Now, I work at a tech support place and we do not make products and neither does any of the electronic stores that we support. It is the manufacturer that makes the products and we provide the best solution for the situration
Whether you are directly hired by the company as an employee or are outsourced makes no difference. Neither does it make a difference if there is another link in the chain. You are the public face of the company, and represent them. Maybe, as an outside agency, you are doing this for multiple companies at once. Great, good for you. Perhaps your management have also not realised that part of their role when hired in this capacity is to represent the companies that hire them.
Maybe you find it better put like this: The company you are contracted for will start to get a bad reputation for customer service, more direct complaints, lose sales etc. A company that DOES realise this and provides good customer care will eventually start taking away your contracts and you will end up with no job. You will be left saying "consumers are asses" because they want things to work. Good luck with that. Maybe instead you will be blaming the original manufacturer. I can only suggest trying their customer service number.
As I said, I rarely get angry with customer support people because I am not stupid and recognise that they are reading scripts and have limited power blah blah blah and because I'm going to be treated better by being nice even in the face of rampant incompetence. The fact of the matter is that most customer support companies do not actually provide the best solution for the situation given in any but the most trivial cases. That may well be an organisational problem (maybe the fact that all supervisors seem to be permanently on holiday has something to do with it?) rather than the fault of individual employees on the phones, but I can only suggest you try to see it from the customer's point of view as you ask them of you.
Bottom line is: they aren't getting paid enough to deal with you being a dick. You can complain to their bosses if you want, but most of the time the boss is going to agree with the employee: you're just being a dick.
That may be what happens, but it doesn't make it right. They are representatives of the company whether their IQ is high enough to recognise that their job entails that or not. If the company is supplying a faulty product/service and won't deal with it properly, they are being a dick to me. There comes a point where being nice back to them still isn't getting things done, so why not match their attitude to at least try to get someone's attention?
Personally, I only go down this route in extreme cases (say 12-18 months without getting what I'm owed in two recent examples, or being taken to court for utility bills incurred for somewhere I don't live). Being nice in all the other cases seems only to turn them into examples like this. Only once has it resulted in something actually getting done (Amazon (.co.uk), by the way; exemplary compared to the rest of the industry).
I really don't see what the fuss is about with all this infrastructure "debate". It's damn obvious who should pay for it: the ISPs. There isn't even a case to answer. The customers have paid for their connections, the BBC have paid for their connections. End of story. It has nothing to do with last mile or neutrality or anything else. ISPs who have planned their businesses badly and mis-sold connectivity are trying to blame it on other people.
Content providers should pay for the infrastructure? Seriously? The BBC has nothing to do with the infrastructure, it's a cost of doing business just like electricity and water. They don't care who provides it or what the difference between the first and last mile is. The ISP *is* in the business of internet infrastructure... funnily enough, they are going to have to pay. At least, here's hoping.
I know people have said this every year since 0, but graphics are fine these days. The biggest improvement in my view would be animation/lack of rag doll-ness on the rag-dolls. Animation tends to be either really over-the-top or really static, sometimes varying between the two in a single game. Even some films have this problem (I'm looking at you, Spiderman).
But AI is surely where it's at. Current AI is terrible, and I think most people confuse "hard" with good AI. They just up the accuracy people! That doesn't mean it's more intelligent, it means it's less crippled. Sports games can be even worse - I just started playing a copy of Pro Evo 4 (okay, not new...) and it's shocking. The basic strategy of the computer players is to stand still and look at the ball. Or if there's really a risk of the opponent scoring, run away. And that's a game with a good reputation. Infuriating.
IANAL and I didn't even read the whole article, I just wanted to see their justification for the headline. Which is basically playing with words. Like previous posters said, this logic also implies that their is no producer right to protect works. The bit that got my attention was:
"In one example of fair use, CNET is free to report and comment on newsworthy events and to offer informative consumer reviews of new products"
In what way has this anything to do with fair use? Or copyright? It's only fair use in the small minority of cases where they quote (small sections of) copyrighted material (including sometimes photos, but most news photos are going to be licensed). These articles always read like not only is the writer spreading FUD, but also hasn't got a clue in the first place.
Well you would think that having it on all the time, automatically adjusting the compression to deal with clipping or in proportion to volume or something would essentially keep it hidden from the user. Higher end equipment can have loads of knobs and dials as necessary.
I'd never investigated and just assumed my ears were failing. I always have to watch with subtitles! I wouldn't advocate ruining the experience for everyone just because of that though - surely it can be done in software?
Okay, so then. And for quality, you want maximum dynamic range, right? But on bad equipment/noisy environments, you can't get the volume up high enough without distortion or clipping, right? Is it not possible to dynamic range compression... ummm... dynamically? High-end equipment could have a second knob for it, low-end could make a guess at a good amount of range compression according to the amount of clipping that is happening, and do it in software, no?
I would think it's possible but increases cost/unit too much at the low end.
Like I said, I'm playing devil's advocate. People have implied here many times recently that nuclear plants are, for want of a better word, bomb proof. I get that they're not being absolute, but as you say the certainty has to be weighed up against the consequences when something *does* go wrong. Which with nuclear, can be quite nasty...
The party line seems to be "things can go wrong, but there is no risk of a chain reaction". It seems it's not that difficult after all.
Nevertheless, don't get me wrong: I think - based on my limited knowledge - that we should have got a lot more involved with nuclear power than we have.
I don't know enough about nuclear safety to say one way or the other, so I'm not trying to flamebait here. I'd just like to know how all those people feel who, during discussions about energy viability, come out with statements like "modern nuclear power plants are completely safe, a major event is almost impossible"? Is this article overplaying the safety issues involved or were you not really as sure as you made out about the current state of technology/protocol in such plants?
I am immensely surprised that these seemingly endless Wikipedia stories are not called out as FUD. Instead, it's always exactly the same arguments about Wikipedia's rules and processes and "insightful" comments about how you can't trust anything etc. etc. Okay, we're all agreed that Wikipedia's greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. So why go over it again and again?
There certainly seems to be an increasingly frequent crackpot/vested interests battle against Wikipedia (and I'm not saying that certain issues shouldn't be addressed). Regardless of whether you think it's 90% accurate or 99.9% accurate, the fact remains that it is an immensely valuable resource. For some people this is a threat. For others, it puts it in the same camp as our omnipotent-Google-master. Most just want to use it for what it is, and fighting the FUD is the best way to ensure that this keeps happening - a sullied reputation will only decrease donations and other help.
I have recently been working on a website http://www.consensusview.com/ with the aim of testing exactly these ideas. We were inspired by the book "The Wisdom of Crowds" by James Surowiecki, and thought it would be interesting to see how well the ideas worked in the financial markets. It's a simple "up or down" decision, made on a daily basis, but we're thinking about extending the time frame and providing a "rating" system as well. Initial results actually seem quite promising, with some hit-rates as high as 70%!
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Now, I work at a tech support place and we do not make products and neither does any of the electronic stores that we support. It is the manufacturer that makes the products and we provide the best solution for the situration
Whether you are directly hired by the company as an employee or are outsourced makes no difference. Neither does it make a difference if there is another link in the chain. You are the public face of the company, and represent them. Maybe, as an outside agency, you are doing this for multiple companies at once. Great, good for you. Perhaps your management have also not realised that part of their role when hired in this capacity is to represent the companies that hire them.
Maybe you find it better put like this: The company you are contracted for will start to get a bad reputation for customer service, more direct complaints, lose sales etc. A company that DOES realise this and provides good customer care will eventually start taking away your contracts and you will end up with no job. You will be left saying "consumers are asses" because they want things to work. Good luck with that. Maybe instead you will be blaming the original manufacturer. I can only suggest trying their customer service number.
As I said, I rarely get angry with customer support people because I am not stupid and recognise that they are reading scripts and have limited power blah blah blah and because I'm going to be treated better by being nice even in the face of rampant incompetence. The fact of the matter is that most customer support companies do not actually provide the best solution for the situation given in any but the most trivial cases. That may well be an organisational problem (maybe the fact that all supervisors seem to be permanently on holiday has something to do with it?) rather than the fault of individual employees on the phones, but I can only suggest you try to see it from the customer's point of view as you ask them of you.
Bottom line is: they aren't getting paid enough to deal with you being a dick. You can complain to their bosses if you want, but most of the time the boss is going to agree with the employee: you're just being a dick.
That may be what happens, but it doesn't make it right. They are representatives of the company whether their IQ is high enough to recognise that their job entails that or not. If the company is supplying a faulty product/service and won't deal with it properly, they are being a dick to me. There comes a point where being nice back to them still isn't getting things done, so why not match their attitude to at least try to get someone's attention?
Personally, I only go down this route in extreme cases (say 12-18 months without getting what I'm owed in two recent examples, or being taken to court for utility bills incurred for somewhere I don't live). Being nice in all the other cases seems only to turn them into examples like this. Only once has it resulted in something actually getting done (Amazon (.co.uk), by the way; exemplary compared to the rest of the industry).
I really don't see what the fuss is about with all this infrastructure "debate". It's damn obvious who should pay for it: the ISPs. There isn't even a case to answer. The customers have paid for their connections, the BBC have paid for their connections. End of story. It has nothing to do with last mile or neutrality or anything else. ISPs who have planned their businesses badly and mis-sold connectivity are trying to blame it on other people.
Content providers should pay for the infrastructure? Seriously? The BBC has nothing to do with the infrastructure, it's a cost of doing business just like electricity and water. They don't care who provides it or what the difference between the first and last mile is. The ISP *is* in the business of internet infrastructure... funnily enough, they are going to have to pay. At least, here's hoping.
"most numbers seem to multiply ok"
perhaps making a statement like this about a spreadsheet is not really a shining endorsement. let me know when you've tested the rest of them.
I know people have said this every year since 0, but graphics are fine these days. The biggest improvement in my view would be animation/lack of rag doll-ness on the rag-dolls. Animation tends to be either really over-the-top or really static, sometimes varying between the two in a single game. Even some films have this problem (I'm looking at you, Spiderman).
But AI is surely where it's at. Current AI is terrible, and I think most people confuse "hard" with good AI. They just up the accuracy people! That doesn't mean it's more intelligent, it means it's less crippled. Sports games can be even worse - I just started playing a copy of Pro Evo 4 (okay, not new...) and it's shocking. The basic strategy of the computer players is to stand still and look at the ball. Or if there's really a risk of the opponent scoring, run away. And that's a game with a good reputation. Infuriating.
IANAL and I didn't even read the whole article, I just wanted to see their justification for the headline. Which is basically playing with words. Like previous posters said, this logic also implies that their is no producer right to protect works. The bit that got my attention was:
"In one example of fair use, CNET is free to report and comment on newsworthy events and to offer informative consumer reviews of new products"
In what way has this anything to do with fair use? Or copyright? It's only fair use in the small minority of cases where they quote (small sections of) copyrighted material (including sometimes photos, but most news photos are going to be licensed). These articles always read like not only is the writer spreading FUD, but also hasn't got a clue in the first place.
Well you would think that having it on all the time, automatically adjusting the compression to deal with clipping or in proportion to volume or something would essentially keep it hidden from the user. Higher end equipment can have loads of knobs and dials as necessary.
I'd never investigated and just assumed my ears were failing. I always have to watch with subtitles! I wouldn't advocate ruining the experience for everyone just because of that though - surely it can be done in software?
Okay, so then. And for quality, you want maximum dynamic range, right? But on bad equipment/noisy environments, you can't get the volume up high enough without distortion or clipping, right? Is it not possible to dynamic range compression... ummm... dynamically? High-end equipment could have a second knob for it, low-end could make a guess at a good amount of range compression according to the amount of clipping that is happening, and do it in software, no?
I would think it's possible but increases cost/unit too much at the low end.
Like I said, I'm playing devil's advocate. People have implied here many times recently that nuclear plants are, for want of a better word, bomb proof. I get that they're not being absolute, but as you say the certainty has to be weighed up against the consequences when something *does* go wrong. Which with nuclear, can be quite nasty...
The party line seems to be "things can go wrong, but there is no risk of a chain reaction". It seems it's not that difficult after all.
Nevertheless, don't get me wrong: I think - based on my limited knowledge - that we should have got a lot more involved with nuclear power than we have.
I don't know enough about nuclear safety to say one way or the other, so I'm not trying to flamebait here. I'd just like to know how all those people feel who, during discussions about energy viability, come out with statements like "modern nuclear power plants are completely safe, a major event is almost impossible"? Is this article overplaying the safety issues involved or were you not really as sure as you made out about the current state of technology/protocol in such plants?
I am immensely surprised that these seemingly endless Wikipedia stories are not called out as FUD. Instead, it's always exactly the same arguments about Wikipedia's rules and processes and "insightful" comments about how you can't trust anything etc. etc. Okay, we're all agreed that Wikipedia's greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. So why go over it again and again?
There certainly seems to be an increasingly frequent crackpot/vested interests battle against Wikipedia (and I'm not saying that certain issues shouldn't be addressed). Regardless of whether you think it's 90% accurate or 99.9% accurate, the fact remains that it is an immensely valuable resource. For some people this is a threat. For others, it puts it in the same camp as our omnipotent-Google-master. Most just want to use it for what it is, and fighting the FUD is the best way to ensure that this keeps happening - a sullied reputation will only decrease donations and other help.
I have recently been working on a website http://www.consensusview.com/ with the aim of testing exactly these ideas. We were inspired by the book "The Wisdom of Crowds" by James Surowiecki, and thought it would be interesting to see how well the ideas worked in the financial markets. It's a simple "up or down" decision, made on a daily basis, but we're thinking about extending the time frame and providing a "rating" system as well. Initial results actually seem quite promising, with some hit-rates as high as 70%!