Apparently all the slashdot readers are techies blaming managers...
That might be the most important one, but some projects fail because the technical staff is incompetent.
We programmers tend to assume that we are skilled enough to do whatever task we have on hand, thus blaming managament for all the problems.
We fail to admit that often is that's to work with us, for one because we are not social people and often lack communication skills.
Some of us are just primadonnas who believe we rock and if people were a bit clever they would tell and let us "lead the project technically". The fact is that the scope of these large projects is huge, and we developers can't see even 1% of it...
I say this after 10 years in the business. Since I stopped blaming managers for everything and blame myself for half of the problems, I've been way more valued by the people I work with.
My experience is quite different, at least lately. My last order was pretty large, and they split it in 3 different boxes. However, each box came with a content list of the entire order.
As a result, customs wanted to charge me three times as much taxes. This, combined with the fact that UPS pays for the taxes and then collects from the buyer, put me in a difficult position. It was impossible to fix the mess with customs, as the three boxes had already been cleared, UPS wouldn't return the boxes to Amazon until they paid for taxes...
Each time I emailed Amazon a guy with an Indian name replied two or three days later with some stupid precooked reply.
As of yet I don't know if Amazon has fixed this or they still can't put the actual contents of each box on it...what I know is that they didn't fix this for me.
You can blame piracy for your company going belly up as much as you want.
The fact is that the most pirated programs are most likely the most successful in actual sales and the companies behind them enjoy quite a bit of success.
Example: Winzip. I would be surprised if their customer base accounted for more than 1% of their user base.
More examples: FlashFXP, ACDSee...
Let alone the big players.
There are other reasons for downloading...
on
TV Piracy is Next
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The American TV industry is missing a major reason to download their shows: Some people just CANNOT buy the programming. At any cost.
Overseas TV fans who speak English download the shows because they want to watch their favourite stuff
a) In English (no dubbing crap)
b) At the same time it airs, not a few years latter
I would be more than happy to pay for the same contents that a regular DirectTV subscriber. But I just can't, so I either download the shows or I'm stuck with whatever the TV station airs. I believe they are premiering Buffy season 6 in a few weeks.
"The same theories that say that a person is worth what the market is willing to pay, also predict ZERO unemployment.".
There are things such as
- Minimum wage
- Unemployment protection
- Not being willing to do certain jobs for less than it's worth
- etc
That prevent this from happening.
Otherwise there would be zero unemployment, as anyone with a job would be more than happy to employ someone to take out the trash (to name one thing that comes to mind) for a couple of cents. See?
met my future wife in one of these services...
on
Online Dating Advice?
·
· Score: 1
meetic.com to be exact. Not that I recommend it specially as I haven't used any other service and the interface of this one, when I used it, wasn't a technical miracle, to put it mildly.
Telling someone not to use this services is as bad advice as 'don't look for girls in bars'. You never know where you can find a match for you and every place is worth a shot. This one has the added convenience.
How it worked for me: I didn't have a job at the time, so I had a lot of time to be online at the time where it's most useful (when the girls where at work, which is where most of them have access to internet - nevermind the 'the shouldn't be chatting at work', the fact is that they are).
I tried to chat with every online girl, not paying a lot of attention to their profile (except for age and location). I assumed most of them lied a bit to look more interesting and after all I was just trying to have some fun and get the hang of it.
Approximately 1 out of 20 replies to a hello (keep in mind that they have way more chat windows open than you do, so they don't answer to one of you). With practice, I found good openers that raised this number to something better, like 5/20 or so.
Anyway, I made some friends online. Some I found attractive, some I didn't, but in any case we chatted for hours (remember I had a lot of free time and nothing to loose) so I learnt a lot about women in general, what to say, what not to say, etc.
BTW, don't be scared about people lying in their profile. They do, but you find about it early in the game. If they say they love reading and you do, you'll find out whether it's true or not.
Anyway, some active members of meetic organized parties and stuff, and a girl invited me to one, which I attended with a friend. It was one of the first parties so everyone was a bit unconfortable, but at least we put faces to the nicks, etc.
The parties became other social activities such as going to the movies, or spending a day in the park, and the group of people trying to date online became a group of single people just having fun.
My current fiance, which I'm marrying in February -two years and a half after the chat log was created- was a girl I wasn't interested in except as a friend (I great one I might add - incredible person). I invited her to one of this events, so we met in person in a little pressure context (at least for me anyway).
From what I know of that group:
- Two people married four months ago.
- Two more (my girlfriend and I) are getting married in four months.
- Two live together and have a child (they don't want to be married, though).
- Another two say they don't love each other but meet from time to time for ocassional sex.
- They friend that came with me to the first party is still a virgin.
And the group hardly ever organize events, as the most active people in it already found what they were looking for. But still, we keep a mailing list and know where to find one another.
I'm sure other people can tell you nightmares from online dating services. But the same applies to almost every place you look for someone, so... if you are single, and are as shy I am, give this a try.
PRECISELY because they are a de-facto monopoly, there is no point in blacklisting their IP whole range.
There's nothing the customers can do about this. Telefonica doesn't listen to their customers in the first place, because they can't go anywhere else.
(let alone their customers' customers).
There's a reason Telefonica can't cancel the spammers accounts. They are not their customers.
Telefonica sells ADSL services to other ISP, which sell the service to the users. So pretty much everyone in Spain uses Telefonica's IP addresses, but that's it. No relationship between Telefonica and the spammer, and if I was an ISP and Telefonica decided to terminate service to one of my customer I would certainly be upset (as I could be sued by my customer for not providing the service).
To that clown that said it's fine with him because he only gets real email "from the good old USA"... dude, 90% of the spammers are American in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
"Ebay scammers are _already_ breaking the law, so what qualms could they possibly have about "selling on ebay without a license."
It's much easier to prove that you sold something that you scammed someone. This makes the "investigation" process totally automatic.
... and this is dream world too.
and mine didn't :-) Who do I have to sleep with to get something posted?
OK, OK, my story sucked big time, but this question beat me hands down!
You can't always fire people or hire new people. Sometimes you are assigned a group of people and you have to finish your project with them.
Apparently all the slashdot readers are techies blaming managers...
That might be the most important one, but some projects fail because the technical staff is incompetent.
We programmers tend to assume that we are skilled enough to do whatever task we have on hand, thus blaming managament for all the problems.
We fail to admit that often is that's to work with us, for one because we are not social people and often lack communication skills.
Some of us are just primadonnas who believe we rock and if people were a bit clever they would tell and let us "lead the project technically". The fact is that the scope of these large projects is huge, and we developers can't see even 1% of it...
I say this after 10 years in the business. Since I stopped blaming managers for everything and blame myself for half of the problems, I've been way more valued by the people I work with.
My experience is quite different, at least lately. My last order was pretty large, and they split it in 3 different boxes. However, each box came with a content list of the entire order.
As a result, customs wanted to charge me three times as much taxes. This, combined with the fact that UPS pays for the taxes and then collects from the buyer, put me in a difficult position. It was impossible to fix the mess with customs, as the three boxes had already been cleared, UPS wouldn't return the boxes to Amazon until they paid for taxes...
Each time I emailed Amazon a guy with an Indian name replied two or three days later with some stupid precooked reply.
As of yet I don't know if Amazon has fixed this or they still can't put the actual contents of each box on it...what I know is that they didn't fix this for me.
You can blame piracy for your company going belly up as much as you want. ...
The fact is that the most pirated programs are most likely the most successful in actual sales and the companies behind them enjoy quite a bit of success.
Example: Winzip. I would be surprised if their customer base accounted for more than 1% of their user base.
More examples: FlashFXP, ACDSee
Let alone the big players.
Sorry. My first first post.
I know this sucks.
The American TV industry is missing a major reason to download their shows: Some people just CANNOT buy the programming. At any cost.
Overseas TV fans who speak English download the shows because they want to watch their favourite stuff
a) In English (no dubbing crap)
b) At the same time it airs, not a few years latter
I would be more than happy to pay for the same contents that a regular DirectTV subscriber. But I just can't, so I either download the shows or I'm stuck with whatever the TV station airs. I believe they are premiering Buffy season 6 in a few weeks.
"The same theories that say that a person is worth what the market is willing to pay, also predict ZERO unemployment.". There are things such as - Minimum wage - Unemployment protection - Not being willing to do certain jobs for less than it's worth - etc That prevent this from happening. Otherwise there would be zero unemployment, as anyone with a job would be more than happy to employ someone to take out the trash (to name one thing that comes to mind) for a couple of cents. See?
meetic.com to be exact. Not that I recommend it specially as I haven't used any other service and the interface of this one, when I used it, wasn't a technical miracle, to put it mildly.
Telling someone not to use this services is as bad advice as 'don't look for girls in bars'. You never know where you can find a match for you and every place is worth a shot. This one has the added convenience.
How it worked for me: I didn't have a job at the time, so I had a lot of time to be online at the time where it's most useful (when the girls where at work, which is where most of them have access to internet - nevermind the 'the shouldn't be chatting at work', the fact is that they are).
I tried to chat with every online girl, not paying a lot of attention to their profile (except for age and location). I assumed most of them lied a bit to look more interesting and after all I was just trying to have some fun and get the hang of it.
Approximately 1 out of 20 replies to a hello (keep in mind that they have way more chat windows open than you do, so they don't answer to one of you). With practice, I found good openers that raised this number to something better, like 5/20 or so.
Anyway, I made some friends online. Some I found attractive, some I didn't, but in any case we chatted for hours (remember I had a lot of free time and nothing to loose) so I learnt a lot about women in general, what to say, what not to say, etc.
BTW, don't be scared about people lying in their profile. They do, but you find about it early in the game. If they say they love reading and you do, you'll find out whether it's true or not.
Anyway, some active members of meetic organized parties and stuff, and a girl invited me to one, which I attended with a friend. It was one of the first parties so everyone was a bit unconfortable, but at least we put faces to the nicks, etc.
The parties became other social activities such as going to the movies, or spending a day in the park, and the group of people trying to date online became a group of single people just having fun.
My current fiance, which I'm marrying in February -two years and a half after the chat log was created- was a girl I wasn't interested in except as a friend (I great one I might add - incredible person). I invited her to one of this events, so we met in person in a little pressure context (at least for me anyway).
From what I know of that group:
- Two people married four months ago.
- Two more (my girlfriend and I) are getting married in four months.
- Two live together and have a child (they don't want to be married, though).
- Another two say they don't love each other but meet from time to time for ocassional sex.
- They friend that came with me to the first party is still a virgin.
And the group hardly ever organize events, as the most active people in it already found what they were looking for. But still, we keep a mailing list and know where to find one another.
I'm sure other people can tell you nightmares from online dating services. But the same applies to almost every place you look for someone, so... if you are single, and are as shy I am, give this a try.
PRECISELY because they are a de-facto monopoly, there is no point in blacklisting their IP whole range. There's nothing the customers can do about this. Telefonica doesn't listen to their customers in the first place, because they can't go anywhere else. (let alone their customers' customers).
There's a reason Telefonica can't cancel the spammers accounts. They are not their customers. Telefonica sells ADSL services to other ISP, which sell the service to the users. So pretty much everyone in Spain uses Telefonica's IP addresses, but that's it. No relationship between Telefonica and the spammer, and if I was an ISP and Telefonica decided to terminate service to one of my customer I would certainly be upset (as I could be sued by my customer for not providing the service). To that clown that said it's fine with him because he only gets real email "from the good old USA"... dude, 90% of the spammers are American in the first place.