My on-the-side rates go up 10-20 dollars an hour if someone looks like they will be a pain in the ass. Putting up with someone is a lot easier when you know that they will be forking over an extra twenty bucks for the privilege of being mean and getting away with it.
If getting an A+ is the only thing keeping you from higher level work then save up for a little while and get it. The test is really not that expensive, you can even prepare for it with free materials online. At the end of it being able to say: "I worked on the Geek Squad, but they trusted me to go into people's homes/offices." will be well worth the extra effort.
Any thing that is misdagnosed, speak to the coders of GS's software.
Outside of virus and malware scans I cannot think of a single repair incident for which I needed specialized software to make a diagnosis. Hell even virus and malware I usually am opening up the tool with that diagnosis in mind. If you cannot diagnose this on your own there is no software in the world good enough to help you.
We deal with REALLY, REALLY, REALLY stupid people all day long. Many of them barely know how to turn a computer on. So if we mess up, we're sorry.
That is no excuse for screwing up. "Yeah, but he was an idiot" is not a good reason for messing up a computer, especially if you are doing it on accident or through incompetence. That you would even consider this a valid point says many things, none of them good.
And as for the software we use to catalouge customer incidences, well, lets just say that I've seen better software written. In HTML.
Setting aside for a moment that HTML by itself is not capable of writing this kind of software, what does that have to do with incompetent service? So your inventory software sucks, almost all of the computer-specific inventory software sucks. All bad inventory software can do is impede the ordering of parts; it does not screw up a diagnosis, needlessly format a drive, lose data, or browse porn on a computer while attempting to fix it.
People whine and moan about the Geek Squad because you are making the repair industry look like incompetent fools that should not be trusted to operate a toaster, much less fix a computer. If you have any decent skills you should be able to find a job in a reputable repair shop that will not work you ten hours a day. The place you work at is crap, the people you work with are crap, and anyone with the slightest speck of knowledge who is not actively looking for another job is too stupid to run away from the idiots they are being associated with.
Cars simple? Not so my young friend. Have you ever seen a Top Fuel dragster run 320+ with their complicated air/hydraulic timer clutch management system?
Cars are conceptually simple. In general this conceptual similarity allows people to generally understand how a car works. They also, usually, are built with one point in mind: to get from here to there. As your specific requirements change the implementation of a car does become more complex, but the general concept remains the same. Software does not fit with either of these principles, and therefore is more difficult to understand. The analogy is bad because it inherently assumes that, like cars, software can only have a small set of purposes.
Re:Family Guy Season 4+ sucks.
on
Futurama Returns
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· Score: 2, Funny
So I'm confused are they trying too hard or not trying at all?
Before I reply to this I will cite the original comment that the GP was responding to, providing emphasis to highlight the circumstances governing this response:
I get any resistance, and I will imply very strongly that the rep is placing himself at very strong risk of personal legal expense.
What kind of moron threatens to sue at "any resistance"? Yes, there is a script. Yes they have to follow it to keep their job. In most cases the script ensures that someone is not trying to cancel service over a problem that they did not know could be solved. Deciding that the call center guy is morally bankrupt for checking if he can fix the problem you are canceling over may be appropriate for some people, but it seems just a bit much to me.
All that said, I agree that when the script or training leads you to abuse your customers (which appears to be the case for AOL) then you are "morally judgeable". I also think that threatening lawsuits when people are just trying to see if they can solve a problem for you is just plain stupid.
Let me know when the Ninja Party makes its way to the US. Ninjas beat pirates any day. I'm sure they would totally flip out and pass an act abolishing copyright, the *AA, and panhandling all at once. The first two for obvious reasons, the second and third because ninjas don't like whiners.
I still think it would be more amusing if they hired Steve Wozniak and put him as co-leader of the same department as Steve Ballmer. Hell make a tv show out of it. Like the odd couple, except argument are conducted through hardware wizardry and flying chairs.
God help (or rather not help, let them go to hell) the telcos if Google starts using its dark fiber to get into the market as an internet backbone carrier.
God help the rest of us if Google manages to become the only game in town. Yes, Google has their "Do No Evil" thing, but corporations have moral breakpoints, just like people do, usually lower ones too. The data mining possibilities of having access to everyone's internet traffic are just obscene. I think it would be too difficult for them to resist doing something with it.
Meh. Wikipedia runs entirely on Fedora. It might have some slight dependance on skill of your hackers, but other than that they'res not much difference.
Wikipedia's business is also entirely based on their internet presence. For them it makes more sense to have enough skilled hackers to handle potential employee loss. Most companies do not need servers or highly skilled techs in the same way, and would do better to just buy a support contract instead of paying for skilled people they may not need.
In fact just being 2.5 more powerful will have very little difference in graphics. The X360 is something like 25X as powerful as the Xbox, but the graphics are not yet twice as good.
So why is this huge power increase important then? If 25x more hardware capability gives me marginal benefits for significant cost increases what good is it? I would rather pay less for a 2.5x hardware increase with more gameplay avenues and still come out approximately close in graphics quality. Especially considering that most of the big name titles will be ported to all platforms, and will lean towards the graphical lowest common denominator anyways. So the only areas where you are going to see the full advantage of all this extra hardware are exclusive titles, and Nintendo arguably does better there to begin with.
So your assertion is that somehow buying bits in the form of music and videos through iTMS is fine, but buying bits in the form of software is not? What is so special about software that it should be excluded? I could easily see it fitting into the existing categorization model, and I doubt it would take too much work the fit keys/licensing into the whole thing. You even avoid the extra (and probably considerable) bandwidth of the preview function, or have a chance to distribute demos. Aside from a very slight chance of search result pollution I see no real problems with this idea.
Or are you just mad because people are smarter than you and exploit the holes in your software you created?
No one writes entirely bug free code all of the time. Working with a group means that your code is open to someone else's bugs. Sometimes declaring who is responsible for a bug is not obvious, especially if you were to bring up a lawsuit.
Personally, I think companies should be held liable for bugs in their programs.
So what happens if the bug is in a library you are linking to? How about if you are using a old version of the library and the newer version does not have the bug? What if the library was purchased from a company that no longer exists? There are just too many ways in which this is a bad idea that will lead to software being bogged down in overzealous bugtesting and software companies being bogged down in stupid lawsuits and responsibility agreements.
If I were them, I'd rebuild those servers. No telling what backdoors and spy software those RIAA-MPAA goons/law enforcement officials put on the machines while they were searching for incriminating evidence.
If I were them I would pay to have the servers professionally audited for just that kind of addition, then if anything turns up make a huge media stink about it and sue the crap out of everyone who so much as touched a system. I'm sure the law enforcement groups involved being publicly confronted with allegations of helping a giant media conglomerate based in another country put backdoors on perfectly legal domestic servers will make them think twice about doing it again.
Ubuntu and Mac OSX do this as well, though from what I've heard Vista doesn't implement it as well, and asks for your password at for stupid things like adusting the time.
The reasoning behind this is that adjusting the clock in windows modifies the system time instead of some user-specific timekeeper. Without that restriction some chronologically pedantic dingus could knock himself out of sync with the domain servers and will fail any kind of authentication attempts automatically. Granted this means absolutely nothing for home use and gaming, and it is stupid that it works this way instead of keeping system and user time independent, but this is microsoft we are talking about, logical is not one of the adjectives I would apply to their system design.
Here is what I know of OSS philosophy: Write cool software, share it with the world, let people help you make it better. In a nutshell that is it. The OSS philosophy comment was directed at Zend taking patches to fix some of the glaring problems with php as a development platform, or rather the fact that they are pretty difficult about it.
As for your comments about what a language is designed for, that is just foolish stereotyping. Python comes pretty close to Perl in text processing for most cases, Perl can do pretty well for rapid prototyping as well. As far as I know (python personally, perl by reference) they are both good for dynamic web pages. In short: both languages are good at a lot of things. PHP is supposedly only good at dynamic web pages, and stupid crap like string escaping make it difficult for that. If you really believe I am wrong here spend enough time with another language or two to really get to know it, build something you would want to be paid for in it, then come back and tell me php is better.
I suggest you yo try to make a better web scripting language than PHP.
No need to, it has been done. See python(turbogears, django, web.py, twisted nevow, probably about 10-20 others I have forgotten) or ruby(on rails, plus a few others) or perl(plus a lot of stuff I don't know) or a host of other, not stupid languages for details. Except they are not "web scripting languages" they are scripting languages with web platforms, which makes life really really easy when your website needs to talk to anything aside from a database and a web browser.
If you can't do that, then try to analyzed and change those PHP C Code, find any bugs (thats the beauty of open source!!) and then released it to Open Source community and then lets see what bugs do you have!
Why should I polish someone else's turd? I could spend all of that time expanding a sane platform instead of trying to fix the stupidity of php. For another argument against this idea, try to submit a patch to zend and see how long it takes to go through. Do the same for one of the frameworks in another language and tell me who is really interested in the OSS philosophy.
Seems to me like the obvious conclusion to take from these comments is that the proprietary OS is always, inevitably, going to be the less reliable one. You've certainly demonstrated that, compared with that criterion, it's purely academic whether Microsoft has been competent or not.
The funny thing about all of this is that, on the whole, I think your conclusion is correct, it just does not follow from this specific line of reasoning. My point was that a comparison of the Vista beta with Debian testing is unfair, especially when the driver model was changed for Vista.
For this specific topic (driver support during a driver subsystem change) I would say that the border between fair and unfair comparisons lies in the differences between the closed and open source development models, and thus any comparisons are going to be unfair. Pick another topic to gripe about Vista, there are more than enough real ones already.
No but SUSE did and I just installed it, nothing needed to be changed at all.
Good for them. I still think evaluating the state of driver support in a beta version of a product when the driver model was just changed is stupid. Yes, if this were a release, or even a release candidate, of Vista I would think it was crap. That is not the case.
And yes I would rather flame you at this juncture and spend another whole 5 seconds thinking about your comment and how flawed your logic is again, but then again I'm not intellectually qualified to understand. So in that case I will stop right here and let this post do it's job by talking up some of your highly intellectual time, shill.
Why, again, does asking for a fair comparison make me a shill? I agree with a number of valid complaints against Microsoft, Windows, and Vista. I see my lack of enthusiasm for engaging in childishly tilted comparisons of linux and windows as a good thing. Linux, as a community, suffers under that kind of behavior. We should be working to make Linux better, not patting ourselves on the back because current versions of Linux do not suffer from obvious (and temporary) deficiencies in a version of windows that for most practical purposes does not even exist yet. But that's ok, my logic is flawed anyways. Maybe at some point you will even deign to tell me how.
Did slackware 10.2 need new drivers when it was about to be released? You are aware that Microsoft made changes to their driver model that makes compatability with XP drivers spotty at best, right? Expecting full driver compatability in a beta release where the driver subsystem was one of the featured changes seems a bit much. I would stick with DRM and Longhorn/Vista hemmoraging features for reasons why Vista Linux.
No but seriously, I'm on Ubuntu Dapper (Beta OS BTW) and everything worked out of the box! Well I had to change two things and add a modeline in xorg.conf for my monitor, and use automatix. But this is also FOSS software and of course is less reliable than the commercial offerings by microsoft right!!!!
So Ubuntu Dapper made some big changes to the linux driver model that were not present in Breezy and required a huge portion of device drivers to be rewritten before they would work? Oh, wait, they didn't, so for the purposes of discussing this article making that comparison is absolutely pointless.
PS Why does the words Microsoft Shill come to mind all of sudden?
Because you would rather flame someone than spend half a second thinking about what they are saying? Because anyone who does not spooge themselves praising linux is a MS shill in your mind? Maybe it is some kind of emotional defense to arguments you are not intellectually qualified to understand. I am not really sure why you think this. Vista is shaping up to be a pile of crap, but using an unfair comparison to try and illustrate this looks foolish to anyone with half a brain. If calling someone on that makes me an MS shill then you are a tool.
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My on-the-side rates go up 10-20 dollars an hour if someone looks like they will be a pain in the ass. Putting up with someone is a lot easier when you know that they will be forking over an extra twenty bucks for the privilege of being mean and getting away with it.
If getting an A+ is the only thing keeping you from higher level work then save up for a little while and get it. The test is really not that expensive, you can even prepare for it with free materials online. At the end of it being able to say: "I worked on the Geek Squad, but they trusted me to go into people's homes/offices." will be well worth the extra effort.
Outside of virus and malware scans I cannot think of a single repair incident for which I needed specialized software to make a diagnosis. Hell even virus and malware I usually am opening up the tool with that diagnosis in mind. If you cannot diagnose this on your own there is no software in the world good enough to help you.
That is no excuse for screwing up. "Yeah, but he was an idiot" is not a good reason for messing up a computer, especially if you are doing it on accident or through incompetence. That you would even consider this a valid point says many things, none of them good.
Setting aside for a moment that HTML by itself is not capable of writing this kind of software, what does that have to do with incompetent service? So your inventory software sucks, almost all of the computer-specific inventory software sucks. All bad inventory software can do is impede the ordering of parts; it does not screw up a diagnosis, needlessly format a drive, lose data, or browse porn on a computer while attempting to fix it.People whine and moan about the Geek Squad because you are making the repair industry look like incompetent fools that should not be trusted to operate a toaster, much less fix a computer. If you have any decent skills you should be able to find a job in a reputable repair shop that will not work you ten hours a day. The place you work at is crap, the people you work with are crap, and anyone with the slightest speck of knowledge who is not actively looking for another job is too stupid to run away from the idiots they are being associated with.
Cars are conceptually simple. In general this conceptual similarity allows people to generally understand how a car works. They also, usually, are built with one point in mind: to get from here to there. As your specific requirements change the implementation of a car does become more complex, but the general concept remains the same. Software does not fit with either of these principles, and therefore is more difficult to understand. The analogy is bad because it inherently assumes that, like cars, software can only have a small set of purposes.
Yes.
All that said, I agree that when the script or training leads you to abuse your customers (which appears to be the case for AOL) then you are "morally judgeable". I also think that threatening lawsuits when people are just trying to see if they can solve a problem for you is just plain stupid.
Let me know when the Ninja Party makes its way to the US. Ninjas beat pirates any day. I'm sure they would totally flip out and pass an act abolishing copyright, the *AA, and panhandling all at once. The first two for obvious reasons, the second and third because ninjas don't like whiners.
Wow ... I really need to get outside more.
In short it makes us not want to talk about him because we would wear out the quotation mark keys on our keyboards doing so.
Wikipedia's business is also entirely based on their internet presence. For them it makes more sense to have enough skilled hackers to handle potential employee loss. Most companies do not need servers or highly skilled techs in the same way, and would do better to just buy a support contract instead of paying for skilled people they may not need.
So why is this huge power increase important then? If 25x more hardware capability gives me marginal benefits for significant cost increases what good is it? I would rather pay less for a 2.5x hardware increase with more gameplay avenues and still come out approximately close in graphics quality. Especially considering that most of the big name titles will be ported to all platforms, and will lean towards the graphical lowest common denominator anyways. So the only areas where you are going to see the full advantage of all this extra hardware are exclusive titles, and Nintendo arguably does better there to begin with.
So your assertion is that somehow buying bits in the form of music and videos through iTMS is fine, but buying bits in the form of software is not? What is so special about software that it should be excluded? I could easily see it fitting into the existing categorization model, and I doubt it would take too much work the fit keys/licensing into the whole thing. You even avoid the extra (and probably considerable) bandwidth of the preview function, or have a chance to distribute demos. Aside from a very slight chance of search result pollution I see no real problems with this idea.
No one writes entirely bug free code all of the time. Working with a group means that your code is open to someone else's bugs. Sometimes declaring who is responsible for a bug is not obvious, especially if you were to bring up a lawsuit. Personally, I think companies should be held liable for bugs in their programs.
So what happens if the bug is in a library you are linking to? How about if you are using a old version of the library and the newer version does not have the bug? What if the library was purchased from a company that no longer exists? There are just too many ways in which this is a bad idea that will lead to software being bogged down in overzealous bugtesting and software companies being bogged down in stupid lawsuits and responsibility agreements.
If I were them I would pay to have the servers professionally audited for just that kind of addition, then if anything turns up make a huge media stink about it and sue the crap out of everyone who so much as touched a system. I'm sure the law enforcement groups involved being publicly confronted with allegations of helping a giant media conglomerate based in another country put backdoors on perfectly legal domestic servers will make them think twice about doing it again.
The reasoning behind this is that adjusting the clock in windows modifies the system time instead of some user-specific timekeeper. Without that restriction some chronologically pedantic dingus could knock himself out of sync with the domain servers and will fail any kind of authentication attempts automatically. Granted this means absolutely nothing for home use and gaming, and it is stupid that it works this way instead of keeping system and user time independent, but this is microsoft we are talking about, logical is not one of the adjectives I would apply to their system design.
Here is what I know of OSS philosophy: Write cool software, share it with the world, let people help you make it better. In a nutshell that is it. The OSS philosophy comment was directed at Zend taking patches to fix some of the glaring problems with php as a development platform, or rather the fact that they are pretty difficult about it.
As for your comments about what a language is designed for, that is just foolish stereotyping. Python comes pretty close to Perl in text processing for most cases, Perl can do pretty well for rapid prototyping as well. As far as I know (python personally, perl by reference) they are both good for dynamic web pages. In short: both languages are good at a lot of things. PHP is supposedly only good at dynamic web pages, and stupid crap like string escaping make it difficult for that. If you really believe I am wrong here spend enough time with another language or two to really get to know it, build something you would want to be paid for in it, then come back and tell me php is better.
No need to, it has been done. See python(turbogears, django, web.py, twisted nevow, probably about 10-20 others I have forgotten) or ruby(on rails, plus a few others) or perl(plus a lot of stuff I don't know) or a host of other, not stupid languages for details. Except they are not "web scripting languages" they are scripting languages with web platforms, which makes life really really easy when your website needs to talk to anything aside from a database and a web browser.
If you can't do that, then try to analyzed and change those PHP C Code, find any bugs (thats the beauty of open source!!) and then released it to Open Source community and then lets see what bugs do you have!
Why should I polish someone else's turd? I could spend all of that time expanding a sane platform instead of trying to fix the stupidity of php. For another argument against this idea, try to submit a patch to zend and see how long it takes to go through. Do the same for one of the frameworks in another language and tell me who is really interested in the OSS philosophy.
The funny thing about all of this is that, on the whole, I think your conclusion is correct, it just does not follow from this specific line of reasoning. My point was that a comparison of the Vista beta with Debian testing is unfair, especially when the driver model was changed for Vista.
For this specific topic (driver support during a driver subsystem change) I would say that the border between fair and unfair comparisons lies in the differences between the closed and open source development models, and thus any comparisons are going to be unfair. Pick another topic to gripe about Vista, there are more than enough real ones already.
Good for them. I still think evaluating the state of driver support in a beta version of a product when the driver model was just changed is stupid. Yes, if this were a release, or even a release candidate, of Vista I would think it was crap. That is not the case.
And yes I would rather flame you at this juncture and spend another whole 5 seconds thinking about your comment and how flawed your logic is again, but then again I'm not intellectually qualified to understand. So in that case I will stop right here and let this post do it's job by talking up some of your highly intellectual time, shill.
Why, again, does asking for a fair comparison make me a shill? I agree with a number of valid complaints against Microsoft, Windows, and Vista. I see my lack of enthusiasm for engaging in childishly tilted comparisons of linux and windows as a good thing. Linux, as a community, suffers under that kind of behavior. We should be working to make Linux better, not patting ourselves on the back because current versions of Linux do not suffer from obvious (and temporary) deficiencies in a version of windows that for most practical purposes does not even exist yet. But that's ok, my logic is flawed anyways. Maybe at some point you will even deign to tell me how.
I remember reading about people reminiscing about that article. Seems like it was just a few minutes ago.
It figures God would be an Anonymous Coward. You have just validated everything that Catholic school inadvertantly taught me.
Did slackware 10.2 need new drivers when it was about to be released? You are aware that Microsoft made changes to their driver model that makes compatability with XP drivers spotty at best, right? Expecting full driver compatability in a beta release where the driver subsystem was one of the featured changes seems a bit much. I would stick with DRM and Longhorn/Vista hemmoraging features for reasons why Vista Linux.
So Ubuntu Dapper made some big changes to the linux driver model that were not present in Breezy and required a huge portion of device drivers to be rewritten before they would work? Oh, wait, they didn't, so for the purposes of discussing this article making that comparison is absolutely pointless.
PS Why does the words Microsoft Shill come to mind all of sudden?
Because you would rather flame someone than spend half a second thinking about what they are saying? Because anyone who does not spooge themselves praising linux is a MS shill in your mind? Maybe it is some kind of emotional defense to arguments you are not intellectually qualified to understand. I am not really sure why you think this. Vista is shaping up to be a pile of crap, but using an unfair comparison to try and illustrate this looks foolish to anyone with half a brain. If calling someone on that makes me an MS shill then you are a tool.