What's the point of coming up with, and defending, a stupid theory?
Well, ask a Creationist, and get an exciting glimpse into the mind of the truly paranoid. He'll be able to come up with all kinds of inane answers -- few of which are answers of any kind, but just restatements of the original question. Some examples off the top of my head...
1. It's so they can push their liberal / secularist agenda. (What agenda might that be? Nobody knows, really. Maybe the idea is that if we keep pushing evolution and cosmology, future generations won't believe in God. How does that help "liberals"? I guess it's so then nothing will stand in our way of killing babies!)
2. Blah blah blah persecution of my beliefs blah blah blah. (Listening to Christians whinge about being some kind of oppressed minority is absolutely hilarious. Not that this response answers the question.)
The only reason I'm responding to this is in the hopes that someone sees it and understands.
No, the entire service is crappy. In the cases where accurate names aren't possible, provide accurate numbers, don't let people put in whatever they want to.
This is what happens. Take your cellphone as an example. If you don't have the number in your address book, the caller's number displays, and that's it.
You seriously think that, as a support tech, you shouldn't have to listen to people telling you that the service your company provides is broken?
It has nothing to do with what my company offers. This is how caller ID works all over the US. A great example is a recent debacle we had with a customer in Texas. If this customer called a number local to him, which would be a Southwest Bell number, guess what? Southwest Bell had their own ANI translation table and delivered to the callee the name they had on record, which was not this customer. We were sending the correct information.
Shit like this happens all the time. One ILEC has their directory updated, another doesn't. One delivers whatever the caller's switch delivers, another doesn't. There are no standards. It's a system that barely works. As I said.
ou see a system that is broken and paying customers who don't expect the system to be broken, and you say fix the customers.
Yes. It's unreasonable of me to expect people to be aware of what a service can and cannot do. Callous though it may seem, caveat emptor works sometimes. You want to fix it? Convince every telecom in the US to adhere to a monolithic and centrally controlled standard? Good luck.
"Hey Southwest Bell, why don't you do it like, say, AT&T does it?" "No thanks, we have our system in place." "Yeah, but it doesn't always match what AT&T does." "Then maybe AT&T should change theirs to match ours!" "They say they don't want to." "Neither do we." "But look here, it would make your customers happier!" "They're already pretty happy." "Some of them aren't. Some of them have problems from time to time." "Not often enough for it to matter." "Matters to them!" "So you want us to tear down the multimillion dollar system we have in place now, develop another system at more considerable cost to us, to correct a problem 'some' people have 'from time to time' with their five-dollar service we never guaranteed would work 100% in the first place." "Yes."
Have fun with that.
The reason I disagree is because I learned at age six that sometimes stuff just doesn't work the way you want it to. Even if you paid for it. You can either let it drive you insane, or you can file it under the heading "sometimes life sucks" and get on with yourself.
Of course, I also think it's pretty damn petty to raise such a fuss about a four-dollar-a-month add-on service that manages to satisfy the end customer 98% of the time, but that's another story.
Yeah, I'm sure that it's okay to complain when a commercial service fails a huge amount of the time.
Then stop using it. I didnt' see anyone holding a gun to your head saying "You must purchase this service, and you must treat it as though it can do things it's not ever going to do."
Why legislate it?
Except it's not the limitation of the technology. Phone companies can do better (e.g. ANI), they choose not to.
I AM the phone company! But seriously, no. ANI is a highly reliable service and works very, very well. If all people cared about was seeing the number, ANI would do it fine. But they want to see names and company names and stuff -- and that's crappy. It relies on directory listings that get updated when someone feels like it, and wrong half the time at that. Some ILECs use their own local databases for ANI-to-caller-ID translation, some rely on whatever the caller's switch is sending. Small businesses in particular change their names all the time, number porting only complicates things further, etc. There's a lot going on with caller ID that makes it a craptastic system -- which is not the case for ANI.
If anybody were pretending that, they wouldn't be complaining, would they?
Perhaps we're talking past each other. What I'm saying here is this: The caller ID system sucks out loud. People don't realize this, and think it's a super awesome system that should always work. If they realized how crappy it is, instead of believing the hype, they wouldn't be griping when it fails, because they'd expect it. Instead, though, they gripe endlessly, and now legislation is being considered, because people expect the technology to do something it's not gonna do.
According to your own previous comment, "the general population".
Yeah, well, fair enough, but I was speaking rhetorically. What I meant was that I really have a hard time understanding why people get so worked up over petty stuff like this. I'd just like to state again and for the record that I, personally, handle huge numbers of people complaining about it, so I know how unbelievably insane they get over caller ID. And to this day it baffles me, because it's such a trivial little thing. It's like four bucks a month for a cool little convenience. So if it doesn't work all the time, big deal. Get over it.
Marketing has a much higher ROI potential than actual R&D, which may not even pan out. If it does, well, marketing is still more profitable in most cases. People will buy stupid shit if you market it properly. Particularly when it comes to computers or any other sort of information technology, which most people view the way the monkeys viewed the black monolith, as a mysterious object to be feared.
Two prime examples from my line of work of people buying into marketing hype with zero understanding of the technology.
1. The vast majority of our clients are small businesses. I'm talking 5 to 10 employees, which are primarily "the people who do some work, and one or two administrative assistants". Zero tech staff whatsoever. I cannot even begin to count the number of these small business owners that call me whining that their VoIP service "doesn't work" and it turns out it's because they bought some insanely expensive Cisco firewall (or some other firewall "appliance"). They have only the foggiest notion of what a firewall does, they have zero idea how to set one up, configure it, or maintain it, but some doofus salesman somewhere told them how important firewalls are and how they have to have one, so they forked over hundreds of dollars for a box they can barely identify.
2. To diagnose VoIP problems I also frequently need to ask what sort of internet connection the client has. Most of them give a totally inane response like "it's the fastest one they offer" or "business-class". In other words, they have no idea what they're paying for every month, but they can recite the bullshit marketing terms all day long.
People have no idea what the hell they're buying. Companies routinely offer crap and doll it up with important-sounding fluff, and people buy it, having no understanding of what they're purchasing or how to compare a good product from bad. It doesn't take long for bean-counters to realize that they can cut back on making an actual reliable product, and divert the savings into marketing, at which point people will start handing over cash.
t's not ludicrous at all to be given a technology that fails a huge amount of the time and then complain about it failing a huge amount of the time.
You sure about that, chief? If that's the limitation of the technology, you can bitch and bitch but that won't change anything. Or you can stop pretending it's a 100% reliable system, and just accept the limitations of it.
Also, who really gives a damn. What's the absolute worst that could happen? Your brother prank calls you and makes it look like he's from the White House? Oh no. A telemarketer calls and you see the caller ID that says your buddy's name, so you answer? Oh no, you've been inconvenienced for the two seconds it takes to hang up.
Soap goes one step further: It works in midair. With this new-age pointing device, now under development at Microsoft Research, you can navigate your PC using nothing but a bare hand.
Waving your hands in the air like you just don't care in order to operate your computer, huh. Where have I heard this one before?
For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive - you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same programme.
I sort of hope it passes, for selfish reasons. I direct the support department at a VoIP provider and I cannot tell you how tired I am of people's endless, nonstop whining about their caller ID, and how they want it changed, and why can't I make it look like they're calling from somewhere else... on and on and on. This will give me a convenient excuse to tell them to shut up.
On a slightly more serious note, though, it's amusing to note why the bill is being introduced. Senator Stevens was blithering about how it's important because people rely on caller ID for "critical information". I cannot imagine what could possibly be considered "critical" about caller ID information, particularly considering what a half-assed hack the entire system is anyway and the lack of any real standards. Please note that caller ID is entirely different from ANI (automated number identification).
Caller ID is a fine example of a semi-convenient feature that people took and ran away with. The general population now sees Caller ID as the Oracle at Delphi, infallable and impossible to live without, and go absolutely apeshit if it's wrong (which is quite often, believe it or not). I guess people just don't understand the technology, but to "rely" on caller ID information is ludicrous.
I remember about fifteen years ago, maybe a bit more, when Caller ID was virtually unheard of, and the Bells were just starting to roll it out to homes. My parents got the little box from Radio Shack, signed up with the service, and my friends and I would rush over to the ID box with childish glee every time the phone rang, cause hey! How cool is this, man!
But in the end that's all we thought about it. It was a cool little novelty. That people take it so seriously now baffles me.
We used to deal with the phone ringing and not knowing who it was in advance with the following method: a) answer the phone, b) don't answer the phone, or c) let them leave a message and get back to them if we feel like it.
Somehow, though, what I don't remember is that the pre-Caller ID era was some kind of a Dark Ages where nobody got anything done.
But if you are a little bit ambitious about your job and want to go the extra mile, sometime spending a few minutes here and there will make the big difference against people that do not do it.
Yeah, and that's the problem. It degrades from there. One guy starts doing just a little extra to get noticed around the office. And indeed, others notice, like his coworkers, some of whom start doing a bit more too, so they don't look like slackers, or to show the guy up, or because they want to be the one getting the promotion. Pretty soon most everyone is doing it, and before too long -- and this is key -- management starts expecting it, and anyone who leaves work at work is derided as someone who doesn't care about his job.
As the operator of a synthpop and darkwave internet radio station (plug!) myself, my response is "kiss my ass". Like most other stations, I broadcast things that aren't ever going to be heard on conventional radio, giving (relatively) niche or obscure artists that much more free exposure. I know this works for two reasons:
1. I myself have bought albums after hearing certain artists' songs on other net radio stations -- music I would never, ever, ever have heard otherwise except perhaps in the drunken haze of a goth club.
2. Several independent artists have sent me singles and even entire albums and other promo kits, encouraging me to put them in rotation. One synthpop artist wrote:
Thanks I appreciate the exposure, it's hard to get the music out as an independent artist which is why I'm trying to get radioplay. The CD is the mail.
And another said, after sending me some tracks and I liked them but mentioned I'd never heard of this group before:
Yeah, that is what we are experiencing with Red Flag. The darkwave scene just loves the music but we need to really get the message out there.
This has happened dozens of times. It's good for the artists who are trying to get noticed; it's good for the audience who gets to discover new music; it's good for the broadcaster cause it's just fun. I get permission from many of the labels or artists to play their stuff, and when I don't, well, it's a freaking 96k broadcast that can't be copied without some technical know-how (certainly much more difficult than jamming a tape into your radio and hitting "record"). Exactly who is being harmed here?
You know, there ain't no Benjamens in the net broadcasting trade. We do this for fun and the love of the music. The RIAA's outmoded and antiquated business models, and their continued attempts to strangle the life out of emergent technologies, is absolutely appalling. I'll continue to broadcast from my host in Germany and here's a big screw you to the suits. I don't make a single cent off my broadcast, and I don't play the kind of music that would come close to competing with the mass-appeal fare on the normal airwaves. You'll never get a dime from me.
For all the whining about Canada, let me point out a few things.
First, all the excuses are pretty hollow and trite. "You have to wait forever", "you have to travel far for advanced care", "mired in beaurocracy", blah blah blah. All of this may be true, but when you're American and you have no health insurance and you can't afford any treatment, suddenly all those "drawbacks" don't sound so bad. I'd rather have to wait for a couple of weeks to get a serious ailment looked at (if that's even true, but there's conflicting anecdotes) then not get treated at all because I can't afford it. Plus, most of those accusations could easily and accurately be levelled at the current American private healthcare system.
(And don't bother kidding yourself with this gibberish about how an American hospital can't turn you away for nonpayment. While I doubt they'd kick you out of the ER if you had a gunshot wound, try getting a broken bone dealt with, or some kind of illness you can't identify, if you can't pay. Lotsa luck, champ.)
Second, I don't think anyone in America is seriously proposing a single-tier system where everybody is exactly on the same playing field. The idea is to provide healthcare for free for those who need it. If you want a specific doctor or a specific hospital or want faster treatment or more tests run or more advanced technology or whatever, you're welcome to pay for it then (or supplement yourself with private insurance).
Finally, such a plan would never involve more taxes if our government wasn't so tax-happy. God forbid we divert funds from pork spending and multiply redundant agencies all doing the same job, eh? Feel free to go through this list -- I'm sure we could all agree on at least a third of these to be totally eliminated and nobody would notice the difference. There are like five agencies doing the same job as the FDA in there, for starters. Just because the government's solution to everything is "tax more" doesn't mean that's how it has to be.
It is telling that most other first-world, developed nations (not all) provide some baseline healthcare system for their citizens, and America is one of the very few that doesn't. We're so enamored with this notion that "free market capitalism solves everything!" that we can't see that our system isn't all that "free market" to begin with. Most critics' complaints eventually boil down to waving away the benefits of universal healthcare with a "Yes, yes, but that's socialism," as though socialism is immediately understood by all to be evil and no more discussion could possibly ensue. It's a weak argument, and it's sad.
The service my company offers is primarily targeted at small to medium businesses. As such I frequently deal with the owners of these companies, and if the issue is technical in nature I have to ask them about their network setup. Simple stuff like "Okay, and what kind of internet connection do you have?"
It's astonishing how many of them will say things like "I dunno" or "Oh, it's broadband" or "There's a box that says Netgear, does that help?" If they don't know sometimes I press a little: "Well, do you know who your internet service is from?" since if they say something like "Verizon" I'll know it's DSL, or "Roadrunner" will be cable.
"I'm not sure," they'll say. This happens all the time.
Some of these people work out of their homes, too. Even then they have no idea.
It's like.. let me get this straight, sir. A bill arrives for you every month. You have no idea what company it's from and you don't know what service it's for, but you just pay it?
Why am I doing this job, then? I could start my own business where I just send out random invoices to random people! Clearly they aren't paying any attention to what the hell they're paying for, so I could just make an invoice for "services rendered" and lots of them would, evidently, pay it anyway.
So you haven't had a bad run-in with the law.. yet. Good for you, I hope that stays that way.
But that doesn't change any of what I said. People attracted to the job solely for power, low requirements of brains and education, No useful oversight whatsoever. Arrest first and ask questions later. A "tell it to the judge" mentality. No citizen recourse. Selective enforcement of frankly stupid laws.
This is a pattern of behavior and the nature of the job attracts the last people who should have such a job. A few "polite and professional" cops dealing with a teenager or manager doesn't count for much, especially since in such cases they're not there to hassle you.
I think you slow down in front of cops because you know they can royally screw you if you make the slightest wrong move, or just because they feel like it. You don't really expect anyone to believe the only motivation you have is the minor inconvenience of a "10 to 15 minute delay", do you?
I think you're so wrong I don't even know where to begin. I loathe cops, and so do most other people.
Here's a few reasons why.
First, what kind of person wants to become a cop? The job itself sucks -- it's incredibly dull for 95% of the time (cruising around looking for someone to ticket, pointing speed guns at people, filling out endless paperwork, etc) and is dangerous the other 5% of the time. It does not pay all that well (here in Atlanta, you start at about 35k). You get decent benefits, I guess, but I doubt anyone goes into a career just for that. A sense of civic duty is possibly a motive, but that quickly fades for most people when they realize that busting people for expired tags and other petty crap, which is the bulk of a beat cop's work, ain't exactly cleaning up the mean streets.
What are we left with? What possible benefit could there be to this job?
Power.
Make no mistake that power is the single most attractive and established benefit to police work. Therefore, most people -- not all -- who pursue this career are, surprise, power hungry animals. Combined with the abysmally low standards for entry (in most jurisdictions any schmuck with a GED who can do 25 pushups can get the job) and you've got a police force composed largely of power-tripping twits on the lower end of the intelligence scale. Dont' forget that cops are not hired for their brains. They are essentially the muscle of the state and that's all the state cares about.
Next we have all the silly laws the cops are told to enforce. This is not directly the cop's fault, of course, but they did choose this job and stay in it. Moreover, I hold the cops accountable for how selective they are in their enforcement. Partially related to the local legislature, traffic cops in particular are far more interested in pursuing "crimes" that result in profit for the state than they are about public safety. They're happy to pull you over and cite you for something like an expired tag (you monster, you!) or whatever inane non-moving violation, but when it comes to the idiot swerving through traffic or the jackass going 20mph below the limit they're nowhere to be found, or drive right by.
A cop is also generally not held accountable for his or her actions. Oh, sure, in extreme cases, they might receive a slap on the wrist in the form of "administrative leave" which amounts to a week of paid vacation, but in general, they can do whatever the hell they want and let the court sort it out later. I hate anecdotal evidence, but I'll offer the example of myself, arrested in 2000 for "terrorist activities". I lost a job thanks to that, not to mention the 3000 dollars I had to front for the 17k bond, the legal hassle, and so forth. When it finally got to the arraignment the DA took one look at the cop's notes, saw that the cop had absolutely no reason to think I was up to no good, and dismissed the charges right then and there in the hallway.
Do you think anything happened to Mister Officer?
This is all too common. Most cases are not as extreme as mine, but cops routinely pull people over just to be jerks, bark orders when they have no legal authority (but know people will comply because, well, it's a cop), and otherwise abuse their power.
The citizenry has almost no recourse, either. Suing for false arrest is almost never successful -- it's not like the system hasn't built in protection for that. And that's assuming you were arrested, and not just harrassed with some bullshit ticket. A cop's charge against you can make your life a living hell and cost you considerable money and you have no way to defend yourself -- he says you ran a red light, you say you didn't, and who is the judge going to believe?
Our legal system is so constructed that no one really watches the watchers -- no one who can do anything about it, anyway. There's a reason we all get nervous when a cop is behind us in traffic, even when we know we're not doing anything wrong.
We should not be nervous around the people we are paying to protect us. There is something wrong when that's the case.
Bush and his whole branch of government aren't even in the loop.
Oh come on, do you honestly believe this? This is an administration that has proven over and over that it has no problem muscling its way past the whole seperation of powers concept. An administration that has been directly involved with breaches of privacy, the PATRIOT act, roaming wiretaps, warrantless searches, is pushing this Real ID thing, pushed for the Total Information Awareness crap, on and on and on.
Now you expect us to believe there is absolutely no connection whatsoever between the pattern of behavior exhibited by the Bush administration, which emphasises huge stores of government-accessible information, and the Supreme Court suddenly pulling this?
I'm not blaming Bush and his cronies directly for this but for you to say they have absolutely nothing to do with it is naive.
So where does Apple win? Dell just gave me a technically superior machine -- 64 bit processor, larger hard drive, insanely better video card. The Dell also comes with Vista Home, if you're wondering -- I didn't cheat and go for some freeDOS or anything. For three hundred less.
Oh, the Macbook is smaller. Whooptee do. That doesn't matter at all to me; it's purely subjective if it matters to you, but is it really worth 300 more dollars and a crappier machine?
This was just the first random Dell I saw, so don't give me wah-wah-wah Dell sucks or Inspiron sucks. When I was shopping for a laptop I actually did consider a Macbook until I saw how much more I could get from other manufacturers for less money -- Toshiba and HP had similar prices for similar machines. (I ended up with an HP.) IBM's Thinkpad came very close, but the specs were close enough that you could call it a borderline case and the Thinkpad came out like a hundred dollars more.
"Can you click the start menu?"
"Yeah, okay."
"Now click Run and type cmd."
"Uh huh."
"Now in the black box type ipconfig space forward slash renew."
"Okay."
And I type "sudo dhclient eth0" in a shell and they're none the wiser.
Unfortunately ISPs hire morons for mass-production call centers and we geeks aren't calling them for trivial crap like "my internet is broken". If we're calling them it's for something serious but if you want your problem addressed you have to play their game, and that means going through the full script with the idiot tier-one doofus, who may not even be an idiot but has to follow an idiotic script to keep his job and whom we can all feel sorry for anyway, since he's been listening to "my internet is broken" for the past eight hours.
Just pretend to do what he says. If he says "restart the computer", play the Windows startup sound at high volume. (I'm serious.) If he says "restart the modem", just do it. Eventually he'll get to the end of his script and do his job -- which is to bump you to someone who can actually address the problem.
Not quite school teacher or business owner point of view, but I've tried to be fair to what the Average User can do with Windows versus Ubuntu in this link I'm shamelessly whoring for myself.
And, as an anecdotal aside, I tested my hypothesis after, by bringing my Ubuntu laptop to my mother's house where she humored me for ten minutes by doing things like "Okay, mom, let's say you want to check your email. See if you can figure it out," and "Now let's say you want to surf the web..." and letting her go at it without prompting from me. Once she saw the Applications menu (took her about three seconds) it was no problem. If it weren't for certain Windows-only propietary software she has to use for work, I'd feel perfectly comfortable giving her an Ubuntu CD and knowing that my "family tech support time" would be reduced by 90%. I dont' expect that she could do everything without any prompting from me, but she'd never call me again for "I think I have a virus" or "can you help me clean up my start menu again" or "the computer is being slow" because there's fifty gigaquads of spyware infesting it.
Yeah, one of the three main questions I ask my potential new hires is "Tell me about your home computer system." Not because I give a damn what kind of computer they have, but I want to gauge their level of enthusiasm about it. The lamers will give a generic "Oh, it's a Dell, like, 2.4ghz, pretty decent," full stop.
I want to hear things like what kind of video card, what type of processor chip, the network they've got going, what OS they're running, that sort of stuff. The good techs will tell you all of this without being prodded -- to them, "tell me about your computers" is an invitation to talk about stuff they really like. If they're not all about it, they don't have the level of interest in technology qua technology that's going to work here.
In my day (I'm in my late 20s) we had answering machines, and you know what? They were good enough. If I left the house and came home a few hours later, I could see if there was a message, and I knew it was left sometime within the past few hours. Barring a few really specific and improbable scenarios, I don't need to know the exact damn time it was left, nor do I need the other BS like mailboxes, saved messages folders, varying greetings, and all the other claptrap.
Today? If you're the caller, you have to listen to the person's personal greeting, then suffer through another 20 seconds of "At the tone, please record your message. When finished, hang up, or press the star key for more options. To page this person, press nine. To listen to your personal horoscope..." Just shut the hell up and let me leave the message so I can get on with it, please?
If you're receiving voicemail it's even worse. "You have...two...new messages and one...saved message. To listen to...new messages...press one. To listen--" One. "First...message...received...at...ten...fifty eight...AM." SHUT UP. JUST PLAY THE GORRAM MESSAGE WITHOUT THE PREAMBLE. Christ. Why the hell do I need to know the exact freaking minute someone called?
But can someone PLEASE explain to me why it's called "wifi"? "Wireless Fidelity" makes absolutely no sense, as "fidelity" simply means "accuracy" -- hence a "lo-fi" recording reproduces the sound with low accuracy, and a "hi-fi" recording reproduces it with high accuracy. "Fidelity" is also irrespective of the medium through which the transmission or recording is made. What is with this term?
One wonders what the hell the judge was smoking to agree that this guy's use of the access point was obtained by "fraudulent" means. Did he, like, sneak his way into range of it under cover of darkness, use social engineering to get the parking space, and spend hours cracking the nonexistent password?
"It's quite clear that the district is talking about conduct in the classroom and not the videotape," Lind said.
So, the mere act of dancing around while the teacher's back is turned merits a 40 day suspension? Spare me -- they're after blood here because of the video.
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What's the point of coming up with, and defending, a stupid theory?
Well, ask a Creationist, and get an exciting glimpse into the mind of the truly paranoid. He'll be able to come up with all kinds of inane answers -- few of which are answers of any kind, but just restatements of the original question. Some examples off the top of my head...
1. It's so they can push their liberal / secularist agenda. (What agenda might that be? Nobody knows, really. Maybe the idea is that if we keep pushing evolution and cosmology, future generations won't believe in God. How does that help "liberals"? I guess it's so then nothing will stand in our way of killing babies!)
2. Blah blah blah persecution of my beliefs blah blah blah. (Listening to Christians whinge about being some kind of oppressed minority is absolutely hilarious. Not that this response answers the question.)
The only reason I'm responding to this is in the hopes that someone sees it and understands.
No, the entire service is crappy. In the cases where accurate names aren't possible, provide accurate numbers, don't let people put in whatever they want to.
This is what happens. Take your cellphone as an example. If you don't have the number in your address book, the caller's number displays, and that's it.
You seriously think that, as a support tech, you shouldn't have to listen to people telling you that the service your company provides is broken?
It has nothing to do with what my company offers. This is how caller ID works all over the US. A great example is a recent debacle we had with a customer in Texas. If this customer called a number local to him, which would be a Southwest Bell number, guess what? Southwest Bell had their own ANI translation table and delivered to the callee the name they had on record, which was not this customer. We were sending the correct information.
Shit like this happens all the time. One ILEC has their directory updated, another doesn't. One delivers whatever the caller's switch delivers, another doesn't. There are no standards. It's a system that barely works. As I said.
ou see a system that is broken and paying customers who don't expect the system to be broken, and you say fix the customers.
Yes. It's unreasonable of me to expect people to be aware of what a service can and cannot do. Callous though it may seem, caveat emptor works sometimes. You want to fix it? Convince every telecom in the US to adhere to a monolithic and centrally controlled standard? Good luck.
"Hey Southwest Bell, why don't you do it like, say, AT&T does it?"
"No thanks, we have our system in place."
"Yeah, but it doesn't always match what AT&T does."
"Then maybe AT&T should change theirs to match ours!"
"They say they don't want to."
"Neither do we."
"But look here, it would make your customers happier!"
"They're already pretty happy."
"Some of them aren't. Some of them have problems from time to time."
"Not often enough for it to matter."
"Matters to them!"
"So you want us to tear down the multimillion dollar system we have in place now, develop another system at more considerable cost to us, to correct a problem 'some' people have 'from time to time' with their five-dollar service we never guaranteed would work 100% in the first place."
"Yes."
Have fun with that.
The reason I disagree is because I learned at age six that sometimes stuff just doesn't work the way you want it to. Even if you paid for it. You can either let it drive you insane, or you can file it under the heading "sometimes life sucks" and get on with yourself.
Of course, I also think it's pretty damn petty to raise such a fuss about a four-dollar-a-month add-on service that manages to satisfy the end customer 98% of the time, but that's another story.
Yeah, I'm sure that it's okay to complain when a commercial service fails a huge amount of the time. Then stop using it. I didnt' see anyone holding a gun to your head saying "You must purchase this service, and you must treat it as though it can do things it's not ever going to do." Why legislate it? Except it's not the limitation of the technology. Phone companies can do better (e.g. ANI), they choose not to. I AM the phone company! But seriously, no. ANI is a highly reliable service and works very, very well. If all people cared about was seeing the number, ANI would do it fine. But they want to see names and company names and stuff -- and that's crappy. It relies on directory listings that get updated when someone feels like it, and wrong half the time at that. Some ILECs use their own local databases for ANI-to-caller-ID translation, some rely on whatever the caller's switch is sending. Small businesses in particular change their names all the time, number porting only complicates things further, etc. There's a lot going on with caller ID that makes it a craptastic system -- which is not the case for ANI.
If anybody were pretending that, they wouldn't be complaining, would they?
Perhaps we're talking past each other. What I'm saying here is this: The caller ID system sucks out loud. People don't realize this, and think it's a super awesome system that should always work. If they realized how crappy it is, instead of believing the hype, they wouldn't be griping when it fails, because they'd expect it. Instead, though, they gripe endlessly, and now legislation is being considered, because people expect the technology to do something it's not gonna do.
According to your own previous comment, "the general population".
Yeah, well, fair enough, but I was speaking rhetorically. What I meant was that I really have a hard time understanding why people get so worked up over petty stuff like this. I'd just like to state again and for the record that I, personally, handle huge numbers of people complaining about it, so I know how unbelievably insane they get over caller ID. And to this day it baffles me, because it's such a trivial little thing. It's like four bucks a month for a cool little convenience. So if it doesn't work all the time, big deal. Get over it.
Marketing has a much higher ROI potential than actual R&D, which may not even pan out. If it does, well, marketing is still more profitable in most cases. People will buy stupid shit if you market it properly. Particularly when it comes to computers or any other sort of information technology, which most people view the way the monkeys viewed the black monolith, as a mysterious object to be feared.
Two prime examples from my line of work of people buying into marketing hype with zero understanding of the technology.
1. The vast majority of our clients are small businesses. I'm talking 5 to 10 employees, which are primarily "the people who do some work, and one or two administrative assistants". Zero tech staff whatsoever. I cannot even begin to count the number of these small business owners that call me whining that their VoIP service "doesn't work" and it turns out it's because they bought some insanely expensive Cisco firewall (or some other firewall "appliance"). They have only the foggiest notion of what a firewall does, they have zero idea how to set one up, configure it, or maintain it, but some doofus salesman somewhere told them how important firewalls are and how they have to have one, so they forked over hundreds of dollars for a box they can barely identify.
2. To diagnose VoIP problems I also frequently need to ask what sort of internet connection the client has. Most of them give a totally inane response like "it's the fastest one they offer" or "business-class". In other words, they have no idea what they're paying for every month, but they can recite the bullshit marketing terms all day long.
People have no idea what the hell they're buying. Companies routinely offer crap and doll it up with important-sounding fluff, and people buy it, having no understanding of what they're purchasing or how to compare a good product from bad. It doesn't take long for bean-counters to realize that they can cut back on making an actual reliable product, and divert the savings into marketing, at which point people will start handing over cash.
t's not ludicrous at all to be given a technology that fails a huge amount of the time and then complain about it failing a huge amount of the time.
You sure about that, chief? If that's the limitation of the technology, you can bitch and bitch but that won't change anything. Or you can stop pretending it's a 100% reliable system, and just accept the limitations of it.
Also, who really gives a damn. What's the absolute worst that could happen? Your brother prank calls you and makes it look like he's from the White House? Oh no. A telemarketer calls and you see the caller ID that says your buddy's name, so you answer? Oh no, you've been inconvenienced for the two seconds it takes to hang up.
Waving your hands in the air like you just don't care in order to operate your computer, huh. Where have I heard this one before?
I sort of hope it passes, for selfish reasons. I direct the support department at a VoIP provider and I cannot tell you how tired I am of people's endless, nonstop whining about their caller ID, and how they want it changed, and why can't I make it look like they're calling from somewhere else... on and on and on. This will give me a convenient excuse to tell them to shut up.
On a slightly more serious note, though, it's amusing to note why the bill is being introduced. Senator Stevens was blithering about how it's important because people rely on caller ID for "critical information". I cannot imagine what could possibly be considered "critical" about caller ID information, particularly considering what a half-assed hack the entire system is anyway and the lack of any real standards. Please note that caller ID is entirely different from ANI (automated number identification).
Caller ID is a fine example of a semi-convenient feature that people took and ran away with. The general population now sees Caller ID as the Oracle at Delphi, infallable and impossible to live without, and go absolutely apeshit if it's wrong (which is quite often, believe it or not). I guess people just don't understand the technology, but to "rely" on caller ID information is ludicrous.
I remember about fifteen years ago, maybe a bit more, when Caller ID was virtually unheard of, and the Bells were just starting to roll it out to homes. My parents got the little box from Radio Shack, signed up with the service, and my friends and I would rush over to the ID box with childish glee every time the phone rang, cause hey! How cool is this, man!
But in the end that's all we thought about it. It was a cool little novelty. That people take it so seriously now baffles me.
We used to deal with the phone ringing and not knowing who it was in advance with the following method: a) answer the phone, b) don't answer the phone, or c) let them leave a message and get back to them if we feel like it.
Somehow, though, what I don't remember is that the pre-Caller ID era was some kind of a Dark Ages where nobody got anything done.
But you'll never convince the public of this.
But if you are a little bit ambitious about your job and want to go the extra mile, sometime spending a few minutes here and there will make the big difference against people that do not do it.
Yeah, and that's the problem. It degrades from there. One guy starts doing just a little extra to get noticed around the office. And indeed, others notice, like his coworkers, some of whom start doing a bit more too, so they don't look like slackers, or to show the guy up, or because they want to be the one getting the promotion. Pretty soon most everyone is doing it, and before too long -- and this is key -- management starts expecting it, and anyone who leaves work at work is derided as someone who doesn't care about his job.
But according to the RIAA, you'd be wrong.
1. I myself have bought albums after hearing certain artists' songs on other net radio stations -- music I would never, ever, ever have heard otherwise except perhaps in the drunken haze of a goth club.
2. Several independent artists have sent me singles and even entire albums and other promo kits, encouraging me to put them in rotation. One synthpop artist wrote:
And another said, after sending me some tracks and I liked them but mentioned I'd never heard of this group before:
This has happened dozens of times. It's good for the artists who are trying to get noticed; it's good for the audience who gets to discover new music; it's good for the broadcaster cause it's just fun. I get permission from many of the labels or artists to play their stuff, and when I don't, well, it's a freaking 96k broadcast that can't be copied without some technical know-how (certainly much more difficult than jamming a tape into your radio and hitting "record"). Exactly who is being harmed here?
You know, there ain't no Benjamens in the net broadcasting trade. We do this for fun and the love of the music. The RIAA's outmoded and antiquated business models, and their continued attempts to strangle the life out of emergent technologies, is absolutely appalling. I'll continue to broadcast from my host in Germany and here's a big screw you to the suits. I don't make a single cent off my broadcast, and I don't play the kind of music that would come close to competing with the mass-appeal fare on the normal airwaves. You'll never get a dime from me.
For all the whining about Canada, let me point out a few things.
First, all the excuses are pretty hollow and trite. "You have to wait forever", "you have to travel far for advanced care", "mired in beaurocracy", blah blah blah. All of this may be true, but when you're American and you have no health insurance and you can't afford any treatment, suddenly all those "drawbacks" don't sound so bad. I'd rather have to wait for a couple of weeks to get a serious ailment looked at (if that's even true, but there's conflicting anecdotes) then not get treated at all because I can't afford it. Plus, most of those accusations could easily and accurately be levelled at the current American private healthcare system.
(And don't bother kidding yourself with this gibberish about how an American hospital can't turn you away for nonpayment. While I doubt they'd kick you out of the ER if you had a gunshot wound, try getting a broken bone dealt with, or some kind of illness you can't identify, if you can't pay. Lotsa luck, champ.)
Second, I don't think anyone in America is seriously proposing a single-tier system where everybody is exactly on the same playing field. The idea is to provide healthcare for free for those who need it. If you want a specific doctor or a specific hospital or want faster treatment or more tests run or more advanced technology or whatever, you're welcome to pay for it then (or supplement yourself with private insurance).
Finally, such a plan would never involve more taxes if our government wasn't so tax-happy. God forbid we divert funds from pork spending and multiply redundant agencies all doing the same job, eh? Feel free to go through this list -- I'm sure we could all agree on at least a third of these to be totally eliminated and nobody would notice the difference. There are like five agencies doing the same job as the FDA in there, for starters. Just because the government's solution to everything is "tax more" doesn't mean that's how it has to be.
It is telling that most other first-world, developed nations (not all) provide some baseline healthcare system for their citizens, and America is one of the very few that doesn't. We're so enamored with this notion that "free market capitalism solves everything!" that we can't see that our system isn't all that "free market" to begin with. Most critics' complaints eventually boil down to waving away the benefits of universal healthcare with a "Yes, yes, but that's socialism," as though socialism is immediately understood by all to be evil and no more discussion could possibly ensue. It's a weak argument, and it's sad.
The service my company offers is primarily targeted at small to medium businesses. As such I frequently deal with the owners of these companies, and if the issue is technical in nature I have to ask them about their network setup. Simple stuff like "Okay, and what kind of internet connection do you have?"
It's astonishing how many of them will say things like "I dunno" or "Oh, it's broadband" or "There's a box that says Netgear, does that help?" If they don't know sometimes I press a little: "Well, do you know who your internet service is from?" since if they say something like "Verizon" I'll know it's DSL, or "Roadrunner" will be cable.
"I'm not sure," they'll say. This happens all the time.
Some of these people work out of their homes, too. Even then they have no idea.
It's like.. let me get this straight, sir. A bill arrives for you every month. You have no idea what company it's from and you don't know what service it's for, but you just pay it?
Why am I doing this job, then? I could start my own business where I just send out random invoices to random people! Clearly they aren't paying any attention to what the hell they're paying for, so I could just make an invoice for "services rendered" and lots of them would, evidently, pay it anyway.
So you haven't had a bad run-in with the law.. yet. Good for you, I hope that stays that way. But that doesn't change any of what I said. People attracted to the job solely for power, low requirements of brains and education, No useful oversight whatsoever. Arrest first and ask questions later. A "tell it to the judge" mentality. No citizen recourse. Selective enforcement of frankly stupid laws. This is a pattern of behavior and the nature of the job attracts the last people who should have such a job. A few "polite and professional" cops dealing with a teenager or manager doesn't count for much, especially since in such cases they're not there to hassle you. I think you slow down in front of cops because you know they can royally screw you if you make the slightest wrong move, or just because they feel like it. You don't really expect anyone to believe the only motivation you have is the minor inconvenience of a "10 to 15 minute delay", do you?
but extending the mission past this to support a weak government has dropped the probability of ultimate success to 26%.
Success? Don't you have to know what the actual goal is before you can talk about the probability of obtaining that goal?
Does anyone actually know what the goal in Iraq is anymore?
I think you're so wrong I don't even know where to begin. I loathe cops, and so do most other people.
Here's a few reasons why.
First, what kind of person wants to become a cop? The job itself sucks -- it's incredibly dull for 95% of the time (cruising around looking for someone to ticket, pointing speed guns at people, filling out endless paperwork, etc) and is dangerous the other 5% of the time. It does not pay all that well (here in Atlanta, you start at about 35k). You get decent benefits, I guess, but I doubt anyone goes into a career just for that. A sense of civic duty is possibly a motive, but that quickly fades for most people when they realize that busting people for expired tags and other petty crap, which is the bulk of a beat cop's work, ain't exactly cleaning up the mean streets.
What are we left with? What possible benefit could there be to this job?
Power.
Make no mistake that power is the single most attractive and established benefit to police work. Therefore, most people -- not all -- who pursue this career are, surprise, power hungry animals. Combined with the abysmally low standards for entry (in most jurisdictions any schmuck with a GED who can do 25 pushups can get the job) and you've got a police force composed largely of power-tripping twits on the lower end of the intelligence scale. Dont' forget that cops are not hired for their brains. They are essentially the muscle of the state and that's all the state cares about.
Next we have all the silly laws the cops are told to enforce. This is not directly the cop's fault, of course, but they did choose this job and stay in it. Moreover, I hold the cops accountable for how selective they are in their enforcement. Partially related to the local legislature, traffic cops in particular are far more interested in pursuing "crimes" that result in profit for the state than they are about public safety. They're happy to pull you over and cite you for something like an expired tag (you monster, you!) or whatever inane non-moving violation, but when it comes to the idiot swerving through traffic or the jackass going 20mph below the limit they're nowhere to be found, or drive right by.
A cop is also generally not held accountable for his or her actions. Oh, sure, in extreme cases, they might receive a slap on the wrist in the form of "administrative leave" which amounts to a week of paid vacation, but in general, they can do whatever the hell they want and let the court sort it out later. I hate anecdotal evidence, but I'll offer the example of myself, arrested in 2000 for "terrorist activities". I lost a job thanks to that, not to mention the 3000 dollars I had to front for the 17k bond, the legal hassle, and so forth. When it finally got to the arraignment the DA took one look at the cop's notes, saw that the cop had absolutely no reason to think I was up to no good, and dismissed the charges right then and there in the hallway.
Do you think anything happened to Mister Officer?
This is all too common. Most cases are not as extreme as mine, but cops routinely pull people over just to be jerks, bark orders when they have no legal authority (but know people will comply because, well, it's a cop), and otherwise abuse their power.
The citizenry has almost no recourse, either. Suing for false arrest is almost never successful -- it's not like the system hasn't built in protection for that. And that's assuming you were arrested, and not just harrassed with some bullshit ticket. A cop's charge against you can make your life a living hell and cost you considerable money and you have no way to defend yourself -- he says you ran a red light, you say you didn't, and who is the judge going to believe?
Our legal system is so constructed that no one really watches the watchers -- no one who can do anything about it, anyway. There's a reason we all get nervous when a cop is behind us in traffic, even when we know we're not doing anything wrong.
We should not be nervous around the people we are paying to protect us. There is something wrong when that's the case.
Bush and his whole branch of government aren't even in the loop.
Oh come on, do you honestly believe this? This is an administration that has proven over and over that it has no problem muscling its way past the whole seperation of powers concept. An administration that has been directly involved with breaches of privacy, the PATRIOT act, roaming wiretaps, warrantless searches, is pushing this Real ID thing, pushed for the Total Information Awareness crap, on and on and on.
Now you expect us to believe there is absolutely no connection whatsoever between the pattern of behavior exhibited by the Bush administration, which emphasises huge stores of government-accessible information, and the Supreme Court suddenly pulling this?
I'm not blaming Bush and his cronies directly for this but for you to say they have absolutely nothing to do with it is naive.
BASELINE, CHEAPEST MACBOOK: $1099
CHIP: 2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
RAM: 1 gig, DDR2 533mhz
DRIVE: 80 gig
VIDEO: Integrated Intel with 64 megs (not a typo!) shared memory.
DELL INSPIRON 1501: $799 (from Dell's site
CHIP: Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 2GHz
RAM: 1 gig DDR2 533mhz
DRIVE: 120 gigs
VIDEO: ATI Radeon Xpress1150 256 megs dedicated memory
So where does Apple win? Dell just gave me a technically superior machine -- 64 bit processor, larger hard drive, insanely better video card. The Dell also comes with Vista Home, if you're wondering -- I didn't cheat and go for some freeDOS or anything. For three hundred less.
Oh, the Macbook is smaller. Whooptee do. That doesn't matter at all to me; it's purely subjective if it matters to you, but is it really worth 300 more dollars and a crappier machine?
This was just the first random Dell I saw, so don't give me wah-wah-wah Dell sucks or Inspiron sucks. When I was shopping for a laptop I actually did consider a Macbook until I saw how much more I could get from other manufacturers for less money -- Toshiba and HP had similar prices for similar machines. (I ended up with an HP.) IBM's Thinkpad came very close, but the specs were close enough that you could call it a borderline case and the Thinkpad came out like a hundred dollars more.
Or do what I do.
"Can you click the start menu?"
"Yeah, okay."
"Now click Run and type cmd."
"Uh huh."
"Now in the black box type ipconfig space forward slash renew."
"Okay."
And I type "sudo dhclient eth0" in a shell and they're none the wiser.
Unfortunately ISPs hire morons for mass-production call centers and we geeks aren't calling them for trivial crap like "my internet is broken". If we're calling them it's for something serious but if you want your problem addressed you have to play their game, and that means going through the full script with the idiot tier-one doofus, who may not even be an idiot but has to follow an idiotic script to keep his job and whom we can all feel sorry for anyway, since he's been listening to "my internet is broken" for the past eight hours.
Just pretend to do what he says. If he says "restart the computer", play the Windows startup sound at high volume. (I'm serious.) If he says "restart the modem", just do it. Eventually he'll get to the end of his script and do his job -- which is to bump you to someone who can actually address the problem.
Not quite school teacher or business owner point of view, but I've tried to be fair to what the Average User can do with Windows versus Ubuntu in this link I'm shamelessly whoring for myself.
And, as an anecdotal aside, I tested my hypothesis after, by bringing my Ubuntu laptop to my mother's house where she humored me for ten minutes by doing things like "Okay, mom, let's say you want to check your email. See if you can figure it out," and "Now let's say you want to surf the web..." and letting her go at it without prompting from me. Once she saw the Applications menu (took her about three seconds) it was no problem. If it weren't for certain Windows-only propietary software she has to use for work, I'd feel perfectly comfortable giving her an Ubuntu CD and knowing that my "family tech support time" would be reduced by 90%. I dont' expect that she could do everything without any prompting from me, but she'd never call me again for "I think I have a virus" or "can you help me clean up my start menu again" or "the computer is being slow" because there's fifty gigaquads of spyware infesting it.
who wrote "true lies" with sylvester stallone?
It was Arnold, not Stallone, and the writer was James Cameron, who can hardly be called "b-grade".
Yeah, one of the three main questions I ask my potential new hires is "Tell me about your home computer system." Not because I give a damn what kind of computer they have, but I want to gauge their level of enthusiasm about it. The lamers will give a generic "Oh, it's a Dell, like, 2.4ghz, pretty decent," full stop.
I want to hear things like what kind of video card, what type of processor chip, the network they've got going, what OS they're running, that sort of stuff. The good techs will tell you all of this without being prodded -- to them, "tell me about your computers" is an invitation to talk about stuff they really like. If they're not all about it, they don't have the level of interest in technology qua technology that's going to work here.
In my day (I'm in my late 20s) we had answering machines, and you know what? They were good enough. If I left the house and came home a few hours later, I could see if there was a message, and I knew it was left sometime within the past few hours. Barring a few really specific and improbable scenarios, I don't need to know the exact damn time it was left, nor do I need the other BS like mailboxes, saved messages folders, varying greetings, and all the other claptrap.
Today? If you're the caller, you have to listen to the person's personal greeting, then suffer through another 20 seconds of "At the tone, please record your message. When finished, hang up, or press the star key for more options. To page this person, press nine. To listen to your personal horoscope..." Just shut the hell up and let me leave the message so I can get on with it, please?
If you're receiving voicemail it's even worse. "You have...two...new messages and one...saved message. To listen to...new messages...press one. To listen--" One. "First...message...received...at...ten...fifty eight...AM." SHUT UP. JUST PLAY THE GORRAM MESSAGE WITHOUT THE PREAMBLE. Christ. Why the hell do I need to know the exact freaking minute someone called?
But can someone PLEASE explain to me why it's called "wifi"? "Wireless Fidelity" makes absolutely no sense, as "fidelity" simply means "accuracy" -- hence a "lo-fi" recording reproduces the sound with low accuracy, and a "hi-fi" recording reproduces it with high accuracy. "Fidelity" is also irrespective of the medium through which the transmission or recording is made. What is with this term?
One wonders what the hell the judge was smoking to agree that this guy's use of the access point was obtained by "fraudulent" means. Did he, like, sneak his way into range of it under cover of darkness, use social engineering to get the parking space, and spend hours cracking the nonexistent password?