For a while I worked doing customer support for Sprint. There are two really big problems:
1. A lot of customers are just trying to scam the company. 2. The company is super cheap and doesn't want to pay-up when they are wrong.
To compound this delicate situation, the software we used to track these issues is REALLY REALLY bad. You have never seen bad software until you've worked for Sprint (imagine the worst windows program in the world and then make it 100times worse).
I started training with 16 people (which is a small group compared to the normal size) -- of those 16 peope, I was the ONLY one that truly understood the billing system. And the only reason I understood it is because I took an accounting course in college. When you phone Sprint with a billing problem -- chances are the person that you are talking to only knows a little bit more than you.
But let me tell you what a service agent is up against -- when someone phones in with a problem you've got four bosses pressuring you to: 1. end the call as quickly as possible because time is money; 2. sell the customer something they don't need; 3. solve all their many problems... Now they all like to talk bout "solving" the customer's problem, but that's more like an obstacle in the course of making more money.
They keep detailed records of how long the calls were, and numerous other 'metrics'. If our calls were getting too long (eg: because we were helping the customer) then we have some asshole boss hassling us over our performance. If we don't make enough sales offers -- same thing -- we get hassled. Try and think of a combination of "office space" and "boiler room". I remember one day when I got 20 calls in a row, and only one of them was applicable to make a sales offer (the rest were agents from sprint stores, people who hung up, etc) well, because my offer rate was so low they took me aside and gave me "special coaching"... They wouldn't listen to the fact that I COULDN'T make sales offers on these calls... they treated me like I was a moron.
And the customers -- don't even get me started on the customers. The customer would be yelling at you through the headset, and at the very same time your boss would be yelling in your other ear. It was a crappy job -- the company was crappy, the co-workers were crappy, and the customers were crappy.
That's exactly what happened to my parents a few years back -- they bought the third party ink and it had the heads all gummed/plugged up before the cartridge was even half done. They paid to have the printer cleaned/fixed but it was never the same again. They eventually gave up and bought a new one.
Is cheap ink worth it? Maybe if you're buying $50 junk printers, but certainly not if you've spent $200+ on a good printer.
"also really, really love how every Microsoft employee has it drilled into them from an early age that any decision made, in reality for the pure benefit of Microsoft [...]"
Yeah, but pretty much every big company does that. I used to work for Convergys doing customer support for one of the leading wireless phone companies in the US -- and during the training they were always brainwashing us to do their evil bidding. They basically told us to lie to customers in a round about way (obviously they didn't refer to it as lying) and had most employees convinced that this wasn't unethical. You know, things like "Hi Mrs Martin, I see you're our 1000th caller today, and you have just won a special discount on x_service".... Where they weren't really the 1000th caller, and there was no special discount it was just the regular price. Yeah, maybe it's minor, but a small lie is still a lie, and I sure wouldn't want to do business with a company that was full knowingly trying to trick me. This is only one example, but this sort of thing was happening all the time. There was far too much pressure to sell and do shifty unethical things -- so I quit. Unfortunately most of the people working there just went along with it.
I'm pretty sure I recall reading that Matt didn't think GEOM solved the problem in the most desirable way, consequently nobody has tried to port it over. Although, don't quote me on it.
Now to begin with, I'm going to mention I'm not into body modification. I personally think it's kind of silly. However, the "old generation" does equally silly things that I also have trouble respecting (eg: starchy uncomfortable clothes).
Calling someone immature because they choose to act differently than yourself is kind of -- well -- imature in itself. Oh, I agree, there are a lot of immature college students -- and some of them were very distracting when I was still in college -- but this had nothing to do with their hair style, the clothes they wore, or the strange piercings they chose to get. The problem was that they were not focussed on school -- and I found it rather annoying that I was using my own hard earned money to take a course only to have some idiot kids talking over the prof. The problem is that mommy and daddy are paying for their classes, and the kids can't really appreciate what they're blowing.
But, as for maturity -- I find the old generation has a tendency to misuse the word. Wearing a bunch of starchy uncomfortable clothes and having short hair by no means makes you mature.
I'm sure I would be labelled as immature because I have long hair and a beard. But you know what? I don't care. I have employers knocking at my door all the time -- and they don't seem to care either. If a company is more caught up on my appearance than my qualifications, then they've got their priorities mixed up.
What if a company turns down a good coder because he has visible tattoos? Is this 'mature' management? I don't think so.
You know, I'll always love slashdot comments -- come on man, you're telling me you can't even spell VAST right? If you're going to be insulting me the least you could do is make sure your four letter words are spelled right.
Anyway, look man, I don't believe my comment tried to make generalizations about jewish people. I was not hiding the fact that it was based primarily on first hand experience, however, it was in reply to a lame comment about how hard it is for Jews to talk about how brilliant their friends and families are. My point WAS that you can't come to conclusions based on a few people in your life. Did you honestly not get this? Do you not see the parallels? Let me say this so that you understand: I was mocking the great-grand-parent's horribly flawed reasoning.
Jews are no better than anyone else, contrary to what some (notice the word 'some' here) might like to believe. Now I'm just waiting for everyone to label me as 'hitler' just for trying to suggest this.
You can now proceed to call me "rediculous" and further insult my POV.
You know, I've only talked to a few Jewish people, but they've always drilled me with the whole "Jews are smarter than everyone else" speech. Maybe the reason it 'seems' this way is because Jews are so insecure that they need to find evidence that there's something special about them. If you look hard enough for something, eventually you will find it. Other cultures (that are more secure) don't spend so much time looking for this relationship.
I am Scotch/English, and many of my friends/family are quite intelligent. I just don't think about it as being relative to a certain cultural/religious background. And really, until reading this article/comment I've never felt the need to say it.
I would suggest that it is _much_ harder to say anything that could be interpreted as anti-jewish than the opposite.
I don't think it has anything to do with Hitler, or the moral majority. If you stand up and say "x_group is smarter than everyone else", then you're going to end up with a lot of people that are going to try and prove otherwise. It's nothing personal, there's no hidden agenda, it's just human nature -- when you say how much better you are, it implies someone else is less. If you go around stepping on people's egos you will find that they don't want to be your friends.
Fortunately George W. Still can't find Canada on the map (sssh! let's keep it that way), so any information acquired that violates our privacy will probably be useless to them. They might as well get a SETI client and mine through some of that data. I can see it right now:
"Your excellence, it appears that an evil race of aliens are planning to attack us -- also, they have a whole bunch of oil. Good thing we already have PATRIOT ACT VIII drafted up."
I know from experience that it's next to impossible to teach 40+ year olds the difference between left and right mouse buttons. When they think left and right they think in relation to their chest. It's left if it's on the left side of their chest, and right if it's on the right side of their chest. Suddenly with two button mice the point of reference now becomes inbetween the first two fingers on the right hand (or lefthand if you're a lefty).
Kids pick these things up like nothing. Most kids have no prior experience that could confuse them, so they'll learn much faster.
Apple still wants to appeal to the lowest common denomonator. And I think Apple recognises that the baby boomer generation still has a lot of $$$ that can be spent on computers (especially when they start to retire and don't have much else to do).
Ummm.. the beer scale is mine dude. I invented the beer scale. So, being the inventor I'll describe how it works and why your use of it is completely wrong:
1. -1 to -12 beers = good to mega hot 2. 0 beers = neutral 3. 1 to 12 beers = meh to gorgon
The first range (in the negative) demonstrates how many beers you would be willing to give up in order to score. The 2nd range (0) is neutral and means you wouldn't give any up, but she's not so bad you'd have to drink any. The last stage is how many beers you'd have to drink before you'd get with her.
Now that we know the rules we'll re-evaluate her:
1. physically attractive: YES 2. smart & interested in computers: definitely adds to percieved attractiveness 3. commodore 64 = cool
So, my sober rating of her would be -8 beers. It's not often that you find a hot computer chick. It pretty much falls into the same category as a "smart jock" or all those other wonderful stereotypes.
Mergemaster is a painful step, and one that can often be confuse the user. It can usually be ignored.
Mergemaster, in theory, is used to update the files in/etc. It is very kludgy, slow, and painful though. It makes a whole bunch of diffs between the existing files and the newly proposed files, then forces you to decide whether or not you want to replace them. The questions it asks are confusing, and it's not entirely intuitive as to what is going on. To me, it seemed as though it increased the likelihood of accidents that could be very hard to track down in the future.
I could have wasted 3 hours sitting around looking at diffs trying to figure out what the hell was going on -- after about 20 mins I just gave up.
In DFBSD you can use "make upgrade" which safely updates the important/etc files without having to mess around with mergemaster. There was a discussion a while back on the DFBSD mailinglist where it was determined that mergemaster wasn't a terribly useful step.
Can't you just keep a list of passwords on a piece of paper locked up somewhere?
I know how hard it is to juggle a million passwords, but there has to be a better way than having a global password on each system.
Re:Somebody settle it once and for all
on
BSD Interview Roundup
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I would say that the BSDs are all pretty close security wise. The typical answer is "OpenBSD" is the most secure, but the truth is that it's the sys admin that makes the biggest difference.
A bad sys admin is like a bad driver, and we all know what happens when you let a bad driver borrow your BMW.
Whenever a really great security feature gets added to OpenBSD, it won't be long before it will end up in the others. So when you get the time it's likely best to try them all and choose which you like best, as there is no OS that is completely immune to security problems.
Slashdot Mirror
For a while I worked doing customer support for Sprint. There are two really big problems:
1. A lot of customers are just trying to scam the company.
2. The company is super cheap and doesn't want to pay-up when they are wrong.
To compound this delicate situation, the software we used to track these issues is REALLY REALLY bad. You have never seen bad software until you've worked for Sprint (imagine the worst windows program in the world and then make it 100times worse).
I started training with 16 people (which is a small group compared to the normal size) -- of those 16 peope, I was the ONLY one that truly understood the billing system. And the only reason I understood it is because I took an accounting course in college. When you phone Sprint with a billing problem -- chances are the person that you are talking to only knows a little bit more than you.
But let me tell you what a service agent is up against -- when someone phones in with a problem you've got four bosses pressuring you to: 1. end the call as quickly as possible because time is money; 2. sell the customer something they don't need; 3. solve all their many problems... Now they all like to talk bout "solving" the customer's problem, but that's more like an obstacle in the course of making more money.
They keep detailed records of how long the calls were, and numerous other 'metrics'. If our calls were getting too long (eg: because we were helping the customer) then we have some asshole boss hassling us over our performance. If we don't make enough sales offers -- same thing -- we get hassled. Try and think of a combination of "office space" and "boiler room". I remember one day when I got 20 calls in a row, and only one of them was applicable to make a sales offer (the rest were agents from sprint stores, people who hung up, etc) well, because my offer rate was so low they took me aside and gave me "special coaching"... They wouldn't listen to the fact that I COULDN'T make sales offers on these calls... they treated me like I was a moron.
And the customers -- don't even get me started on the customers. The customer would be yelling at you through the headset, and at the very same time your boss would be yelling in your other ear. It was a crappy job -- the company was crappy, the co-workers were crappy, and the customers were crappy.
That's exactly what happened to my parents a few years back -- they bought the third party ink and it had the heads all gummed/plugged up before the cartridge was even half done. They paid to have the printer cleaned/fixed but it was never the same again. They eventually gave up and bought a new one.
Is cheap ink worth it? Maybe if you're buying $50 junk printers, but certainly not if you've spent $200+ on a good printer.
"also really, really love how every Microsoft employee has it drilled into them from an early age that any decision made, in reality for the pure benefit of Microsoft [...]"
Yeah, but pretty much every big company does that. I used to work for Convergys doing customer support for one of the leading wireless phone companies in the US -- and during the training they were always brainwashing us to do their evil bidding. They basically told us to lie to customers in a round about way (obviously they didn't refer to it as lying) and had most employees convinced that this wasn't unethical. You know, things like "Hi Mrs Martin, I see you're our 1000th caller today, and you have just won a special discount on x_service".... Where they weren't really the 1000th caller, and there was no special discount it was just the regular price. Yeah, maybe it's minor, but a small lie is still a lie, and I sure wouldn't want to do business with a company that was full knowingly trying to trick me. This is only one example, but this sort of thing was happening all the time. There was far too much pressure to sell and do shifty unethical things -- so I quit. Unfortunately most of the people working there just went along with it.
I'm pretty sure I recall reading that Matt didn't think GEOM solved the problem in the most desirable way, consequently nobody has tried to port it over. Although, don't quote me on it.
Let me guess here: Blipverts?
Am I the only one that recognizes this as being a joke?
About the text on the plaque: Do you people really take this literally?
The giant life sized plastic geek doesn't give it away to you?
It's just a harmless gag.
Okay, I'll bite.
Now to begin with, I'm going to mention I'm not into body modification. I personally think it's kind of silly. However, the "old generation" does equally silly things that I also have trouble respecting (eg: starchy uncomfortable clothes).
Calling someone immature because they choose to act differently than yourself is kind of -- well -- imature in itself. Oh, I agree, there are a lot of immature college students -- and some of them were very distracting when I was still in college -- but this had nothing to do with their hair style, the clothes they wore, or the strange piercings they chose to get. The problem was that they were not focussed on school -- and I found it rather annoying that I was using my own hard earned money to take a course only to have some idiot kids talking over the prof. The problem is that mommy and daddy are paying for their classes, and the kids can't really appreciate what they're blowing.
But, as for maturity -- I find the old generation has a tendency to misuse the word. Wearing a bunch of starchy uncomfortable clothes and having short hair by no means makes you mature.
I'm sure I would be labelled as immature because I have long hair and a beard. But you know what? I don't care. I have employers knocking at my door all the time -- and they don't seem to care either. If a company is more caught up on my appearance than my qualifications, then they've got their priorities mixed up.
What if a company turns down a good coder because he has visible tattoos? Is this 'mature' management? I don't think so.
You know, I'll always love slashdot comments -- come on man, you're telling me you can't even spell VAST right? If you're going to be insulting me the least you could do is make sure your four letter words are spelled right.
Anyway, look man, I don't believe my comment tried to make generalizations about jewish people. I was not hiding the fact that it was based primarily on first hand experience, however, it was in reply to a lame comment about how hard it is for Jews to talk about how brilliant their friends and families are. My point WAS that you can't come to conclusions based on a few people in your life. Did you honestly not get this? Do you not see the parallels? Let me say this so that you understand: I was mocking the great-grand-parent's horribly flawed reasoning.
Jews are no better than anyone else, contrary to what some (notice the word 'some' here) might like to believe. Now I'm just waiting for everyone to label me as 'hitler' just for trying to suggest this.
You can now proceed to call me "rediculous" and further insult my POV.
I never really got this.
You know, I've only talked to a few Jewish people, but they've always drilled me with the whole "Jews are smarter than everyone else" speech. Maybe the reason it 'seems' this way is because Jews are so insecure that they need to find evidence that there's something special about them. If you look hard enough for something, eventually you will find it. Other cultures (that are more secure) don't spend so much time looking for this relationship.
I am Scotch/English, and many of my friends/family are quite intelligent. I just don't think about it as being relative to a certain cultural/religious background. And really, until reading this article/comment I've never felt the need to say it.
I would suggest that it is _much_ harder to say anything that could be interpreted as anti-jewish than the opposite.
I don't think it has anything to do with Hitler, or the moral majority. If you stand up and say "x_group is smarter than everyone else", then you're going to end up with a lot of people that are going to try and prove otherwise. It's nothing personal, there's no hidden agenda, it's just human nature -- when you say how much better you are, it implies someone else is less. If you go around stepping on people's egos you will find that they don't want to be your friends.
Fortunately George W. Still can't find Canada on the map (sssh! let's keep it that way), so any information acquired that violates our privacy will probably be useless to them. They might as well get a SETI client and mine through some of that data. I can see it right now:
"Your excellence, it appears that an evil race of aliens are planning to attack us -- also, they have a whole bunch of oil. Good thing we already have PATRIOT ACT VIII drafted up."
I know from experience that it's next to impossible to teach 40+ year olds the difference between left and right mouse buttons. When they think left and right they think in relation to their chest. It's left if it's on the left side of their chest, and right if it's on the right side of their chest. Suddenly with two button mice the point of reference now becomes inbetween the first two fingers on the right hand (or lefthand if you're a lefty).
Kids pick these things up like nothing. Most kids have no prior experience that could confuse them, so they'll learn much faster.
Apple still wants to appeal to the lowest common denomonator. And I think Apple recognises that the baby boomer generation still has a lot of $$$ that can be spent on computers (especially when they start to retire and don't have much else to do).
Ummm.. the beer scale is mine dude. I invented the beer scale. So, being the inventor I'll describe how it works and why your use of it is completely wrong:
1. -1 to -12 beers = good to mega hot
2. 0 beers = neutral
3. 1 to 12 beers = meh to gorgon
The first range (in the negative) demonstrates how many beers you would be willing to give up in order to score. The 2nd range (0) is neutral and means you wouldn't give any up, but she's not so bad you'd have to drink any. The last stage is how many beers you'd have to drink before you'd get with her.
Now that we know the rules we'll re-evaluate her:
1. physically attractive: YES
2. smart & interested in computers: definitely adds to percieved attractiveness
3. commodore 64 = cool
So, my sober rating of her would be -8 beers. It's not often that you find a hot computer chick. It pretty much falls into the same category as a "smart jock" or all those other wonderful stereotypes.
Mac OS X relies on XNU (modified Mach 3.0 + BSD) for SMP. As far as I know, it uses a mutex model (like linux, freebsd, & netbsd).
Mac OS X SMPWell technically it can be compiled with either the 3.x or 2.9.x versions.
Both are available. You just have to set your CCVER variable.
Mergemaster is a painful step, and one that can often be confuse the user. It can usually be ignored.
/etc. It is very kludgy, slow, and painful though. It makes a whole bunch of diffs between the existing files and the newly proposed files, then forces you to decide whether or not you want to replace them. The questions it asks are confusing, and it's not entirely intuitive as to what is going on. To me, it seemed as though it increased the likelihood of accidents that could be very hard to track down in the future.
/etc files without having to mess around with mergemaster. There was a discussion a while back on the DFBSD mailinglist where it was determined that mergemaster wasn't a terribly useful step.
Mergemaster, in theory, is used to update the files in
I could have wasted 3 hours sitting around looking at diffs trying to figure out what the hell was going on -- after about 20 mins I just gave up.
In DFBSD you can use "make upgrade" which safely updates the important
Can't you just keep a list of passwords on a piece of paper locked up somewhere?
I know how hard it is to juggle a million passwords, but there has to be a better way than having a global password on each system.
I would say that the BSDs are all pretty close security wise. The typical answer is "OpenBSD" is the most secure, but the truth is that it's the sys admin that makes the biggest difference.
A bad sys admin is like a bad driver, and we all know what happens when you let a bad driver borrow your BMW.
Whenever a really great security feature gets added to OpenBSD, it won't be long before it will end up in the others. So when you get the time it's likely best to try them all and choose which you like best, as there is no OS that is completely immune to security problems.