation for that (either mo' money, or more holiday days). I don't believe my employer has any say whatsoever over me in my own time, while some people do. These things are not black and white.
My personal view, though: As long as you don't cost too much detouring, and performing the tasks you're assigned, who cares? On the other hand, if detouring does cause you to neglect your job, or costs the company a significant amount, you deserve everything you get.
Monitoring should be done. It's a good thing. But some understanding from the boss' end should be forthcoming, if 'transgressions' are kept within limits.
This is home user support. It's an ISP. One of the main criterias for being hired is having basic computer knowledge, and the teamleaders on the floor have final say over whether someone gets hired. One applicant, upon being asked "Do you know what a motherboard is?" responded "Well, I'm not much of a hardware person, more software". He promptly received a burnt out motherboard one of the teamleaders had lying about and was told to study it. He wasn't hired.
On a more sexist note: Where many callcenters have about a 50/50 male/female ratio, it being a callcenter and women doing well in callcenters, ours has a 95-99 percent male population. Which is also the ratio at CompSci studies, and "computer clubs" I used to go to as a kid. Which probably helps the technological awareness of the employees.
Second line support is given to those with deeper knowledge of both technical matters and procedural matters, as opposed to proto-managers. Also, there are no call-time-limits (although service levels do have to be maintained, 95% of calls have to be answered at the least), even if that means taking an hour for a tough problem. One long call is better than 15 short calls by the same customer.
So in short: An ISP helpdesk that favors customer satisfaction, technical savvy, has people between managers and employees (teamleaders) that know what they're doing, and that actually performs its job well.
I don't know if I want to feel sorry for a guy that sells and develops spam software. I guess there are legitimate uses for Mailing Lists, but just because there are a few people using it legitimitely (sp?)... doesn't mean it's not used to increase spam.
"Legitimately"
What's your stance on, say, modchips for gaming consoles? Just because there are legitimate uses for it, doesn't mean they won't be used to increase copyright infringement.
Except that I like modchips. For modchips as well as this software, I'd formualate it as "Just because it may be used illegally, doesn't mean it there aren't legitimate uses for it."
That's kindof the point. My company outsourced techsupport to Fujitsu Services Netherlands (which also does Symantec Europe support). I work at techsupport, and me and a few (+/- 15) others were relegated to dealing with tougher calls that Fujitsu couldn't handle, making appointments with customers and some quality control.
Long story short: It was a disaster. Customer satisfaction went through the floor, waiting times skyrocketed, answers were frequently poor (not entirely the *fault* of Fujitsu, but certainly their responsibility) and the small crew at the company itself was overworked. The multimillion euro contract was cut short, and the helpdesk is now back at the company with about 180-200 decently- to well-trained employees in all (many, many part-timers), waiting times are reduced to 2-4 minutes on busy days (taking about 2000-2500 or more calls in a 14h day).
The day you can get that kind of quality from a call-center on the other side of the planet, *then* you can talk about outsourcing. Until then, if you want it done right, do it yourself.
If the 'coupon cards' are things you scan to take advantage of any running promotions, then I prefer the way the Dutch supermarket Albert Heijn does it. When I asked about the card, they asked me if I would want it personalized or anonymous. I said anonymous. She drew a little X at the bottom of the long form, and gave me a card.
The idea being that they can still track what I buy, without them knowing my personal information, I suppose, and I'm okay with that.
The beneficial case of competition involves competition through excellence, which is a constructive way of dealing with a threat.
*This* kind of competition -- buying out your opponents so that you don't *have* to excel anymore -- is destructive , and it is not in the best interests of consumers.
If I were a shareholder, I'd be pissed if their motto wasn't "Carpe Jugulum".
However, as a consumer, I preferred the former over the latter. Alas, those days are apparently over.
" All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2004 OSTG."
Seems pretty clear to me that Slashdot absolves itself of responsibility, especially with them not deleting comments, and letting the community moderate posts (specifically mentioned in the 'comments might be moderated' caveats are Illegal comments).
Warez boards make use of 'public FTPs', or directories with write access. Sometimes this write access is acquired through use of bugs or exploits. Then you upload your crap to the public FTP, post the address for people to use, and people will snag it for as long as it lasts.
There's a self-deterioration effect, though, since if *you* can write stuff there, other people can write stuff there too, and they can delete stuff, which is a lot quicker than uploading it.
That's kindof the point of that game, I think, if it has a real-cash economy. It's a real-world-simulator in a way. Intelligence and talent, both physical and mental, is how you get ahead in the *real* world, as well having a large pocketbook.
The 'game' is like real life, in that you need to invest effort and money to make money. The less money you have, the more effort you have to invest. But in the game, once you're done playing after either failing or succeeding, you can just quit it or restart it, and noone will care. You don't have in-game lives to pay for, so failure isn't that much of a problem. In real life, this is more complex.
This is Slashdot. How can you expect me to read your post?
Okay, okay, sorry for not paying attention. The fact that I still got moderated up proves that I'm not the only one, though, and as such the tip bore repeating.
By the way, have you tried to tape a piece of paper to the pad, to increase the traction?
All though Text two speach is a grape gnu technology it is not red E for the main stream yet.
Now I see the master plan. Rather than improving speech-to-text technologies, the focus is on destroying basic literacy. Apart from the word 'grape', I parsed that sentence without even having to mentally translate it.
Based on current experience, I'd say speech-to-text is going to be a growing market:-(
Please note that that cable provider is an exceedingly poor one.
While load-balancing is (more) necessary with cable than with DSL, it is certainly possible to have top DSL speeds available throughout your network, 24/7.
The price is giving up a bit of 'instant service', which doesn't serve the customers as much as it pleases them. Another ISP, upon learning that the cable modem can't broadcast strongly enough to get through to make a connection, changes the upper transmit limit on the modem. Customer online, and it'll likely work forever. My own ISP sends a mechanic 'round to fix the cable network so that the pre-chosen limits are actually sufficient.
It's an attitude that's important; forgo the quick fix and easy browniepoints, and do the more expensive work that saves you in the long term.
New GC games: $40-$50, normally.
New PS2 games: $40-$50, normally
New Xbox games: $40-$50, normally
I'm sorry, which bizarro world do you live in where something that sells for the exact same price is "usually $5 more expensive" than its counterparts?
Exactly. They are, in fact, about $40-$50 more expensive than its counterparts.
The point of HL2's story isn't the story that is told by your actions. That rarely works well; either it's a crappy game with a great story, or a great game with a crappy story.
The thing Half-life and HL2 do, is provide great *backstory*. The world makes sense in its universe, and is built solidly. Weapons from characters, corpses and weapon-storage facilities, instead of strewn all over the place. Bases that actually look defensible, fronts for the resistance marked with the Half-life symbol, physics that work, etc.
Is it a story? Not really. But that's not bad. I get the feeling of a headlong dash. I don't mind that, it's why I play the game.
If I'm outside your door yelling at the top of my lungs about penis enlargers, viagra, and various other crap, all day, all night, would you be so quick to say "You're not hurting anyone"?
In the worst case, you open the door and punch my teeth in, and in the best case the police would come pick me up for harassment. This is easy, for actual physical harassment, because you have to be there to commit it. Spam requires no such thing.
I get 300 mails a day, practically all spam. I also get a lot of commercial E-mail. I make the distinction between these two, as the commercial E-mail is actually targetted at me, either because I signed up with them, ordered from them once, or signed up with one of their partners and checked the "Mail me" button. I like commercial E-mail, telling me the things I can buy at local stores, or informing me of new products from quality manufacturers.
Spam is harassment, plain and simple, and it costs money, too. Think of the bandwidth alone, not to mention support costs for ISPs, etc. My own ISP had to take an SMTP server offline, because the IP got listed in SpamCop. This costs money.
VoIP is pretty much pointless for the US, since you mostly only have the one-time charge of a few cents, and then unlimited calling time.
For other nations, telephone calls are by the second, usually at something like E0.10-0.20 per minute for a mobile phone. Voice over IP is a great fix.
Also, it'll allow cable companies to offer phone services. Whether this is good or bad, I dunno, though I'm leaning towards 'good'.
One theory I'd heard is that one short term result is that more icebergs than 'normal' would descend into warmer waters, thus cooling them (because the vast bulk is underwater, and slowly melting). If enough icebergs descend into the Gulfstream it'll cool down enough to severely worsen the Western European winter climate. This would make winters here bitter cold, and summers less attractive than they are now. This, I think, people would notice.
"Suffering effects of global warming; send blankets."
To summarize some thoughts: That big lump of ice out there probably has a large effect on global climate in general. The mass-concentration and distribution at the poles might somehow be important to the rotation of the earth? I think the volume of ice underwater will shrink more than the above-surface portion will provide (certainly after shrinking)
Speaking as an employee of a (Dutch) cable company, with analog channels this makes sense. Basically there are three filtering levels used: - Filter out everything. This is for people who don't pay and/or don't want cable. - Filter out the higher bands. This is for people who want the limited package of Dutch, Belgian, English and German public channels, but not the more 'exotic' channels. - Filter out nothing. The full package.
Already, sometimes there are mixups of the wrong package, sometimes by recent mistakes, sometimes by wiring mistakes made decades ago. You do not want this to be any more complex than it has to be, unless you like price hikes.
For digital, the main concern would be marketing. Right now, the company offers half a dozen themed packages, two of which are fairly broad from Discovery to Extreme Sports to the Fashion TV. Make it more packages, and people get confused, don't know what they want, and grow a general dislike of your product because they didn't choose what they really wanted.
Talk about a growth market. Poor country, cheap ground for large launch facilities, decent tourist(y) spots along the coast... If they can attract the market, they're in to make some money.
Slashdot Mirror
That is a culture related statement. Frex, I do believe in working extra hours to help the employer out, but I also believe in direct compensation for that (either mo' money, or more holiday days). I don't believe my employer has any say whatsoever over me in my own time, while some people do. These things are not black and white.
My personal view, though: As long as you don't cost too much detouring, and performing the tasks you're assigned, who cares? On the other hand, if detouring does cause you to neglect your job, or costs the company a significant amount, you deserve everything you get.
Monitoring should be done. It's a good thing. But some understanding from the boss' end should be forthcoming, if 'transgressions' are kept within limits.
This is home user support. It's an ISP. One of the main criterias for being hired is having basic computer knowledge, and the teamleaders on the floor have final say over whether someone gets hired. One applicant, upon being asked "Do you know what a motherboard is?" responded "Well, I'm not much of a hardware person, more software". He promptly received a burnt out motherboard one of the teamleaders had lying about and was told to study it. He wasn't hired.
On a more sexist note: Where many callcenters have about a 50/50 male/female ratio, it being a callcenter and women doing well in callcenters, ours has a 95-99 percent male population. Which is also the ratio at CompSci studies, and "computer clubs" I used to go to as a kid. Which probably helps the technological awareness of the employees.
Second line support is given to those with deeper knowledge of both technical matters and procedural matters, as opposed to proto-managers. Also, there are no call-time-limits (although service levels do have to be maintained, 95% of calls have to be answered at the least), even if that means taking an hour for a tough problem. One long call is better than 15 short calls by the same customer.
So in short: An ISP helpdesk that favors customer satisfaction, technical savvy, has people between managers and employees (teamleaders) that know what they're doing, and that actually performs its job well.
I'm starting to treasure it.
What's your stance on, say, modchips for gaming consoles? Just because there are legitimate uses for it, doesn't mean they won't be used to increase copyright infringement.
Except that I like modchips. For modchips as well as this software, I'd formualate it as "Just because it may be used illegally, doesn't mean it there aren't legitimate uses for it."
That's kindof the point. My company outsourced techsupport to Fujitsu Services Netherlands (which also does Symantec Europe support). I work at techsupport, and me and a few (+/- 15) others were relegated to dealing with tougher calls that Fujitsu couldn't handle, making appointments with customers and some quality control.
Long story short: It was a disaster. Customer satisfaction went through the floor, waiting times skyrocketed, answers were frequently poor (not entirely the *fault* of Fujitsu, but certainly their responsibility) and the small crew at the company itself was overworked. The multimillion euro contract was cut short, and the helpdesk is now back at the company with about 180-200 decently- to well-trained employees in all (many, many part-timers), waiting times are reduced to 2-4 minutes on busy days (taking about 2000-2500 or more calls in a 14h day).
The day you can get that kind of quality from a call-center on the other side of the planet, *then* you can talk about outsourcing. Until then, if you want it done right, do it yourself.
If the 'coupon cards' are things you scan to take advantage of any running promotions, then I prefer the way the Dutch supermarket Albert Heijn does it. When I asked about the card, they asked me if I would want it personalized or anonymous. I said anonymous. She drew a little X at the bottom of the long form, and gave me a card.
The idea being that they can still track what I buy, without them knowing my personal information, I suppose, and I'm okay with that.
The beneficial case of competition involves competition through excellence, which is a constructive way of dealing with a threat.
*This* kind of competition -- buying out your opponents so that you don't *have* to excel anymore -- is destructive , and it is not in the best interests of consumers.
If I were a shareholder, I'd be pissed if their motto wasn't "Carpe Jugulum".
However, as a consumer, I preferred the former over the latter. Alas, those days are apparently over.
How?
" All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2004 OSTG."
Seems pretty clear to me that Slashdot absolves itself of responsibility, especially with them not deleting comments, and letting the community moderate posts (specifically mentioned in the 'comments might be moderated' caveats are Illegal comments).
Warez boards make use of 'public FTPs', or directories with write access. Sometimes this write access is acquired through use of bugs or exploits. Then you upload your crap to the public FTP, post the address for people to use, and people will snag it for as long as it lasts.
There's a self-deterioration effect, though, since if *you* can write stuff there, other people can write stuff there too, and they can delete stuff, which is a lot quicker than uploading it.
That's kindof the point of that game, I think, if it has a real-cash economy. It's a real-world-simulator in a way. Intelligence and talent, both physical and mental, is how you get ahead in the *real* world, as well having a large pocketbook.
The 'game' is like real life, in that you need to invest effort and money to make money. The less money you have, the more effort you have to invest. But in the game, once you're done playing after either failing or succeeding, you can just quit it or restart it, and noone will care. You don't have in-game lives to pay for, so failure isn't that much of a problem. In real life, this is more complex.
This is Slashdot. How can you expect me to read your post?
Okay, okay, sorry for not paying attention. The fact that I still got moderated up proves that I'm not the only one, though, and as such the tip bore repeating.
By the way, have you tried to tape a piece of paper to the pad, to increase the traction?
Now I see the master plan. Rather than improving speech-to-text technologies, the focus is on destroying basic literacy. Apart from the word 'grape', I parsed that sentence without even having to mentally translate it.
Based on current experience, I'd say speech-to-text is going to be a growing market :-(
Please note that that cable provider is an exceedingly poor one.
While load-balancing is (more) necessary with cable than with DSL, it is certainly possible to have top DSL speeds available throughout your network, 24/7.
The price is giving up a bit of 'instant service', which doesn't serve the customers as much as it pleases them. Another ISP, upon learning that the cable modem can't broadcast strongly enough to get through to make a connection, changes the upper transmit limit on the modem. Customer online, and it'll likely work forever. My own ISP sends a mechanic 'round to fix the cable network so that the pre-chosen limits are actually sufficient.
It's an attitude that's important; forgo the quick fix and easy browniepoints, and do the more expensive work that saves you in the long term.
If you find the tablet too 'slick', and want that papery feeling back, here's a simple solution:
Tape a piece of paper of the drawing area.
Sounds simple, and it is. Works like a charm, though.
The point of HL2's story isn't the story that is told by your actions. That rarely works well; either it's a crappy game with a great story, or a great game with a crappy story.
The thing Half-life and HL2 do, is provide great *backstory*. The world makes sense in its universe, and is built solidly. Weapons from characters, corpses and weapon-storage facilities, instead of strewn all over the place. Bases that actually look defensible, fronts for the resistance marked with the Half-life symbol, physics that work, etc.
Is it a story? Not really. But that's not bad. I get the feeling of a headlong dash. I don't mind that, it's why I play the game.
Bull shit.
If I'm outside your door yelling at the top of my lungs about penis enlargers, viagra, and various other crap, all day, all night, would you be so quick to say "You're not hurting anyone"?
In the worst case, you open the door and punch my teeth in, and in the best case the police would come pick me up for harassment. This is easy, for actual physical harassment, because you have to be there to commit it. Spam requires no such thing.
I get 300 mails a day, practically all spam. I also get a lot of commercial E-mail. I make the distinction between these two, as the commercial E-mail is actually targetted at me, either because I signed up with them, ordered from them once, or signed up with one of their partners and checked the "Mail me" button. I like commercial E-mail, telling me the things I can buy at local stores, or informing me of new products from quality manufacturers.
Spam is harassment, plain and simple, and it costs money, too. Think of the bandwidth alone, not to mention support costs for ISPs, etc. My own ISP had to take an SMTP server offline, because the IP got listed in SpamCop. This costs money.
So fuck spam, and fuck spammers.
VoIP is pretty much pointless for the US, since you mostly only have the one-time charge of a few cents, and then unlimited calling time.
For other nations, telephone calls are by the second, usually at something like E0.10-0.20 per minute for a mobile phone. Voice over IP is a great fix.
Also, it'll allow cable companies to offer phone services. Whether this is good or bad, I dunno, though I'm leaning towards 'good'.
Samples drilled from deep within (ant)arctic ice contain bits of evidence about climate dating millions and billions of years.
One theory I'd heard is that one short term result is that more icebergs than 'normal' would descend into warmer waters, thus cooling them (because the vast bulk is underwater, and slowly melting). If enough icebergs descend into the Gulfstream it'll cool down enough to severely worsen the Western European winter climate. This would make winters here bitter cold, and summers less attractive than they are now. This, I think, people would notice.
"Suffering effects of global warming; send blankets."
To summarize some thoughts:
That big lump of ice out there probably has a large effect on global climate in general. The mass-concentration and distribution at the poles might somehow be important to the rotation of the earth? I think the volume of ice underwater will shrink more than the above-surface portion will provide (certainly after shrinking)
IANAE (Environmentalist)
Speaking as an employee of a (Dutch) cable company, with analog channels this makes sense. Basically there are three filtering levels used:
:)
- Filter out everything. This is for people who don't pay and/or don't want cable.
- Filter out the higher bands. This is for people who want the limited package of Dutch, Belgian, English and German public channels, but not the more 'exotic' channels.
- Filter out nothing. The full package.
Already, sometimes there are mixups of the wrong package, sometimes by recent mistakes, sometimes by wiring mistakes made decades ago. You do not want this to be any more complex than it has to be, unless you like price hikes.
For digital, the main concern would be marketing. Right now, the company offers half a dozen themed packages, two of which are fairly broad from Discovery to Extreme Sports to the Fashion TV. Make it more packages, and people get confused, don't know what they want, and grow a general dislike of your product because they didn't choose what they really wanted.
So don't dis cable companies for this, mmm-kay?
Talk about a growth market. Poor country, cheap ground for large launch facilities, decent tourist(y) spots along the coast... If they can attract the market, they're in to make some money.
Whose stock do I buy?
At least RJ's main characters didn't outlaw fire, the yellowy-orange hot stuff that makes food edible. As some hack's characters did.
It's not genetic. It can't be. The US hasn't existed with a homogenous population long enough (or at all) to create genetic modifications.
If the people can't handle things, it's solely a cultural issue.
Star Trek XI: The Dead Pool
I smell a hit!
Clint Eastwood as a disgruntled security officer. "This is the most powerful phaser in the known galaxy..."
Repeated once.