There wasn't even a mention of police. There was a -former- SS guy, who is not an 'IT consultant' that made 1 statement.
Someone else said it earlier: The main customer for this is private businesses, not the government.
And if we were going to protest private businesses monitoring us, that milestone was passed long ago. If you don't want to be monitored by a computer, don't shop at a retail store. Period.
Personally, I'm just not worried about it. I don't steal, and if some store accused me of it, I'd happily just never shop there again. (Best Buy once told me not to take pictures in their store because 'loss prevention' told them so... I've never been back to that store again. More like 'gain prevention' than 'loss'.)
Why shouldn't they scold Apple for it, simply because someone else is worse? It's not like the have to spend -all- their time 'bashing' Microsoft for it. They can divide their time between the 2 with no drop in the number of rants they manage to keep on-topic for each of them. If Linux were to implement proprietary DRM-ridden protocols as well, they could spend their time ranting about that as well and still have time for their families.
And besides that... Who are you to tell them what to rant about? If we were going that route, I'd rant about how I'm sick of hearing people rant about why person X shouldn't be ranting about problem Y because problem Z is 'more important' or 'bigger'.
If there were video drivers that supported it (nVidia's could, if they did a little work on them) then I'd be very, very tempted to do this for gaming.
In fact, I'm not 100% sure nVidia's don't already support it... After a little research, I'm left confused about it. It would be really awesome.
I enjoy working for the company I'm with, but organization has been left to the programmers because it has worked so far. We're growing rapidly, though, and I can see it getting out of hand soon.
Hopefully things will naturally gravitate towards the setup you have, but I've already been shot down on the ticketing system. They claim that it's out job to take the input however anyone (!) wants to send it... Phone, email, IM, whatever. I think it wastes a lot of time for everyone and some bug reports get put off or lost altogether.
Anyhow, I always enjoy reading about how well-organized shops run, so thanks for that post.
"But it's fair to ignore complainers who just say "it's bad" without giving anything useful."
I think you actually just hit on the real problem. It's -never- 'fair' to ignore complainers. File them in the 'complainer' bin, but don't ignore them. If 99% of the email you get is 'your products sucks' without an explanation, it probably sucks so bad that it NEEDS no explanation. The sheer volume of complaints can tell you things in itself.
I've been reading all these comments and I've come to a conclusion: Haters aren't needed. 'Disgruntled customers' are needed. People that 'hate' don't do it rationally. They are 'fanboys' of the opposing team and have very little actual help to give. Instead, we need people who like Linux (or any open source software), but are able to not only see what's wrong, but are strong enough to stand up and say it and take the rocks that will be thrown at them.
Here, let me add mine:
Blender's interface sucks. Nothing about it is intuitive and every single time I use it, I have to look up where things are and what magic keys to push. Having 'object' and 'edit' modes is part of this... I like it in Vim, it sucks in Blender. Why do I have to go into edit mode to unwrap the UV? Why does it sometimes throw me out of edit mode when I think I've done nothing? Why is it so blessed hard to add a texture to a model?
The rocks that will be thrown at me include:
Do something about it yourself Write your own if you don't like it Blender's interface is great if you just take time to learn it
And other's I've forgotten already.
I'm sure you've all heard these complaints before, and they were dismissed. So OSS doesn't really need haters or disgruntled customers at all... They're already there and are being ignored.
E3's death has only been predicted for 2 years now... This year and last. That's because it was the previous year they announced the format change.
E3's creators are unable to deal with that their show WAS and keep trying to make it what they want.
Newsflash: Developers don't WANT what E3 wants. Developers want a way to tell the entire public what's new and exciting. E3 demands that they only tell journalists, who then tell the public. So the last 2 years have seen reduced presentations, with some developers not even showing up. Next year's will have even fewer.
E3 may get to be what it wants... But it may only do it for a short time before it dies.
Personally, I'm glad to see the attention go to gamer conventions that actually WANT to be gamer conventions, like PAX. I would never have considered going to E3 because it wasn't -supposed- to be aimed at me, and they refused to deal with the crowds. PAX aims at me and I'm actually considering going next year or the one after.
Because -all- of the HDDVD players are as bad as most of the Bluray players. I bought one of Toshiba's... Ugh. It's slow to boot (!?) and the video quality is grainy. My PS3 is far, far better.
In their defense, most DVD players are as bad, too. I don't know why everyone fails at making such a simple device.
Okay, but how do I get set up for POTS calls and how much is it? I'm guessing I have to find a provider for that, which means wading through tons of links to people that change too much, or give shitty service.
I use Skype because for a low monthly cost, I have unlimited calling in and out to POTS lines as well as free online calls. I also have a hardware Skype phone that doesn't require a computer whatsoever. When Ekiga can offer all that, I will consider switching.
The same is true about closed-source software, you know. How do you know about all the spyware/etc in closed source software? Because people have found and reported it.
Sure, they didn't do it by reading the source code, but in the end it doesn't really matter, as long as there's a way... And there always is. At the very least, the network traffic would tell you about it, and someone is as likely to find it that way as looking through the source.
No, my love of open source is for another reason altogether: Changes. Anyone can fix or change open source without having to wait on some corporation to acknowledge, solve, implement, test and publish the fix. In a good corporation, that'll take days... In a bad one, weeks, months, or years... If ever.
Never could figure out why they thought that was a good idea. Either send the changes upstream (you know, the open source way) or leave them the hell alone.
Was it that you started using BT, or that you started using a lot more bandwidth?
What I've found is that ANY home router that I use as the main switch will freak out after a few days... Linksys (original and multiple custom firmwares), DLink, you name it.
My solution?
I bought an 8 port gigabit switch and use that for my network, and my router now only deal with things that are actually going to/from the internet.
I've not had a problem since. (I use a DLink DIR-655 now and love it. The QoS solved my BT hogging-all-the-bandwidth problem nicely and even BT gets better speed now.)
I actually prefer the MS Comfort Curve 2000. $20, tactile feedback is nice, it's not too loud, but you can still hear it, and the curve isn't as crazy as some of the ergo keyboards out there. I really need to go buy a few more before they disappear forever.
Last I tried the Multi-WAN on Clark Connect, it didn't work. The words were there, and you could turn it on, but it just didn't work. After beating our heads against it for a week, we emailed them. The response? "It doesn't work yet."
I'll go one further. I suspect they'll ignore the situation and let things get rolling, and THEN license it to ATI.
I have been wondering how nVidia would conquer the 'only our cards use it' hurdle, and figured they'd just push games that work on the software version of Physx but you can turn on all the really cool effects if you have the hardware. Doing that while ignoring this hack for a while is a great way to get people interested.
You've had a lot of good luck, then. When I was first trying out Linux (many years ago), I had these kinds of failures happen to me a lot... To the point that even though I eventually got a distro to work, I was so pissed about the whole thing that I couldn't possibly give it a real try.
Fast forward a few years and Linux has improved greatly... And I still see this kind of thing happen. Generally, I now know there are a few magic things you can add to the command line (thanks Google!) to try to solve issues with video, or hard drive controllers, or the power save features, or USB... But I shouldn't -have- to.
I'm a die-hard Kubuntu fan now, but I recognize that Linux still has major issues to conquer.
"what you sold to me is rubbish, you have to give me my money back"
On the other hand, sometimes the customer is right in THAT instance, too. If refusing that customer will lose future sales, it makes more sense to treat the customer as the customer thinks is fair. Every situation has to be weighed on its merits, but there aren't very many situations where it makes sense to piss the customer off. Most of them -are- reasonable.
And before anyone says 'then you never worked retail!', I did. For years. I had many customers return and ask to speak to only me because of the level of service I provided. The company I worked for had a $100 'make the customer happy' policy that meant I could do anything up to $100 to make a customer happy again. The only time I would have used it (and nowhere near the $100), a manager made a decision before I could. That manager now works at a Toys-R-Us.
"The customer is always right" is mean to remind us that we are to do our utmost to keep the company's customers happy. You are PAID to do that. If you disagree, ask your boss. You'll be set straight right away.
I agree, partially. I'd love to have had the internet when I was a kid... But I fear I'd have spent a lot more time fooling around and a lot less learning.
For instance, I spent a LOT of time learning to program and playing around with that. While the internet provides so many excellent sources of information for that, it also provides a lot more games and time-wasters for free as well. I doubt I'd have had the self control to use it for learning instead of playing.
An effort to make these tools available away from the all the games would work much better. Parents that provided the wanted/needed information while limiting the use of the internet to an hour or so a day would enable kids to learn more on their own without the distraction.
Don't get me wrong, I'd have been seriously pissed about being limited to the internet. But I now realize it would have been for the best.
So my question is: Why are there not people like you creating lesson plans for teachers who aren't able to think this deeply? Obviously, the books are written by someone other than the teacher, and good books make all the difference. If your 'multiple levels' technique was simply applied there, it would make a world of difference.
BTW, My expeience was a lot like yours:
3rd-5th: Gifted class on Thursday, have to play catchup the rest of the week for the regular classes I missed. (Usually done by Friday anyhow, it was all too simple.) 6th-7th: Half-assed Gifted class that was open to more students, but actually had fewer join. Had its own timeslot, so no regular classes missed. 8th: Nothing, they dropped the class completely. 9th-10th: Honors classes. 11th-12th: Honors classes and dual-enrollment with the local Community College.
I was bored as well, but filled it by convincing teachers to let me do odd things... Program the TRS-80, draw pixelized art on my pad, play cards with other honors students (we all got straight A's and passed every single pop quiz), etc. There were ways to handle the boredom, as long as the teacher had some sense. For the other teachers, I usually found a way to make them think I was still working and do something else.
Didn't you just describe college in America, too? We have VoTech (Vocational/Technical) schools here that are supposed to be the manual labor colleges, and then colleges and universities that are supposed to be for academic jobs. But very, very few people even consider VoTech because it's shunned, and many try college and fail miserably.
Here, that's considered normal because you're supposed to try your best to be all you can. Even if that means struggling through math courses to do it.
And I must say, I've met very, very few people who weren't able to do basic addition and subtraction above 100. For them not to be able to, they've just never been taught.
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There wasn't even a mention of police. There was a -former- SS guy, who is not an 'IT consultant' that made 1 statement.
Someone else said it earlier: The main customer for this is private businesses, not the government.
And if we were going to protest private businesses monitoring us, that milestone was passed long ago. If you don't want to be monitored by a computer, don't shop at a retail store. Period.
Personally, I'm just not worried about it. I don't steal, and if some store accused me of it, I'd happily just never shop there again. (Best Buy once told me not to take pictures in their store because 'loss prevention' told them so... I've never been back to that store again. More like 'gain prevention' than 'loss'.)
Why shouldn't they scold Apple for it, simply because someone else is worse? It's not like the have to spend -all- their time 'bashing' Microsoft for it. They can divide their time between the 2 with no drop in the number of rants they manage to keep on-topic for each of them. If Linux were to implement proprietary DRM-ridden protocols as well, they could spend their time ranting about that as well and still have time for their families.
And besides that... Who are you to tell them what to rant about? If we were going that route, I'd rant about how I'm sick of hearing people rant about why person X shouldn't be ranting about problem Y because problem Z is 'more important' or 'bigger'.
If there were video drivers that supported it (nVidia's could, if they did a little work on them) then I'd be very, very tempted to do this for gaming.
In fact, I'm not 100% sure nVidia's don't already support it... After a little research, I'm left confused about it. It would be really awesome.
Damn, are you hiring? j/k
I enjoy working for the company I'm with, but organization has been left to the programmers because it has worked so far. We're growing rapidly, though, and I can see it getting out of hand soon.
Hopefully things will naturally gravitate towards the setup you have, but I've already been shot down on the ticketing system. They claim that it's out job to take the input however anyone (!) wants to send it... Phone, email, IM, whatever. I think it wastes a lot of time for everyone and some bug reports get put off or lost altogether.
Anyhow, I always enjoy reading about how well-organized shops run, so thanks for that post.
"But it's fair to ignore complainers who just say "it's bad" without giving anything useful."
I think you actually just hit on the real problem. It's -never- 'fair' to ignore complainers. File them in the 'complainer' bin, but don't ignore them. If 99% of the email you get is 'your products sucks' without an explanation, it probably sucks so bad that it NEEDS no explanation. The sheer volume of complaints can tell you things in itself.
I've been reading all these comments and I've come to a conclusion: Haters aren't needed. 'Disgruntled customers' are needed. People that 'hate' don't do it rationally. They are 'fanboys' of the opposing team and have very little actual help to give. Instead, we need people who like Linux (or any open source software), but are able to not only see what's wrong, but are strong enough to stand up and say it and take the rocks that will be thrown at them.
Here, let me add mine:
Blender's interface sucks. Nothing about it is intuitive and every single time I use it, I have to look up where things are and what magic keys to push. Having 'object' and 'edit' modes is part of this... I like it in Vim, it sucks in Blender. Why do I have to go into edit mode to unwrap the UV? Why does it sometimes throw me out of edit mode when I think I've done nothing? Why is it so blessed hard to add a texture to a model?
The rocks that will be thrown at me include:
Do something about it yourself
Write your own if you don't like it
Blender's interface is great if you just take time to learn it
And other's I've forgotten already.
I'm sure you've all heard these complaints before, and they were dismissed. So OSS doesn't really need haters or disgruntled customers at all... They're already there and are being ignored.
E3's death has only been predicted for 2 years now... This year and last. That's because it was the previous year they announced the format change.
E3's creators are unable to deal with that their show WAS and keep trying to make it what they want.
Newsflash: Developers don't WANT what E3 wants. Developers want a way to tell the entire public what's new and exciting. E3 demands that they only tell journalists, who then tell the public. So the last 2 years have seen reduced presentations, with some developers not even showing up. Next year's will have even fewer.
E3 may get to be what it wants... But it may only do it for a short time before it dies.
Personally, I'm glad to see the attention go to gamer conventions that actually WANT to be gamer conventions, like PAX. I would never have considered going to E3 because it wasn't -supposed- to be aimed at me, and they refused to deal with the crowds. PAX aims at me and I'm actually considering going next year or the one after.
If it doesn't, it shouldn't have let it make the news that they won't let anyone check its accuracy. Now it's in doubt by default.
My first thought was actually: How many will claim their windshield told them to drive that way?
"I didn't pay attention to the sign because my windshield didn't say it was important."
"I ran off the road because my windshield said the line went that way."
etc.
It's a neat idea, but only if it's absolutely perfect. And is -anything- perfect?
Or if they guessed it randomly. Guessing a random name @gmail.com is going to have pretty good chances of success at this point.
Because -all- of the HDDVD players are as bad as most of the Bluray players. I bought one of Toshiba's... Ugh. It's slow to boot (!?) and the video quality is grainy. My PS3 is far, far better.
In their defense, most DVD players are as bad, too. I don't know why everyone fails at making such a simple device.
Okay, but how do I get set up for POTS calls and how much is it? I'm guessing I have to find a provider for that, which means wading through tons of links to people that change too much, or give shitty service.
I use Skype because for a low monthly cost, I have unlimited calling in and out to POTS lines as well as free online calls. I also have a hardware Skype phone that doesn't require a computer whatsoever. When Ekiga can offer all that, I will consider switching.
The same is true about closed-source software, you know. How do you know about all the spyware/etc in closed source software? Because people have found and reported it.
Sure, they didn't do it by reading the source code, but in the end it doesn't really matter, as long as there's a way... And there always is. At the very least, the network traffic would tell you about it, and someone is as likely to find it that way as looking through the source.
No, my love of open source is for another reason altogether: Changes. Anyone can fix or change open source without having to wait on some corporation to acknowledge, solve, implement, test and publish the fix. In a good corporation, that'll take days... In a bad one, weeks, months, or years... If ever.
Item 2, addendum: And modifies said projects.
Never could figure out why they thought that was a good idea. Either send the changes upstream (you know, the open source way) or leave them the hell alone.
Was it that you started using BT, or that you started using a lot more bandwidth?
What I've found is that ANY home router that I use as the main switch will freak out after a few days... Linksys (original and multiple custom firmwares), DLink, you name it.
My solution?
I bought an 8 port gigabit switch and use that for my network, and my router now only deal with things that are actually going to/from the internet.
I've not had a problem since. (I use a DLink DIR-655 now and love it. The QoS solved my BT hogging-all-the-bandwidth problem nicely and even BT gets better speed now.)
I actually prefer the MS Comfort Curve 2000. $20, tactile feedback is nice, it's not too loud, but you can still hear it, and the curve isn't as crazy as some of the ergo keyboards out there. I really need to go buy a few more before they disappear forever.
Last I tried the Multi-WAN on Clark Connect, it didn't work. The words were there, and you could turn it on, but it just didn't work. After beating our heads against it for a week, we emailed them. The response? "It doesn't work yet."
I can't recommend it.
I'll go one further. I suspect they'll ignore the situation and let things get rolling, and THEN license it to ATI.
I have been wondering how nVidia would conquer the 'only our cards use it' hurdle, and figured they'd just push games that work on the software version of Physx but you can turn on all the really cool effects if you have the hardware. Doing that while ignoring this hack for a while is a great way to get people interested.
You've had a lot of good luck, then. When I was first trying out Linux (many years ago), I had these kinds of failures happen to me a lot... To the point that even though I eventually got a distro to work, I was so pissed about the whole thing that I couldn't possibly give it a real try.
Fast forward a few years and Linux has improved greatly... And I still see this kind of thing happen. Generally, I now know there are a few magic things you can add to the command line (thanks Google!) to try to solve issues with video, or hard drive controllers, or the power save features, or USB... But I shouldn't -have- to.
I'm a die-hard Kubuntu fan now, but I recognize that Linux still has major issues to conquer.
I was just coming to post exactly the same thing.
If you're willing to put a little more work into it, there are others as well.
http://flickr.com/photos/99188631@N00/128731804/ created theirs from a wikipedia article, adding their own tabs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_projection is the article he got it from, which also has an SVG
We have plenty of them. Most of them are crackpots without a snowball's chance in hell of actually bringing anything worthwhile forward.
The difference here is that we had a dreamer who had a brain, instead of the usual Perpetual Motion 'inventors'.
Granted, he didn't appear to always use it, but he was able to use it to turn his random thoughts into interesting ideas pretty consitently.
"what you sold to me is rubbish, you have to give me my money back"
On the other hand, sometimes the customer is right in THAT instance, too. If refusing that customer will lose future sales, it makes more sense to treat the customer as the customer thinks is fair. Every situation has to be weighed on its merits, but there aren't very many situations where it makes sense to piss the customer off. Most of them -are- reasonable.
And before anyone says 'then you never worked retail!', I did. For years. I had many customers return and ask to speak to only me because of the level of service I provided. The company I worked for had a $100 'make the customer happy' policy that meant I could do anything up to $100 to make a customer happy again. The only time I would have used it (and nowhere near the $100), a manager made a decision before I could. That manager now works at a Toys-R-Us.
"The customer is always right" is mean to remind us that we are to do our utmost to keep the company's customers happy. You are PAID to do that. If you disagree, ask your boss. You'll be set straight right away.
I agree, partially. I'd love to have had the internet when I was a kid... But I fear I'd have spent a lot more time fooling around and a lot less learning.
For instance, I spent a LOT of time learning to program and playing around with that. While the internet provides so many excellent sources of information for that, it also provides a lot more games and time-wasters for free as well. I doubt I'd have had the self control to use it for learning instead of playing.
An effort to make these tools available away from the all the games would work much better. Parents that provided the wanted/needed information while limiting the use of the internet to an hour or so a day would enable kids to learn more on their own without the distraction.
Don't get me wrong, I'd have been seriously pissed about being limited to the internet. But I now realize it would have been for the best.
So my question is: Why are there not people like you creating lesson plans for teachers who aren't able to think this deeply? Obviously, the books are written by someone other than the teacher, and good books make all the difference. If your 'multiple levels' technique was simply applied there, it would make a world of difference.
BTW, My expeience was a lot like yours:
3rd-5th: Gifted class on Thursday, have to play catchup the rest of the week for the regular classes I missed. (Usually done by Friday anyhow, it was all too simple.)
6th-7th: Half-assed Gifted class that was open to more students, but actually had fewer join. Had its own timeslot, so no regular classes missed.
8th: Nothing, they dropped the class completely.
9th-10th: Honors classes.
11th-12th: Honors classes and dual-enrollment with the local Community College.
I was bored as well, but filled it by convincing teachers to let me do odd things... Program the TRS-80, draw pixelized art on my pad, play cards with other honors students (we all got straight A's and passed every single pop quiz), etc. There were ways to handle the boredom, as long as the teacher had some sense. For the other teachers, I usually found a way to make them think I was still working and do something else.
Didn't you just describe college in America, too? We have VoTech (Vocational/Technical) schools here that are supposed to be the manual labor colleges, and then colleges and universities that are supposed to be for academic jobs. But very, very few people even consider VoTech because it's shunned, and many try college and fail miserably.
Here, that's considered normal because you're supposed to try your best to be all you can. Even if that means struggling through math courses to do it.
And I must say, I've met very, very few people who weren't able to do basic addition and subtraction above 100. For them not to be able to, they've just never been taught.