For a cellphone company. And a fairly small percentage of the customers call so often that it bleeds away a lot of the profits. Trying to figure out how to get these people to stop calling so much is a full time job for many thousands of people in my industry. Next solution: Replace me with Siri-like bots. Customers won't like it at first but someone has to pay for me for my time and my benefits and the cost of the call center. AI customer service and sales bots are coming and not that far into the future.
The minimum wage in Australia is more than $16/hour US and the McDonalds there do just fine. Do not listen to their scare tactics. http://xpatnation.com/how-does...
It's inevitable, someone will strap a nailbomb to a drone and do something and then all drones large enough to carry an explosive will be strictly regulated. It's only a matter of time.
Sending IS back to hell with airpower is easy when they are out in the open. But once Islamic State fighters retreat to towns like Fallujah it will be very difficult to twist them out of their holes. It will require house to house fighting and the towns will be more or less destroyed in the process with great cost to any civilians in the area. If the Shiite dominated Iraq Army does it there will be all kinds of payback. But I doubt they will step up. It will be up to mostly the US with help from the UK and some token help from a few other countries.
Colin Powell was right. We broke it, we bought it.
Let's say you're sending your 19 year old off to college and for this argument you have to choose between and iPad and a netbook to give her. Which one would get the job done better? Netbook wins hands down for the real keyboard, ability to use a mouse and wide variety of software. The iPad is for gadget hounds to play with while sitting on the toilet (I hope they are easy to clean) and for tech-savvy older folks to read their Wall Street journal from the easy chair.
The biggest drawback of the iPad that needs to be discussed more is the lack of a courser and mouse support because of Steve Job's Don Quixote quest to create something with no mouse and keyboard that works entirely with your fingers on glass. We take the mouse and keyboard for granted and forget how good it is until we try to do something without it. The touch interface works on the iPhone but will fail when compared to the netbook for general purpose computing because of the superior dexterity of the mouse compared to the finger on glass interface.
The part of the story that needs to be talked about a bit more is the under-recognized talent that worked on Duke 3D and made it so much fun. 3D Realms got lucky once because of a brilliant young programmer named Ken Silverman
http://www.advsys.net/ken/
who wrote the engine while he was still in high school, and the talents of their design team, people like Levelord
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Gray_(game_designer)
and others. The management of the company took credit for the success of Duke 3D. But once the talent left, management lived for years off the residual income from the various Duke ports and publisher advances while showing their utter lack of competence by being unable to ship a single product. While we mourn Duke and scorn Broussard and Miller let's remember the fine work of the team. Good work, guys!
In this week's issue of Nature, scientists from Princeton University confirm pleasure centers of mouse brain lights up after grabbing the Quad Damage jumping off the platform, spin 180 degrees and rockets his opponent who explodes in a mass of flying bloody chunks. Film at 11.
If you can stand the mental torment, the pay taking cancellation calls at Sprint call centers starts about about 45k a year and tops out at 80 to 90k if you are good and do 20 to 30 hours of overtime a week. Before the scam was exposed 3 years* ago AOL call centers taking "retention" calls pay also started at about 50k and topped out over 100K for those willing to do heavy amounts of overtime.
Short Question:
I play Mythic's current MMO Dark Age of Camelot and, like a bad relationship, I love it and hate it and can't leave it. The addictiveness and superior PvP make me optimistic that Warhammer will be the WoW killer that EA hopes for. Almost everyone who plays DAoC considers it a superior game to WoW. But some glaring flaws in the game design and underlying game engine concern me that the same type of mistakes and flaws will be in Warhammer. How are the Warhammer designers and programmers working to avoid the well-know problems with their current game, Dark Age of Camelot?
Long Question:
The abilities of the three realms in DAoC are unusually asymmetrical for a game of this type which does make it interesting . But it seems like over and over and over one of the three realms gets buffed. I know Hibernia had low population in the first years of the game (probably because the newbs usually picked Albion and the Hib characters looked freakish). So you gave Hib mages baseline stun which renders their opponent helpless as they get nuked to death, while you gave mages from the other two realms root which freezes the targets feet to the ground but does not render them helpless. That flaw is still in today and is a constantly given reason for quitting the game after people get stun-nuked one time too many. Hib baseline stun has driven thousands of people away from the game. And the carebear type players who love WoW will head for the doors after experiencing that a few times.
You gave Hibernia Group Purge exclusively - since removed from the game as too powerful. You gave them Thornweed field first - a mistake that was corrected when you gave it to all three realms. Hib primary healers have pets programmed to make a beeline to the enemy healers which completely shuts them down until the pet is killed - the other two realm's primary healers do not have pets (still in the game today). When New Frontiers came out you put the boat docks on the other side of the river for two realms (to make players vulnerable to attack while going to the boat) but not for Hib - another mistake since corrected. It goes on and on and on.
What were your game designers thinking and are these kinds of mistakes going to be made in Warhammer?
Game Engine:
The technology used in DAoC was impressive when it came out in 2001 and has been updated successfully and looks pretty good by today's standards, but has some glaring problems that your programmers can't seem to fix. Is the game engine fundamentally flawed or are there no programmers at Mythic skilled enough to go deep into the engine and fix this stuff? I don't expect you to have a John Carmack on the payroll but some of these problems seem beyond your ability to correct.
Walls in keeps stop most spells and all arrows but certain kinds of spells go right through them. Again, the worst offender is in Hibernia - the Bainshee - with the highest damage and the longest range of anything that penetrates keep walls. The people who play that class know this and exploit it shamelessly giving them huge advantages in siege. The Animist who casts a turret in the form of a cute little mushroom has the only turret in the game which gives (surprise surprise) Hibernia another advantage, this time in siege warfare. Animists place these "shrooms" all over the place while sieging keeps in spots where the shroom can attack enemies who cannot attack the Animist which infuriates the other two realms. Bad design or bad programming? Probably a little of both.
Necromancers cannot cross certain bridges without losing their pets (bridges are focal points of PvP and losing the pet makes the Necro absolutely vulnerable. Why is that so hard to fix?
I'm one of those evil AOL "retention" agents except I'm not an idiot like the guy in the recording you all heard a few weeks ago. It is astounding how things have changed here at the AOL call center since the incident with the cancellation call recording being on the Today Show. A few weeks ago they would fire you for not hammering the hell out of these people calling to cancel. They expected us to "save" every single caller and lying was acceptible and encouraged (as long as the lie cheated the customer and not AOL). Now they fire you for making more than one very polite saves attempt or being the slightest bit rude to the caller. Call volume is way down and rumors are rampant that the center will be closed. The management assholes in this place who have been running the money-machine scam for years have definitely had the smugness wiped off their faces.
Having said all that, if you know someone like your grandmother or your kid sister who likes AOL and wants to keep it here's how to get it free over broadband or for $9.95/month unlimited dialup - Just call and request to cancel. Just say they you've gone to broadband and you want to cancel and they will give you free version. If you want the dialup version request to cancel giving the reason that it's too expensive and you want to go to a low cost provider. They will offer you $9.95 unlimited dialup no commitment. But you have to say you want to cancel or you won't be offered these deals.
Tell anyone thinking of tying AOL to beware of the "Risk Free Trial" disks. Risk Free Trial really means money back guarantee (it's not the slightest bit clear on the packaging) and the payment method will be hit for $25.90 on the day after creating the account. These risk free CDs are making checking accounts go overdrawn by the tens of thousands because the dipshits running them don't have an extra $25.90 to cover the unexpected charge. The typical AOL customer nowdays is either old or poor or an immigrant and most of them don't have much money. If you want to make a AOL account call AOL and make them give you a free trial and then cancel it to get the free broadband account or the $9.95 dialup.
Because full blown MMO addiction (Dark Age of Camelot in my case which I'm in recovery from) squeezes out most everything else in life. You not only stop buying other games you save money on food because a Hot Pocket and a yogurt is way cheaper than going to a decent resturant or preparing yourself a good meal. You save money on gas because you don't leave the house much except to go to work. Absorbed in your virtual world you don't feel the need for new clothes, consumer electronics (except that needed to run the game). You need a Legendary Hammer and Realm Rank 10 but you don't need a new car, the old one will suffice.
I saved a lot of money while addicted to that game.
I used to do "retention" at an AOL call center and posted about it on Slashdot once last year. Go ahead, hate me. I deserve it. It's a crappy call center job that pays extremely well (50k a year for ordinary schmucks like the one in the recording and 70k+ if you're good) because it's so ugly what you have to do.
Let me tell you about AOL "retention". They have a mantra there "Saves attempts on every call". You will get written up and eventually fired if you don't try to run every single caller through their process they call "Member Connect". So the AOL employee in the recording, admittedly a really shitty example of a retention agent, had no choice but to make his 3 saves attempts no matter how adamant the caller is about "JUST CANCEL IT". People should make more of these recordings and shine some light on the shameful stuff they do there. It doesn't matter what your reason for canceling is, they have an answer and will attempt to close you with crude, but effective high pressure sales tactics.
"My computer's broke, I can't afford to buy another one and my phone was turned off. I need to cancel" - "No problem. You can actually use AOL from any computer work, school, library...
"The account holder was my father and he passed away so I need to cancel." - "I'm very sorry to hear about your dad that but since your name is not on the account you can't cancel it"
But mostly it's:
"I upgraded to broadband so I don't need AOL any more." - "Congratulations on your broadband! However, with your new high speed connection, your computer will be more vulnerable to viruses, hackers and identity thieves. AOL gives you the protection you need..."
Now here's where it really gets ugly: AOL makes a ton of money from people who accidentally create multiple accounts by running the disc over and over while trying to get online. So they call billing to complain about the multiple charges on their credit card a few months down the road. Billing and "Saves" are the same department now and if you tell them the truth about that they have multiple accounts you're going to have to cancel some accounts. So you deceive them by searching for the account by screen name only instead of payment method or telephone number in order to purposely not discover the additional accounts. Then you tell them that it must be their bank - "call your bank" - to get them off the phone without canceling anything.
You gotta understand that if you do the right thing and cancel the poor schmucks second and third accounts you're going to drag down your saves rate and your coach is going to be in your face telling you he's concerned about your saves rate. It's kind of sickening when the people your screwing over are little old ladies and inner city mothers with crying babies at their breasts.
Here's some lies I used to hear a lot on the floor:
"AOL was really slow." - "No problem! Just go to keyword: Top Speed and you can make it go five times faster!" Top Speed is the compression and caching that speeds up dial up a little and it's built into AOL. Going to that keyword just gives you a advertisement for something that is already present in the client. The reason it's so damn slow is all the ads that AOL pumps into everything they do. There's so many ads in AOL that they should give it away for free instead of $25.90 a month for crappy dialup ($30.90 if you don't have a credit card.)
"I'm having computer problems and have had bad experiences with your Indian tech support." - No problem! I'll transfer you to the "good" tech support located here in the US." There is no special tech support que that's only in the US, it's a lie. You just dump them back into the ordinary tech support que. And now days you have to sit through a long, painful session of talking to the IVR system before you even get to talk to the Indian tech support.
I good tell more but I'm getting sick thinking about it.
Also, telling your credit card company not to pay them will result in paper bills for the charges and if you don't pay those you'll get turned over for collection.
"There is no game. No one is working on the game. The investors got fleeced."
3drealms got lucky once because of the work of a brilliant young programmer named Ken Silverman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Silverman and great designers like Levelord http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelord and they have been milking the Duke franchise ever since with console ports farmed out to third parties. Once the real talent left the company has been unable to complete a worthwhile follow-up to their original cash-cow. It's not a scam, it's just grossly incompetent management. To their credit, at least George and Scott didn't ship Duke4ever as a turd-quality product like Ion Storm did with Daikatana.
Claimed Vs Actual Throughput
on
Wireless USB hubs
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
If UWB is like 802.11x then the actual throughput will at best only be about half the claimed speed since the protocol will eat up the other half. Because wireless is half-duplex and has to use the much less efficient Carrier Sense Avoidence instead of Carrier Sense Detection to avoid collusions, your 54 mbps 802.11g router will give you maybe 30 megs tops under ideal conditions. And the more devices talking at the same time the slower it goes as they all try to contend for the medium like a bunch of truckers all trying to talk on the same CB channel at the same time. I'm guessing that a UWB wireless USB hub that claimed 480 mbps on the box when you bought it will actually run a lot slower in the real world. Sadly, vendors usually feel free to use the highest numbers available to them to market the products even if the customers will never achieve those numbers in actual use.
I bought two computers this year: a Mac Mini and a HP Lance Armstrong notebook both of which ordered directly and I found out were made in China by watching them come to me with the Fedex tracking number. But no where on either machine is the designation "Made in China".
Irony of ironies - the US fought a long and bloody war in the 60s and early 70s to prevent an Asian country from becoming communist. Now it seems like most of the stuff we buy today is made in a communist Asian country.
Not much. I'm an adult living with Asperger's Syndrome http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperger_Syndrome so my job prospects are rather limited. When I took the job I had no idea what I was getting into but I'm still here because of the checks and I damn near starved doing that dsl tech support job.
I work in "retention" (meaning I take cancellation calls) at an AOL call center. I'm ashamed of what I do here but the money is so damn good that I'm doing it anyway, bad karma be damned.
The "saves rate" expected of us is 65%. Incredibly, we have to get two thirds of the people calling to cancel their AOL off the phone without canceling them. This pressure to hit these numbers causes retention agents to due some pretty unscrupulous things.
In training we are told a bunch of bullshit about the "value" of AOL. But that's not how it works when you get out onto the floor. Here's how it really works: You be a very good listener, repeat back to the member the cancellation reason as though you agree with them to give the member the feeling that you are to cancel their account. You be extremely nice to them and show empathy. This is to get them to let their guard down. Then you ask them to get a piece of paper and write down your email address and you start talking about keyword this and keyword that to confuse and distract them. Then you read the "full disclosure" which is a statement that basically says your account is not canceled. If they are not listening closely they will get off the phone with the feeling that you have cancelled the account even though you didn't.
Once you practice and polish the technique it works amazingly well especially on people who don't speak real good english, older folks, inner city types who have little experience dealing with good salespeople, hillbillies in Alabama and people who are just plain stupid. And since they are stupid they typically don't look at their checking or credit card statements and many months may go by before they notice that AOL is hitting them for $23.90 a month in automatic withdrawals. Do the math. It's a lot of money for AOL.
I am ashamed of myself. But my last job was tech support and I made $9.75 and hour. Here I make about $28 an hour. As soon as I save enough for a down payment for a house I'm getting out of here.
As someone formally employed in the IT certification training industry, I can tell you that the results of these surveys are often used by unscrupulous salespeople to sell expensive courses and training "kits" (over-priced boxes of cheaply bound, poor quality books and a CD or two) to gullible persons looking to get into IT. Let's say experienced Cisco admins are making $65k/year according to the survey. This information is pitched to prospective students to imply that they will make $65k if they just buy the $5000 CCNA course and pass the exam. Of course a CCNA and no job experience is unlikely to get you a job at all much less a high paying one.
I'll name names: Intense School, Wave Technologies, TechSkills, and by far the worst, New Horizons.
Regular cardio vascular excercise has been shown to provide substantial benefits to alertness. Don't worry about losing your nerd status by excercising. Simply commute to work on a bicycle , like I do, with baggy shorts and a high powered bike like strapped to the top of the helmet. You'll stay fit, save money and retain your geek status.
I paid for a copy of XP when I bought this Sony laptop. But I use a corporate copy of XP and a warez key so that I can have Windows without all the garbage that the Sony cd installs. Too bad that this will affect me even though I'm a paying customer.
Slashdot Mirror
For a cellphone company. And a fairly small percentage of the customers call so often that it bleeds away a lot of the profits. Trying to figure out how to get these people to stop calling so much is a full time job for many thousands of people in my industry. Next solution: Replace me with Siri-like bots. Customers won't like it at first but someone has to pay for me for my time and my benefits and the cost of the call center. AI customer service and sales bots are coming and not that far into the future.
The minimum wage in Australia is more than $16/hour US and the McDonalds there do just fine. Do not listen to their scare tactics. http://xpatnation.com/how-does...
So They Can Learn From (steal) Your Ideas
It's inevitable, someone will strap a nailbomb to a drone and do something and then all drones large enough to carry an explosive will be strictly regulated. It's only a matter of time.
Black Slashdotters may want to avoid walking around the city with something that could be seen as a weapon.
Sending IS back to hell with airpower is easy when they are out in the open. But once Islamic State fighters retreat to towns like Fallujah it will be very difficult to twist them out of their holes. It will require house to house fighting and the towns will be more or less destroyed in the process with great cost to any civilians in the area. If the Shiite dominated Iraq Army does it there will be all kinds of payback. But I doubt they will step up. It will be up to mostly the US with help from the UK and some token help from a few other countries. Colin Powell was right. We broke it, we bought it.
I have no doubt she will be worthy. But I also have no doubt Marvel will spec her with large bosoms and a bustier.
It's still just math. How will this be any different from digital calculations except for maybe the level of precision?
Let's say you're sending your 19 year old off to college and for this argument you have to choose between and iPad and a netbook to give her. Which one would get the job done better? Netbook wins hands down for the real keyboard, ability to use a mouse and wide variety of software. The iPad is for gadget hounds to play with while sitting on the toilet (I hope they are easy to clean) and for tech-savvy older folks to read their Wall Street journal from the easy chair. The biggest drawback of the iPad that needs to be discussed more is the lack of a courser and mouse support because of Steve Job's Don Quixote quest to create something with no mouse and keyboard that works entirely with your fingers on glass. We take the mouse and keyboard for granted and forget how good it is until we try to do something without it. The touch interface works on the iPhone but will fail when compared to the netbook for general purpose computing because of the superior dexterity of the mouse compared to the finger on glass interface.
The part of the story that needs to be talked about a bit more is the under-recognized talent that worked on Duke 3D and made it so much fun. 3D Realms got lucky once because of a brilliant young programmer named Ken Silverman http://www.advsys.net/ken/ who wrote the engine while he was still in high school, and the talents of their design team, people like Levelord http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Gray_(game_designer) and others. The management of the company took credit for the success of Duke 3D. But once the talent left, management lived for years off the residual income from the various Duke ports and publisher advances while showing their utter lack of competence by being unable to ship a single product. While we mourn Duke and scorn Broussard and Miller let's remember the fine work of the team. Good work, guys!
In this week's issue of Nature, scientists from Princeton University confirm pleasure centers of mouse brain lights up after grabbing the Quad Damage jumping off the platform, spin 180 degrees and rockets his opponent who explodes in a mass of flying bloody chunks. Film at 11.
If you can stand the mental torment, the pay taking cancellation calls at Sprint call centers starts about about 45k a year and tops out at 80 to 90k if you are good and do 20 to 30 hours of overtime a week. Before the scam was exposed 3 years* ago AOL call centers taking "retention" calls pay also started at about 50k and topped out over 100K for those willing to do heavy amounts of overtime.
* http://consumerist.com/191878/timewarner-dissolves-aol-retention-centers
http://sprint.jobsincallcenters.com/
Short Question: I play Mythic's current MMO Dark Age of Camelot and, like a bad relationship, I love it and hate it and can't leave it. The addictiveness and superior PvP make me optimistic that Warhammer will be the WoW killer that EA hopes for. Almost everyone who plays DAoC considers it a superior game to WoW. But some glaring flaws in the game design and underlying game engine concern me that the same type of mistakes and flaws will be in Warhammer. How are the Warhammer designers and programmers working to avoid the well-know problems with their current game, Dark Age of Camelot? Long Question: The abilities of the three realms in DAoC are unusually asymmetrical for a game of this type which does make it interesting . But it seems like over and over and over one of the three realms gets buffed. I know Hibernia had low population in the first years of the game (probably because the newbs usually picked Albion and the Hib characters looked freakish). So you gave Hib mages baseline stun which renders their opponent helpless as they get nuked to death, while you gave mages from the other two realms root which freezes the targets feet to the ground but does not render them helpless. That flaw is still in today and is a constantly given reason for quitting the game after people get stun-nuked one time too many. Hib baseline stun has driven thousands of people away from the game. And the carebear type players who love WoW will head for the doors after experiencing that a few times. You gave Hibernia Group Purge exclusively - since removed from the game as too powerful. You gave them Thornweed field first - a mistake that was corrected when you gave it to all three realms. Hib primary healers have pets programmed to make a beeline to the enemy healers which completely shuts them down until the pet is killed - the other two realm's primary healers do not have pets (still in the game today). When New Frontiers came out you put the boat docks on the other side of the river for two realms (to make players vulnerable to attack while going to the boat) but not for Hib - another mistake since corrected. It goes on and on and on. What were your game designers thinking and are these kinds of mistakes going to be made in Warhammer? Game Engine: The technology used in DAoC was impressive when it came out in 2001 and has been updated successfully and looks pretty good by today's standards, but has some glaring problems that your programmers can't seem to fix. Is the game engine fundamentally flawed or are there no programmers at Mythic skilled enough to go deep into the engine and fix this stuff? I don't expect you to have a John Carmack on the payroll but some of these problems seem beyond your ability to correct. Walls in keeps stop most spells and all arrows but certain kinds of spells go right through them. Again, the worst offender is in Hibernia - the Bainshee - with the highest damage and the longest range of anything that penetrates keep walls. The people who play that class know this and exploit it shamelessly giving them huge advantages in siege. The Animist who casts a turret in the form of a cute little mushroom has the only turret in the game which gives (surprise surprise) Hibernia another advantage, this time in siege warfare. Animists place these "shrooms" all over the place while sieging keeps in spots where the shroom can attack enemies who cannot attack the Animist which infuriates the other two realms. Bad design or bad programming? Probably a little of both. Necromancers cannot cross certain bridges without losing their pets (bridges are focal points of PvP and losing the pet makes the Necro absolutely vulnerable. Why is that so hard to fix?
I could get fired for this but here goes:
I'm one of those evil AOL "retention" agents except I'm not an idiot like the guy in the recording you all heard a few weeks ago. It is astounding how things have changed here at the AOL call center since the incident with the cancellation call recording being on the Today Show. A few weeks ago they would fire you for not hammering the hell out of these people calling to cancel. They expected us to "save" every single caller and lying was acceptible and encouraged (as long as the lie cheated the customer and not AOL). Now they fire you for making more than one very polite saves attempt or being the slightest bit rude to the caller. Call volume is way down and rumors are rampant that the center will be closed. The management assholes in this place who have been running the money-machine scam for years have definitely had the smugness wiped off their faces.
Having said all that, if you know someone like your grandmother or your kid sister who likes AOL and wants to keep it here's how to get it free over broadband or for $9.95/month unlimited dialup - Just call and request to cancel. Just say they you've gone to broadband and you want to cancel and they will give you free version. If you want the dialup version request to cancel giving the reason that it's too expensive and you want to go to a low cost provider. They will offer you $9.95 unlimited dialup no commitment. But you have to say you want to cancel or you won't be offered these deals.
Tell anyone thinking of tying AOL to beware of the "Risk Free Trial" disks. Risk Free Trial really means money back guarantee (it's not the slightest bit clear on the packaging) and the payment method will be hit for $25.90 on the day after creating the account. These risk free CDs are making checking accounts go overdrawn by the tens of thousands because the dipshits running them don't have an extra $25.90 to cover the unexpected charge. The typical AOL customer nowdays is either old or poor or an immigrant and most of them don't have much money. If you want to make a AOL account call AOL and make them give you a free trial and then cancel it to get the free broadband account or the $9.95 dialup.
Because full blown MMO addiction (Dark Age of Camelot in my case which I'm in recovery from) squeezes out most everything else in life. You not only stop buying other games you save money on food because a Hot Pocket and a yogurt is way cheaper than going to a decent resturant or preparing yourself a good meal. You save money on gas because you don't leave the house much except to go to work. Absorbed in your virtual world you don't feel the need for new clothes, consumer electronics (except that needed to run the game). You need a Legendary Hammer and Realm Rank 10 but you don't need a new car, the old one will suffice.
I saved a lot of money while addicted to that game.
I used to do "retention" at an AOL call center and posted about it on Slashdot once last year. Go ahead, hate me. I deserve it. It's a crappy call center job that pays extremely well (50k a year for ordinary schmucks like the one in the recording and 70k+ if you're good) because it's so ugly what you have to do.
Let me tell you about AOL "retention". They have a mantra there "Saves attempts on every call". You will get written up and eventually fired if you don't try to run every single caller through their process they call "Member Connect". So the AOL employee in the recording, admittedly a really shitty example of a retention agent, had no choice but to make his 3 saves attempts no matter how adamant the caller is about "JUST CANCEL IT". People should make more of these recordings and shine some light on the shameful stuff they do there. It doesn't matter what your reason for canceling is, they have an answer and will attempt to close you with crude, but effective high pressure sales tactics.
"My computer's broke, I can't afford to buy another one and my phone was turned off. I need to cancel" - "No problem. You can actually use AOL from any computer work, school, library...
"The account holder was my father and he passed away so I need to cancel." - "I'm very sorry to hear about your dad that but since your name is not on the account you can't cancel it"
But mostly it's:
"I upgraded to broadband so I don't need AOL any more." - "Congratulations on your broadband! However, with your new high speed connection, your computer will be more vulnerable to viruses, hackers and identity thieves. AOL gives you the protection you need..."
Now here's where it really gets ugly: AOL makes a ton of money from people who accidentally create multiple accounts by running the disc over and over while trying to get online. So they call billing to complain about the multiple charges on their credit card a few months down the road. Billing and "Saves" are the same department now and if you tell them the truth about that they have multiple accounts you're going to have to cancel some accounts. So you deceive them by searching for the account by screen name only instead of payment method or telephone number in order to purposely not discover the additional accounts. Then you tell them that it must be their bank - "call your bank" - to get them off the phone without canceling anything.
You gotta understand that if you do the right thing and cancel the poor schmucks second and third accounts you're going to drag down your saves rate and your coach is going to be in your face telling you he's concerned about your saves rate. It's kind of sickening when the people your screwing over are little old ladies and inner city mothers with crying babies at their breasts.
Here's some lies I used to hear a lot on the floor:
"AOL was really slow." - "No problem! Just go to keyword: Top Speed and you can make it go five times faster!" Top Speed is the compression and caching that speeds up dial up a little and it's built into AOL. Going to that keyword just gives you a advertisement for something that is already present in the client. The reason it's so damn slow is all the ads that AOL pumps into everything they do. There's so many ads in AOL that they should give it away for free instead of $25.90 a month for crappy dialup ($30.90 if you don't have a credit card.)
"I'm having computer problems and have had bad experiences with your Indian tech support." - No problem! I'll transfer you to the "good" tech support located here in the US." There is no special tech support que that's only in the US, it's a lie. You just dump them back into the ordinary tech support que. And now days you have to sit through a long, painful session of talking to the IVR system before you even get to talk to the Indian tech support.
I good tell more but I'm getting sick thinking about it.
Also, telling your credit card company not to pay them will result in paper bills for the charges and if you don't pay those you'll get turned over for collection.
"There is no game. No one is working on the game. The investors got fleeced." 3drealms got lucky once because of the work of a brilliant young programmer named Ken Silverman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Silverman and great designers like Levelord http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelord and they have been milking the Duke franchise ever since with console ports farmed out to third parties. Once the real talent left the company has been unable to complete a worthwhile follow-up to their original cash-cow. It's not a scam, it's just grossly incompetent management. To their credit, at least George and Scott didn't ship Duke4ever as a turd-quality product like Ion Storm did with Daikatana.
If UWB is like 802.11x then the actual throughput will at best only be about half the claimed speed since the protocol will eat up the other half. Because wireless is half-duplex and has to use the much less efficient Carrier Sense Avoidence instead of Carrier Sense Detection to avoid collusions, your 54 mbps 802.11g router will give you maybe 30 megs tops under ideal conditions. And the more devices talking at the same time the slower it goes as they all try to contend for the medium like a bunch of truckers all trying to talk on the same CB channel at the same time. I'm guessing that a UWB wireless USB hub that claimed 480 mbps on the box when you bought it will actually run a lot slower in the real world. Sadly, vendors usually feel free to use the highest numbers available to them to market the products even if the customers will never achieve those numbers in actual use.
I bought two computers this year: a Mac Mini and a HP Lance Armstrong notebook both of which ordered directly and I found out were made in China by watching them come to me with the Fedex tracking number. But no where on either machine is the designation "Made in China". Irony of ironies - the US fought a long and bloody war in the 60s and early 70s to prevent an Asian country from becoming communist. Now it seems like most of the stuff we buy today is made in a communist Asian country.
Not much. I'm an adult living with Asperger's Syndrome http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperger_Syndrome so my job prospects are rather limited. When I took the job I had no idea what I was getting into but I'm still here because of the checks and I damn near starved doing that dsl tech support job.
I work in "retention" (meaning I take cancellation calls) at an AOL call center. I'm ashamed of what I do here but the money is so damn good that I'm doing it anyway, bad karma be damned.
The "saves rate" expected of us is 65%. Incredibly, we have to get two thirds of the people calling to cancel their AOL off the phone without canceling them. This pressure to hit these numbers causes retention agents to due some pretty unscrupulous things.
In training we are told a bunch of bullshit about the "value" of AOL. But that's not how it works when you get out onto the floor. Here's how it really works: You be a very good listener, repeat back to the member the cancellation reason as though you agree with them to give the member the feeling that you are to cancel their account. You be extremely nice to them and show empathy. This is to get them to let their guard down. Then you ask them to get a piece of paper and write down your email address and you start talking about keyword this and keyword that to confuse and distract them. Then you read the "full disclosure" which is a statement that basically says your account is not canceled. If they are not listening closely they will get off the phone with the feeling that you have cancelled the account even though you didn't.
Once you practice and polish the technique it works amazingly well especially on people who don't speak real good english, older folks, inner city types who have little experience dealing with good salespeople, hillbillies in Alabama and people who are just plain stupid. And since they are stupid they typically don't look at their checking or credit card statements and many months may go by before they notice that AOL is hitting them for $23.90 a month in automatic withdrawals. Do the math. It's a lot of money for AOL.
I am ashamed of myself. But my last job was tech support and I made $9.75 and hour. Here I make about $28 an hour. As soon as I save enough for a down payment for a house I'm getting out of here.
As someone formally employed in the IT certification training industry, I can tell you that the results of these surveys are often used by unscrupulous salespeople to sell expensive courses and training "kits" (over-priced boxes of cheaply bound, poor quality books and a CD or two) to gullible persons looking to get into IT. Let's say experienced Cisco admins are making $65k/year according to the survey. This information is pitched to prospective students to imply that they will make $65k if they just buy the $5000 CCNA course and pass the exam. Of course a CCNA and no job experience is unlikely to get you a job at all much less a high paying one. I'll name names: Intense School, Wave Technologies, TechSkills, and by far the worst, New Horizons.
Add these to your hosts file: # doubleclick 127.0.0.1 3ad.doubleclick.net 127.0.0.1 ad.3au.doubleclick.net 127.0.0.1 ad.au.doubleclick.net 127.0.0.1 ad.be.doubleclick.net 127.0.0.1 ad.br.doubleclick.net 127.0.0.1 ad.ca.doubleclick.net 127.0.0.1 ad.de.doubleclick.net 127.0.0.1 ad.es.doubleclick.net 127.0.0.1 ad.fi.doubleclick.net 127.0.0.1 ad.fr.doubleclick.net 127.0.0.1 ad.it.doubleclick.net 127.0.0.1 ad.jp.doubleclick.net 127.0.0.1 ad.n2434.doubleclick.net 127.0.0.1 ad.nl.doubleclick.net 127.0.0.1 ad.no.doubleclick.net 127.0.0.1 ad.pl.doubleclick.net 127.0.0.1 ad.se.doubleclick.net 127.0.0.1 ad.sg.doubleclick.net 127.0.0.1 ad.uk.doubleclick.net 127.0.0.1 ad.ve.doubleclick.net 127.0.0.1 ad.za.doubleclick.net 127.0.0.1 ad2.doubleclick.net 127.0.0.1 doubleclick.com 127.0.0.1 doubleclick.de 127.0.0.1 doubleclick.net From http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/
Regular cardio vascular excercise has been shown to provide substantial benefits to alertness. Don't worry about losing your nerd status by excercising. Simply commute to work on a bicycle , like I do, with baggy shorts and a high powered bike like strapped to the top of the helmet. You'll stay fit, save money and retain your geek status.
I paid for a copy of XP when I bought this Sony laptop. But I use a corporate copy of XP and a warez key so that I can have Windows without all the garbage that the Sony cd installs. Too bad that this will affect me even though I'm a paying customer.