Every call center I've ever encountered is designed to ask you if you power cycled your thing and then call back if that doesn't work. If you call back, the person you speak to will ask if you power cycled your thing. You really have to put up a fight to talk to someone who can actually help you, assuming that such a thing even exists at that call center, and most people give up long before they reach that point. Most of the time you can find an answer with a bit of googling anyway.It seems like to pointless waste of money to have a call center that everyone is just going to hate and which will give everyone who calls into it a negative impression of your company.
Depends on what you consider "Winning". Sure, something like 85% of US citizens have tried marijuana and it's now not uncommon for presidents to admit to marijuana and cocaine use in their past (But they'd never do it NOW, oh no!) But it's a huge windfall for privatized, for-profit prison systems and an excellent tool for oppressing minorities in ever-greater numbers. It's also been wonderful for anyone with an agenda of eroding the bill of rights and militarizing police forces. I'd go so far as to speculate that the difference between being president and not being president, for the last three presidents, was that they didn't get caught. Naturally that depends on exactly how much of what they had on them at any given time, but all 3 seem like the kind of people who'd have a pretty decent stockpile of stuff they like. And if you're a black dude, misdemeanor possession can easily be turned into multiple felonies.
So yeah, sucks for the average citizen, awesome for the people who actually make the laws.
They should just pick a number, convert it all to nickels and make the CEO shove them all up his ass. In a televised venue. I bet no company would ever break the law again. At least, not after the first one.
I don't know man, I just know that was in the agreement with my last "Visionary CEO." He has all this shit and he gets 2 years worth of all of it for pretty much any reason he might go. It's easy enough to find the disclosure forms for a publicly traded company on finance.yahoo.com.
You know there's pictures of penises in there, anyone can get to them. 'Nuff said, right? Wasn't chat roulette working on some penis detection code? Perhaps someone could hook that code up to an automated web robot to automatically ferret the dick pics out of this site.
"As CEO, my vision is that the only way this company can work is if I'm grossly overcompensated while all the other employees learn to make due with less. I will run the company into the ground for the next two years and then leave, taking a 'severance bonus' of 2 years salary and stock options, all the while laying off employees with a promise not to contest their unemployment claims if they sign a waiver promising not to sue us." Is that about right?
Funnily many of the climate change deniers also own beachfront property. Perhaps it will be slightly harder to deny when their beach front property is under 10 feet of water.
You could run. Once you're in, you just have to figure out how to pay for things the civilization wants. Like roads, bridges and schools. Or you could just shirk that responsibility and pander to whatever interests you need to in order to keep your job for another election cycle. Humans are bad at planning for long-term abstract threats. That's why we have governments. But planning for those long term abstract threats is a great way to be unpopular in government, and will likely get you kicked out after one or two terms. Isn't that just delicious?
Not really. It took you years to acquire all that experience. You get a month or two to train someone. It took you years to acquire all that experience. Even if you do a great job of training them, the company is getting a person who's basically completely unfamiliar with their systems, corporate culture or product lines. It can easily take a year or more to come up to speed on a unfamiliar code base.
So they're paying less for that employee, but they're not going to get as much productivity out of him, either. Perhaps they could hire two or three people to insure adequate coverage of your position, but anyplace where off-shore development is booming, you won't get those kinds of rates for people for long. I did a gig with IBM where all the dev work was moved to Romania. A couple years later a few contracting companies that'd set up shop there were asking rates only marginally competitive with US salaries at the time. Certainly not enough to hire multiple developers for the cost of one in the USA.
If it's an off-shore position, he's probably not going to be loyal to your company, either. There's the same incentive for that guy to job hop for more pay every few months that there was for US IT workers when the industry was booming in the 90's. So that guy you spent that couple of months training could easily be gone a few months after you leave. The end effect of that is a company that doesn't actually know how to do anything.
These factors contribute to a lot of failed off-shore efforts. You don't hear about the failures so often, as those companies would rather their shareholders didn't hear about them.
I was approached by a recruiter recently who sent me the link to his client. Apparently his client has open-sourced the application they're working on, under the Apache license. I appreciated being able to look at their code, and that's an extra incentive for me to consider them. Last company I worked at, I suggested they release a ruby "expect" DSL I'd written under an open source license. It used the Ruby SSH gem, which was not something I'd seen before, and had a syntax similar to TCL/Expect. I suggested it several times and got blown off several times. Basically no one was particularly opposed to it, but no one was actually capable of making a decision in that company. The entire place was an example of institutionalized learned helplessness. I don't think there's anyone left there who has any idea it's even in their version control.
Yeah, I haven't figured out how to make a trip to DIA for less than $60. Even if it's just to drop a departing passenger off, gas and tolls are about that. God help you if you want to leave a car there for any length of time. Taking a private plane from KLMO would be pretty competitive except that the gate fees at DIA would quadruple the price.
But a lot of the IT people I talk to haven't had a vacation in years. Suggest that they take one and you get a stunned pause and then you can actually sense the wave of relief coming off them as they start to think about it. I took a three day weekend skydiving down in Phoenix after going about three years without a vacation and the change to my outlook was amazing. Taking time off and staying in town doesn't seem to have the same effect.
My first job was with a small company in 1989. They'd gone with SCO Xenix on a 286 machine (IIRC the 386 was still on the horizon at that point.) I looked briefly at BSD as a potentially less expensive and more feature rich alternative to that, but at the time the only options was to order tapes of the distribution and I didn't even know if it would work on our hardware. Even if that'd have been guaranteed, I'd still have to convince the boss to buy a tape drive to try it out. Given the fact that our immediate solution wasn't broke (even if it had cost $1200 for the base OS,) that would have been a tough sell.
Over the next couple years I worked there we looked onto potentially OS/2 and... I want to say DRM DOS? as a potentially cheaper multitasking alternative to Xenix on our systems. Even though I was nominally aware of BSD, the amount of tinkering to even try to get it working was intimidating, and we didn't have the immediate need for it.
By the mid 90's people were really starting to talk about Linux in exactly the sort of way they were NOT talking about BSD. I looked at the procedure to install it -- download a bunch of slakware install floppies off the newfangled internets (24 install floppies as I recall, which took for-fucking-ever! And I accidentally FTPed the first two in text mode. Shit!) and boot that shit up. I specifically remember finding the installer to be far less sucktastic than either the OS/2 installer or the Windows 3.1 installer that you ran shortly after pirating MS DOS (Which you typically would do even if you had a legitimate MS DOS install on your system.)
In short order, I had a working Linux system with a working C compiler, no fuss, no muss. Well some fuss -- couldn't run X11 very well on the VGA controller I had, but I was fine with a text console until I bought a computer that wasn't made out of duct tape and baling wire, that being the custom of the time. I almost immediately set up a TCP/IP network between the real computer and the baling wire computer, too, experimented with NFS, all that fun stuff. Got my system pwned several times, you know, all the usual stuff you go through to learn how to become a halfway decent Linux admin.
So yeah, for me at least it was all about accessibility. Minix was just a toy and BSD required a wizard hat and robe.
Much like the NASA EM drive, this happens when a virtual quantum burrito is created in the microwave chamber. Not only is thrust always guaranteed in the event that a burrito is in the microwave chamber, but virtual quantum burritos tend to be very loud in the EM spectrum due to quantum entanglement of the burrito particles.
Mack over on Mackscorner on youtube has been playing with an Oculus Rift. Watching his response to that one game, the potential for the technology is amazing, if some company can make one that's not shit. I think that company might actually be Microsoft, based on what I've been hearing. If they can do this right, I'm willing to forgive all previous transgressions. He does one with Subnautica too, which looks freaking amazing (Even without an Oculus.)
If they can get a 360 degree camera into a reasonable form factor (neighborhood of a GoPro,) it would be possible to give people the experience of skydiving, rock climbing, or flying a wingsuit in ways that are significantly more real than just watching a video on youtube. You could actually be there, and look around as if you were the pilot. That would be a game changer both for the audience and for content creators.
One bill, and that they be able to provide you with a reasonably accurate estimate of the costs when you go in. I had a moth fly into my ear, craziest thing, I'm just sitting there minding my own business and this moth just comes out of nowhere, hits the side of my face and disappears. And I freak the fuck out because a moth is now raping my goddamn ear. So I get my room mate to drive me to the emergency room to have the fucker removed. They don't believe me, have a look, and say "Yep, something's in there." And I'm like "Yes! It's a fucking moth!" So they make a couple of attempts and finally get the damn thing out, and it cost $1000 for that, in three separate bills. If they'd told me that in advance, I probably would have decided that I can put up with an awful lot of ear raping for $1000.
Hell of it was I'd just switched jobs and didn't have a new insurance card yet, but was actually insured. Over the course of my career, I've probably paid $20,000 or so worth of medical insurance and I've had the insurance companies weasel out of paying anything every single time I've had to have a medical procedure. And the total cost of those procedures so far has been significantly less than $20,000. I've had three trips to the ER or urgent care over 25 years, totaling about $3000 worth of care. $1000 of which was for a moth raping my ear.
So fuck the medical system and fuck the insurance providers. Over the past three decades, I'd have been better of with a jar of leeches. At least those are honest about sucking your blood.
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Every call center I've ever encountered is designed to ask you if you power cycled your thing and then call back if that doesn't work. If you call back, the person you speak to will ask if you power cycled your thing. You really have to put up a fight to talk to someone who can actually help you, assuming that such a thing even exists at that call center, and most people give up long before they reach that point. Most of the time you can find an answer with a bit of googling anyway.It seems like to pointless waste of money to have a call center that everyone is just going to hate and which will give everyone who calls into it a negative impression of your company.
A little bourbon will counteract the light quite nicely! And a little coffee in the morning will counteract the bourbon! Problem solved!
So yeah, sucks for the average citizen, awesome for the people who actually make the laws.
Oh god... I probably have some of your ass pennies in my pocket!
They should just pick a number, convert it all to nickels and make the CEO shove them all up his ass. In a televised venue. I bet no company would ever break the law again. At least, not after the first one.
I don't know man, I just know that was in the agreement with my last "Visionary CEO." He has all this shit and he gets 2 years worth of all of it for pretty much any reason he might go. It's easy enough to find the disclosure forms for a publicly traded company on finance.yahoo.com.
You know there's pictures of penises in there, anyone can get to them. 'Nuff said, right? Wasn't chat roulette working on some penis detection code? Perhaps someone could hook that code up to an automated web robot to automatically ferret the dick pics out of this site.
"As CEO, my vision is that the only way this company can work is if I'm grossly overcompensated while all the other employees learn to make due with less. I will run the company into the ground for the next two years and then leave, taking a 'severance bonus' of 2 years salary and stock options, all the while laying off employees with a promise not to contest their unemployment claims if they sign a waiver promising not to sue us." Is that about right?
California, your fucked up agricultural water rights system is making you drink your own pee. Enjoy.
Funnily many of the climate change deniers also own beachfront property. Perhaps it will be slightly harder to deny when their beach front property is under 10 feet of water.
You could run. Once you're in, you just have to figure out how to pay for things the civilization wants. Like roads, bridges and schools. Or you could just shirk that responsibility and pander to whatever interests you need to in order to keep your job for another election cycle. Humans are bad at planning for long-term abstract threats. That's why we have governments. But planning for those long term abstract threats is a great way to be unpopular in government, and will likely get you kicked out after one or two terms. Isn't that just delicious?
So they're paying less for that employee, but they're not going to get as much productivity out of him, either. Perhaps they could hire two or three people to insure adequate coverage of your position, but anyplace where off-shore development is booming, you won't get those kinds of rates for people for long. I did a gig with IBM where all the dev work was moved to Romania. A couple years later a few contracting companies that'd set up shop there were asking rates only marginally competitive with US salaries at the time. Certainly not enough to hire multiple developers for the cost of one in the USA.
If it's an off-shore position, he's probably not going to be loyal to your company, either. There's the same incentive for that guy to job hop for more pay every few months that there was for US IT workers when the industry was booming in the 90's. So that guy you spent that couple of months training could easily be gone a few months after you leave. The end effect of that is a company that doesn't actually know how to do anything.
These factors contribute to a lot of failed off-shore efforts. You don't hear about the failures so often, as those companies would rather their shareholders didn't hear about them.
I was approached by a recruiter recently who sent me the link to his client. Apparently his client has open-sourced the application they're working on, under the Apache license. I appreciated being able to look at their code, and that's an extra incentive for me to consider them. Last company I worked at, I suggested they release a ruby "expect" DSL I'd written under an open source license. It used the Ruby SSH gem, which was not something I'd seen before, and had a syntax similar to TCL/Expect. I suggested it several times and got blown off several times. Basically no one was particularly opposed to it, but no one was actually capable of making a decision in that company. The entire place was an example of institutionalized learned helplessness. I don't think there's anyone left there who has any idea it's even in their version control.
Yeah, I haven't figured out how to make a trip to DIA for less than $60. Even if it's just to drop a departing passenger off, gas and tolls are about that. God help you if you want to leave a car there for any length of time. Taking a private plane from KLMO would be pretty competitive except that the gate fees at DIA would quadruple the price.
But a lot of the IT people I talk to haven't had a vacation in years. Suggest that they take one and you get a stunned pause and then you can actually sense the wave of relief coming off them as they start to think about it. I took a three day weekend skydiving down in Phoenix after going about three years without a vacation and the change to my outlook was amazing. Taking time off and staying in town doesn't seem to have the same effect.
Hmm, that would explain that message from the future I received the other day that simply read "OMG SPIDERS"
Jebidiah will be sorely missed.
Yeah. Too be fair, it's a lot easier to plan ahead when a moth isn't raping your ear :-P
That's not creepy at all, Apple.
Over the next couple years I worked there we looked onto potentially OS/2 and... I want to say DRM DOS? as a potentially cheaper multitasking alternative to Xenix on our systems. Even though I was nominally aware of BSD, the amount of tinkering to even try to get it working was intimidating, and we didn't have the immediate need for it.
By the mid 90's people were really starting to talk about Linux in exactly the sort of way they were NOT talking about BSD. I looked at the procedure to install it -- download a bunch of slakware install floppies off the newfangled internets (24 install floppies as I recall, which took for-fucking-ever! And I accidentally FTPed the first two in text mode. Shit!) and boot that shit up. I specifically remember finding the installer to be far less sucktastic than either the OS/2 installer or the Windows 3.1 installer that you ran shortly after pirating MS DOS (Which you typically would do even if you had a legitimate MS DOS install on your system.)
In short order, I had a working Linux system with a working C compiler, no fuss, no muss. Well some fuss -- couldn't run X11 very well on the VGA controller I had, but I was fine with a text console until I bought a computer that wasn't made out of duct tape and baling wire, that being the custom of the time. I almost immediately set up a TCP/IP network between the real computer and the baling wire computer, too, experimented with NFS, all that fun stuff. Got my system pwned several times, you know, all the usual stuff you go through to learn how to become a halfway decent Linux admin.
So yeah, for me at least it was all about accessibility. Minix was just a toy and BSD required a wizard hat and robe.
Mmmm... burrito...
If they can get a 360 degree camera into a reasonable form factor (neighborhood of a GoPro,) it would be possible to give people the experience of skydiving, rock climbing, or flying a wingsuit in ways that are significantly more real than just watching a video on youtube. You could actually be there, and look around as if you were the pilot. That would be a game changer both for the audience and for content creators.
You could tell your insurance company you think they're committing insurance fraud. That'd probably sort them out in a hurry.
Hell of it was I'd just switched jobs and didn't have a new insurance card yet, but was actually insured. Over the course of my career, I've probably paid $20,000 or so worth of medical insurance and I've had the insurance companies weasel out of paying anything every single time I've had to have a medical procedure. And the total cost of those procedures so far has been significantly less than $20,000. I've had three trips to the ER or urgent care over 25 years, totaling about $3000 worth of care. $1000 of which was for a moth raping my ear.
So fuck the medical system and fuck the insurance providers. Over the past three decades, I'd have been better of with a jar of leeches. At least those are honest about sucking your blood.
Yes! That's another problem! No new humans to oppress! I wasn't going to say anything, but there you go!