Small business lives and dies by its reputation, and the poor call quality of VoIP can really impact customer perception of a business. After using a VoIP solution for a full year, we dumped it in favor of copper. I know that I didn't like having to try to figure out what my customer was saying, and I'm sure that they felt the same way about me.
VoIP for personal use - yes. VoIP for small business - not ready for prime time.
The OS makes a huge difference. Not because the user cares, but the developers who deliver applications certainly do. They want to know that there will be a large enough market for their applications, and there must be tools that are widely available. The Mac would have mopped up on the PC in the 80s if Apple had opened up their APIs and made product development easier. Microsoft gained huge market share by engaging developers.
I have a Zaurus that I really like, and it would be a lot less of a niche machine if it didn't have Qtopia on it. Abandoning X for a lighter alternative was a real mistake by Sharp, and the adoption rate by developers was low. I haven't looked at this product yet, but if it's really a true Linux/X machine running from ROM then I could see a market for it. There are a lot of folks who want to have a "real" machine available to them but don't like the fact that laptops are so fragile.
If they impacted on lunar dayside, the whole event would probably have been lost in the glare.
According to NASA, the Apollo 14 S-IVB impacted in an area that would have been relatively dark at impact. I say "relatively" because the impact was west of the Apollo 14 landing site and since landings were always performed in the lunar dawn to take advantage of shadowing (the 3D effect), it was probably pretty dark in that area when the S-IVB came plowing in at 6,000+ MPH.
On an unrelated note, I've always thought it would be cool to collect a bunch of cash and then go scouting for an S-IC laying on the bottom of the Atlantic. I'm not quite sure how you'd recover it, but it sure would be a collector's item.
I'm really excited about this. If you think about it, this is the first time in human history where we can really witness the interaction of a man-made object on a body in outer space. It would be kind of like looking at the Moon and being able to see the lunar landers sitting on the surface. That is, if you believe that we really went to the Moon.:-)
I understand your enthusiam, but after using VoIP services for nearly a year in our business we switched back to copper. No matter what we did to improve the situation, the call quality never really measured up to that of even a cell phone. IP was never really meant to route real-time traffic, and it definitely shows. QoS can help, but with more and more real-time traffic being driven onto the Internet (video, streaming audio) then my fear is that the QoS indicator is just meaningless. After all, how many apps are willing to tag their content as "unimportant"? Maybe some file transfer stuff, but that's usually a small portion of the traffic.
I'd love to see something like VoIP take off. It just seems like IP is the wrong protocol to do the job.
Well, it's more like "Who in their right mind would ever route his calls through his PC?" For mission critical apps like your phone, you want a dedicated device that doesn't crash. After all, how many people use their PC to *receive* faxes?
Does your local government (city, county, state) produce a voter's pamphlet? Usually those contain a candidate statement and a list of endorsements. Sometimes it can be difficult to interpret where a candidate stands based on their wishy-washy statements, so looking at the list of endorsements can go a long way toward understanding a judge's position. You still have to be careful though, because some endorsements aren't always what they seem. An endorsement of a judge by a police union may be because the judge is tough on crime, but it may also be because he supports big labor. If you're still in doubt then read some of the judge's opinions in cases that he's ruled on.
Re:Stop the corruption, or you will lose money, to
on
A $251 Million Typo
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Tens of thousands of employees and investors have lost their entire life savings because of the corporate fraud in the United States.
There's an old saying - "If it sounds too good to be true then it probably is". People should stop looking to the government to bail them out when their greed gets excessive. If you invested in Enron and got burned, I feel bad for you, but I don't really think that it's a federal matter. We have 100 years of market data that suggests that anything over an 11% return is risky. So just because your broker or the company CEO tells you that they're going to make you millions of dollars, you have to turn on the common sense filter to see if it's right. This is why I didn't buy Netscape or Enron, and have no plans to buy Google. I'm thrilled with an 8% return on a stable issue rather than a 100% return on an unstable one.
Don't get me wrong - I don't think that we shouldn't indict people who cheat the system. I'm just saying that a con artist is only as good as those people who are willing to trust them. Anyone who has been swindled has to accept the fact that they were a willing participant in the scheme. Once you're willing to admit that you were wrong, then you'll look at future "opportunities" with much more discretion.
The sad fact is that this same problem exists in the US in the form of appointed officials. Out here in Seattle, our director of elections is appointed by an elected county executive. During the recent Washington governor's race, several problems popped up with the way that votes were counted. Many on both sides of the fence felt disenfranchised in the process, and the entire thing led to a huge court fight. The problem here is that many people, Democrat and Republican alike, would like to see the system fixed, but our hands are tied since the decision ultimately rests with the county executive. Sure, you can fire him for standing behind his appointment and replace him with someone else, but that seems like a draconian solution the problem. For someone with as much authority as an elections director has, wouldn't you want to directly decide who this individual will be? Granting someone power without electing them is always a bad idea.
Re:Probably this is just a trick by Merrill Lynch.
on
A $251 Million Typo
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Although I'm not quite ready to make the fraud connection yet, I have to admit that I too had problems with the numbers that were listed. In addition, I was troubled by the phrase that "... the trader was unfamiliar with new computer systems". This doesn't sound right to me either. Would you really give this much authority to someone who wasn't adequately trained, or who was trained and couldn't demonstrate the key ability to execute a trade?
It's possible that there's fraud here, and as such should probably be investigated. But it's also possible that it's a case of CYA and the trader was on the losing end. After all, how do you explain the phrase "Something like this is difficult to explain to superiors" by "a Fubon executive"? Could it just be that he's trying to cover his own incompetence in managing his people?
Strongarm tactics like this are what is wrong with our judicial system today.
Actually, what's wrong with our judicial system today is that not enough people take interest in it. How many people take the time to do the research on judges before going to vote? Since most judicial races are non-partisan, it can be difficult to tell if a judge shares your political leanings. So people vote for judges (and legislators for that matter) because they recognize the name from a sign that they saw on the way to the polls.
If you don't like the system then work to change it. Find tech-friendly judges and then run around town putting up their signs on election day.
Ok, I'm not accusing anyone of anything, but I have a simple question. How is anyone to know if this is real or if it's just made up? I seem to recall that there have been cases of people asking for help when it was all just a big scam. Anyone have any suggestions on how to tell if this is for real, other than inspecting documents provided for by the purported victim in this case?
And a lot of what comes from "within" has to do with the company that they're working for. A company that constantly nickles-and-dimes their employees by providing low wages and poor benefits doesn't build any loyalty with those who are manning the phones all day long. I used to try to reason with customer service reps, something along the lines of "If your company delivers bad service, then people like me will take our business elsewhere. When your business declines, you will be out of a job". I've never made it very far with that line of reasoning, in part because the guy I'm talking with could really give a rat's ass about his job. He's not making much money anyway, so if he wasn't answering phones then he'd just be flipping burgers down at McDonalds. (My apologies to those who work at Mickey-D's.)
If you want good customer service then the best place to start is with companies that charge more for their service. They are more likely (but not guaranteed) to treat their employees better, and this reflects directly on customer service.
There's a similar illusion with mountains. When I look at Mount Rainier between some large trees, it looks huge. When I look at it while driving down the highway, it doesn't look all that big. I actually find it disappointing to stand at the foot of the mountain. From that vantage point, it doesn't look all that impressive. Having climbed Mount St. Helens, looking down on a mountain from the top, it looks huge. It's really weird.
It was a tire on a trailer that I was towing. We put too much weight in the back of the trailer and it started to fishtail while we were driving on the highway. The back end snapped around and popped the tire completely off the rim. As I was headed back to the shop, a cop spotted the missing tire and wrote me up. The law that he used was a Michigan law against studded snow tires. It prohibits direct metal contact with the road.
It's possible that even this is not enough. I once had to drive a truck down the road that was missing a tire and got pulled over and written a ticket. I went to court and fought the ticket on the grounds that my boss had told me to drive the vehicle rather than provide a new tire. I still lost the case. As the magistrate told me, "Your boss can't order you to do anything illegal". So if you get a letter from your boss saying that everything is ok, the actual act of asking him for the letter shows your suspicion, and if you get busted you could be asked why you didn't dig further.
Personally, I'd just tell the boss that I wouldn't install the software. I've had times that I've needed to tell me boss that I wouldn't participate in illegal activity. They don't like it, but it's the right thing to do.
Not to mention cost was not one of your initial criteria
And how long have you been reading Slashdot?:-)
Your point is well taken. I guess that I've always operated on a "first impression" basis. If you want to do publishing, get a Mac. Need a good accounting machine? Use Windows. So it's no surprise that I'd naturally look to *nix for machines for my network. In all reality, none of the "vendors" of the various OSes are doing anything to rid themselves of their reputations. They're mainly trying to bring in new lines of business to add on to their existing customer base. That makes it hard to take their claims seriously. After all, would you run a web server off of an AS/400? I know it can be done, but it's really hard for me to believe that a machine with its roots in EBCDIC land does very well with a web browser.
For what it's worth, Apple is doing a great job in extending their media reach with the iPod.
Explain to me how "...provide services to everyone on your network with the unlimited-client edition for $999" helps me. For that money, I can buy a complete hardware/software solution running Linux. With the Mac, I just got an OS. I'm not sure that "Get[ting] enterprise class features and stability starting at $2999" makes a lot of sense for just a piece of hardware.
Product publicity is like watering a plant... The right amount of information, in the right-sized doses, would likely produce something with a better chance of survival.
Having been involved in several startups with budgets ranging from hundreds of millions of dollars down to one that's self-funded, I've found that the key is in knowing when to listen to your customers versus when to tell them what to do. Most people don't believe this, but there are times when you need to tell people what they should be thinking. After all, you're hired not only for your ability to service a customer's needs but also for your expertise, and if you keep asking people all the time what they want then they start wondering whether you know what you're really doing. The message that you want to convey to any new customer is "Hey, I know what I'm doing, and I want to use that knowledge to help you with your needs."
Glad you don't work for me, that type of embicilic comment can lose customers.
As a self-employed, "elitist cut-tax and spend phoney conservative", I don't have to.:-)
The path that you outline is a pretty sensible one. I guess that it really just depends on how much risk you want to take. I know several very successful people who never got any formal education, and they'd all tell you the same thing - try something, and if that doesn't work, keep tweaking it until it does. There's something to the 10% inspiration, 90% perspiration rule. I totally agree that learning from other's mistakes is a really good thing, but I don't think that you have to be working for someone to learn from them. Watch the competition and what others in your industry are doing. Then go out and sell yourself. People don't buy from you because you actually know more, but rather they buy from you because they feel confident that you know what you're doing. The largest, most successful companies are seldom the ones with the best products. They're the ones with the best marketing departments.
Who in their right mind marked this a troll? The initial post is asking what he should do with his newly minted Masters, the response is to go make a job instead of finding one, and somehow this is inappropriate? Or perhaps the moderator is simply a tax-and-spend Democrat who doesn't appreciate the truth when he sees it.
For what it's worth, I totally agree on becoming self-employed. A Masters in CS is really pretty meaningless in today's market. If you're in any technical field, prospective bosses are more worried about whether you can do the job than what your credentials are. Big companies like Microsoft send you through multiple interviews because they know that they can't trust your resume. I have a relative that bills out at $75/hr and his credentials are that he finished high school. The system may not seem fair, but whether you're self-employed or not, your income is directly proportional to your ability to convince others that you're worth the kind of money you're seeking. To the self-employed it's called "sales", and in a corporation it's called "sucking up".
Slashdot Mirror
VoIP for personal use - yes. VoIP for small business - not ready for prime time.
So yes, the OS absolutely matters.
I have a Zaurus that I really like, and it would be a lot less of a niche machine if it didn't have Qtopia on it. Abandoning X for a lighter alternative was a real mistake by Sharp, and the adoption rate by developers was low. I haven't looked at this product yet, but if it's really a true Linux/X machine running from ROM then I could see a market for it. There are a lot of folks who want to have a "real" machine available to them but don't like the fact that laptops are so fragile.
We're just a small business, running everything over DSL. We were using Vonage on the backend.
According to NASA, the Apollo 14 S-IVB impacted in an area that would have been relatively dark at impact. I say "relatively" because the impact was west of the Apollo 14 landing site and since landings were always performed in the lunar dawn to take advantage of shadowing (the 3D effect), it was probably pretty dark in that area when the S-IVB came plowing in at 6,000+ MPH.
On an unrelated note, I've always thought it would be cool to collect a bunch of cash and then go scouting for an S-IC laying on the bottom of the Atlantic. I'm not quite sure how you'd recover it, but it sure would be a collector's item.
I'm really excited about this. If you think about it, this is the first time in human history where we can really witness the interaction of a man-made object on a body in outer space. It would be kind of like looking at the Moon and being able to see the lunar landers sitting on the surface. That is, if you believe that we really went to the Moon. :-)
You're talking Windows here, so your comment should read " EVERTHING you open or look at is logged into temp files or stored in user.reg files."
I'd love to see something like VoIP take off. It just seems like IP is the wrong protocol to do the job.
Well, it's more like "Who in their right mind would ever route his calls through his PC?" For mission critical apps like your phone, you want a dedicated device that doesn't crash. After all, how many people use their PC to *receive* faxes?
Does your local government (city, county, state) produce a voter's pamphlet? Usually those contain a candidate statement and a list of endorsements. Sometimes it can be difficult to interpret where a candidate stands based on their wishy-washy statements, so looking at the list of endorsements can go a long way toward understanding a judge's position. You still have to be careful though, because some endorsements aren't always what they seem. An endorsement of a judge by a police union may be because the judge is tough on crime, but it may also be because he supports big labor. If you're still in doubt then read some of the judge's opinions in cases that he's ruled on.
There's an old saying - "If it sounds too good to be true then it probably is". People should stop looking to the government to bail them out when their greed gets excessive. If you invested in Enron and got burned, I feel bad for you, but I don't really think that it's a federal matter. We have 100 years of market data that suggests that anything over an 11% return is risky. So just because your broker or the company CEO tells you that they're going to make you millions of dollars, you have to turn on the common sense filter to see if it's right. This is why I didn't buy Netscape or Enron, and have no plans to buy Google. I'm thrilled with an 8% return on a stable issue rather than a 100% return on an unstable one.
Don't get me wrong - I don't think that we shouldn't indict people who cheat the system. I'm just saying that a con artist is only as good as those people who are willing to trust them. Anyone who has been swindled has to accept the fact that they were a willing participant in the scheme. Once you're willing to admit that you were wrong, then you'll look at future "opportunities" with much more discretion.
The sad fact is that this same problem exists in the US in the form of appointed officials. Out here in Seattle, our director of elections is appointed by an elected county executive. During the recent Washington governor's race, several problems popped up with the way that votes were counted. Many on both sides of the fence felt disenfranchised in the process, and the entire thing led to a huge court fight. The problem here is that many people, Democrat and Republican alike, would like to see the system fixed, but our hands are tied since the decision ultimately rests with the county executive. Sure, you can fire him for standing behind his appointment and replace him with someone else, but that seems like a draconian solution the problem. For someone with as much authority as an elections director has, wouldn't you want to directly decide who this individual will be? Granting someone power without electing them is always a bad idea.
It's possible that there's fraud here, and as such should probably be investigated. But it's also possible that it's a case of CYA and the trader was on the losing end. After all, how do you explain the phrase "Something like this is difficult to explain to superiors" by "a Fubon executive"? Could it just be that he's trying to cover his own incompetence in managing his people?
If a robot falls over in a shopping mall and none of the old people can hear it, does it still make a sound?
Actually, what's wrong with our judicial system today is that not enough people take interest in it. How many people take the time to do the research on judges before going to vote? Since most judicial races are non-partisan, it can be difficult to tell if a judge shares your political leanings. So people vote for judges (and legislators for that matter) because they recognize the name from a sign that they saw on the way to the polls.
If you don't like the system then work to change it. Find tech-friendly judges and then run around town putting up their signs on election day.
Ok, I'm not accusing anyone of anything, but I have a simple question. How is anyone to know if this is real or if it's just made up? I seem to recall that there have been cases of people asking for help when it was all just a big scam. Anyone have any suggestions on how to tell if this is for real, other than inspecting documents provided for by the purported victim in this case?
If you want good customer service then the best place to start is with companies that charge more for their service. They are more likely (but not guaranteed) to treat their employees better, and this reflects directly on customer service.
There's a similar illusion with mountains. When I look at Mount Rainier between some large trees, it looks huge. When I look at it while driving down the highway, it doesn't look all that big. I actually find it disappointing to stand at the foot of the mountain. From that vantage point, it doesn't look all that impressive. Having climbed Mount St. Helens, looking down on a mountain from the top, it looks huge. It's really weird.
It was a tire on a trailer that I was towing. We put too much weight in the back of the trailer and it started to fishtail while we were driving on the highway. The back end snapped around and popped the tire completely off the rim. As I was headed back to the shop, a cop spotted the missing tire and wrote me up. The law that he used was a Michigan law against studded snow tires. It prohibits direct metal contact with the road.
Personally, I'd just tell the boss that I wouldn't install the software. I've had times that I've needed to tell me boss that I wouldn't participate in illegal activity. They don't like it, but it's the right thing to do.
And how long have you been reading Slashdot? :-)
Your point is well taken. I guess that I've always operated on a "first impression" basis. If you want to do publishing, get a Mac. Need a good accounting machine? Use Windows. So it's no surprise that I'd naturally look to *nix for machines for my network. In all reality, none of the "vendors" of the various OSes are doing anything to rid themselves of their reputations. They're mainly trying to bring in new lines of business to add on to their existing customer base. That makes it hard to take their claims seriously. After all, would you run a web server off of an AS/400? I know it can be done, but it's really hard for me to believe that a machine with its roots in EBCDIC land does very well with a web browser.
For what it's worth, Apple is doing a great job in extending their media reach with the iPod.
Am I missing something here?
Having been involved in several startups with budgets ranging from hundreds of millions of dollars down to one that's self-funded, I've found that the key is in knowing when to listen to your customers versus when to tell them what to do. Most people don't believe this, but there are times when you need to tell people what they should be thinking. After all, you're hired not only for your ability to service a customer's needs but also for your expertise, and if you keep asking people all the time what they want then they start wondering whether you know what you're really doing. The message that you want to convey to any new customer is "Hey, I know what I'm doing, and I want to use that knowledge to help you with your needs."
As a self-employed, "elitist cut-tax and spend phoney conservative", I don't have to. :-)
The path that you outline is a pretty sensible one. I guess that it really just depends on how much risk you want to take. I know several very successful people who never got any formal education, and they'd all tell you the same thing - try something, and if that doesn't work, keep tweaking it until it does. There's something to the 10% inspiration, 90% perspiration rule. I totally agree that learning from other's mistakes is a really good thing, but I don't think that you have to be working for someone to learn from them. Watch the competition and what others in your industry are doing. Then go out and sell yourself. People don't buy from you because you actually know more, but rather they buy from you because they feel confident that you know what you're doing. The largest, most successful companies are seldom the ones with the best products. They're the ones with the best marketing departments.
For what it's worth, I totally agree on becoming self-employed. A Masters in CS is really pretty meaningless in today's market. If you're in any technical field, prospective bosses are more worried about whether you can do the job than what your credentials are. Big companies like Microsoft send you through multiple interviews because they know that they can't trust your resume. I have a relative that bills out at $75/hr and his credentials are that he finished high school. The system may not seem fair, but whether you're self-employed or not, your income is directly proportional to your ability to convince others that you're worth the kind of money you're seeking. To the self-employed it's called "sales", and in a corporation it's called "sucking up".