In the case of the crashed computer, your department has totally dropped the ball. It has nothing to do with "tell me when it can be done". Trust me, I don't give one tenth of one hoot how slowly or quickly you can repair a computer or even if you can predict how long it will take to fix. I want to know, "When am I going to be back up and running?" as opposed to "When will you fix the computer?" These are two extremely different things.
Let me explain to you how it's supposed to work. I am a landlord. One of the huge selling points for my properties is my maintenance guarantee. The guarantee is as follows: when you notify me of a repair issue in your apartment, your problem will be solved within 3 business days. If it is not solved in 3 business days, you do not pay rent until it is resolved. How am I able to offer such a guarantee when other landlords let repairs fester for months and get taken to court for "not fixing anything"? Because I focus on solving my residents' problems.
Let's say a roof springs a leak and water is dripping into the apartment. This is a problem for the resident that needs solving, probably with a new roof. Does that mean that the building is getting a new roof in 3 days? No, there is no roof fairy that delivers roofs in 3 days--I'm lucky to even have a bid after 3 days. But what it does mean is that I will do some type of remediation to keep the water from dripping down on their heads within 3 days. Because really, a building's residents don't care about the roof itself, they care about the shelter it provides. Same with a furnace dying. New furnaces don't magically appear in 3 days, but come hell or high water heat will be restored to the building within 3 days (not that I'd wait 3 days to restore heat, but the guarantee says 3 days). Residents don't care about the furnace itself, they care about the heat it provides.
How does this translate to your (lack of) service department? It means when someone's computer crashes, you give them a loaner laptop with their image on it, their data files are on the network, and they're good to go. You can fix the desktop at your leisure.
Your lack of focus on solving the actual problem causes stress for both you and the users you support. I don't stress about maintenance issues because I know that my residents are happy. I've never once been sued for "not fixing anything" and I get great word of mouth advertising. Sure, I have to give out a few days of rent rebates here and there, but it's well worth it in the end. My residents know that I care about their problem and that I'm trying as hard as I can to solve it because if I don't, it's going to hit my bottom line.
Again, it's all about expectations. No one's saying that you have to stay after 5 to install some software. It's better for the requester and the requestee if you set expectations and stick to them.
For instance, say installation of supported software will, come hell or high water, be done within 16 business hours (or whatever you can deliver with the resources that you have). If I make a request at 9am on Monday, I know it's guaranteed to be done by Tuesday COB and I don't have to worry about it. I don't have to ride you. As a customer, I want my problem solved in a predictable manner. I want to know that my request hasn't vanished into thin air.
I'm going to go so far as to assert that I understand customer service better than you. You want to know why? Because while you are busy browbeating your customers for "thinking that they are special", I actually go out of my way to make sure my residents feel special and that they understand that resolving their problem is important to me.
Maybe you can think about this the next time you're plugging in a printer.
Being a good detection dog has more to do with personality than with raw olfactory skill.
Two dogs with the same DNA won't necessarily have similar personalities. Think about the identical twins that you know. Same DNA, different personalities.
You can't clone personality. What a waste of time and resources.
Never ceases to amaze me the quantity of jackasses on Slashdot. Agreed.
Now if you are a person like that, well sorry to burst your bubble but you don't matter. You are not special, people are not required to care about you. Naturally one person cannot force another to care about them. On the other hand, one person cannot force another to pay them. This is something my accountant is about to find out.
Bitching fixes nothing and indeed can make it take longer since time is now being spent dealing with that rather than working. Well, obviously there is the old adage about the squeaky wheel and the grease, but I think it goes beyond that. At my current client site, the admins have a habit of simply closing tickets that they aren't 100% sure how to resolve. I guess it never occurred to them to contact the requester first, so requests sometimes disappear into thin air. When this happens, I reserve the right to become irate, and I will not apologize for it. You want me to be nice to you? Do your fucking job, then. I don't ask for much.
At this point, I'll still submit requests to them through email, but if I don't hear anything after 8 business hours, I'm going to call on the phone and get it resolved then and there. Otherwise, for all I know it's never going to get done.
Don't want me to call you? Acknowledge my request ASAP, tell me when it's going to get done, and then do what you promised me you would do, and by when you promised me that you would do it. Do that, and your users will leave you alone so you can post to slashdot.
If someone's riding you like this, it's probably because he expects that the work will never be done.
Why would he expect that? Could it be because you have failed to do the work in the past?
Perhaps you need to do a better job managing people's expectations by performing the work that you say that you'll perform in the time that you said you would perform it.
c'mon. Calling an average of 25 times per month? If I had to call 25 times per month because of billing issues, I'd be thrilled to death that they let me out of my contract.
For the record, sprint is horrible. I've received crazy bills from them for Sprint long distance service over 5 years after I canceled my long distance service for calls made years after I canceled. It took several calls to resolve the issue that basically went, "I do not have your service anymore." "Yes, I see that." "So can you please tell billing to stop attempting to bill me?" "No, it shows the charges are valid." "How could they be valid if I am not a customer?"
Own a home and loading garden supplies into your civic isn't going to cut it. Want to pull a boat or trailer (we are allowed to go on vacations aren't we???) and your little car won't cut it. Just so you know, it's way cheaper to own the car that you use on a day to day basis and then rent a larger car as needed.
I need a large car probably 5 days a year. For the rest of the time, I drive an economical car.
I get on a bus right in front of my house that takes me to the subway that takes me to work. Maybe public transport in your city is not run well, but it is run fine here.
Right now the poor are sucking up the SUV's because they are all over the place at the $1500-$3900 price tag, which is all the car they can afford. Where do I get an SUV for $1500-$3900? The family ain't getting any smaller, and I'd rather lug everyone around in one car than two.
Will Adobe give me Photoshop CS3 for free? No, but they will give you Photoshop Elements for $30, which is probably the best value you will ever see in the retail software market. It is truly amazing what they pack into that little $30 powerhouse.
Anyhow, the companies are giving you value for reporting vulnerabilities. They are fixing them. That gives value to a user of that product, anyway.
Maybe it's because I have a firm maximum bid in mind whereas some people decide that they're willing to increase their maximum bid in certain situations? Yes, that is exactly why you can't understand the benefit of sniping.
Most people are not engineers and have zero discipline. They act on their emotions and do illogical things. The average person does not enter his true maximum bid into the proxy system. He enters some idea of his max, but then his emotions take over. "Am I willing to lose this auction over $1 or $2?" And he raises his bid.
Watch the bidding on an item for evidence. You'll see some joker increasing his "maximum" bid by $1 or $2 for about a dozen iterations. Sniping protects against this inane bidding behavior.
Multisnipe is also a cool tool, although there is nothing specific to sniping about it. It just bids on every auction in the group until you win one, and then it stops bidding on that group. You could just as easily implement something like that without sniping, but it just happens to typically be bundled with sniping tools.
I have no relationship with the LinRails project, and this is the first I've heard of it, but even I can tell you why they include mysql database. They include it because it's more popular and quicker to get up and running.
The idea of LinRails isn't to spread good database ideology. It's to get Ruby on Rails up and running as quickly as possible for the greatest number of users.
The whole thing is irrelevant, anyhow. Chances are if you want to make a Rails app, you already know what database server you'll be using and already have your database configured. Even if you use LinRails, it takes 0.2 seconds of config file editing to point your app at postgres is that's your thing. Rails doesn't really care what database server it's connecting to.
What a truly sad state of affairs we are in when I have to agree with a post like this.
After working with computers for god knows how many years, I have developed a well-learned mistrust for computers to do the right thing with any regularity.
How sad is it then, that I still trust a computer to do the right thing more often than I trust a cop?
That's because domestic unionized workers aren't working in sweatshops or literal slave factories, as is the case for many prison system "workers" in China. One simple fact is a blue collar worker in the United States cannot compete on a simple price basis against slave labor. The solution to this problem, at least according to the open borders advocates, is importing our own permanent underclass so we can "remain competitive". Personally, I find this unpalatable. Neither can they compete with shipping raw materials to the other side of the world, having foreign workers make the finished product, and then shipping the finished goods back to the US.
Somehow, that makes me think that the domestic worker might be asking for a little too much. And yes, I think that $55 per hour in 2006 dollars is too much to ask for a unionized factory worker.
Which is a shame, since we used to come to Orlando and to ski in Denver You go to Disney and ski in Denver? I wasn't aware that Denver had any place to ski.
So go to EuroDisney. The money still comes back to the motherland, anyhow.:P
Here's a thought: if a company is at risk of going out of business as a consequence of breaking the law, then maybe the whole 'deterrent' thing might actually hold some water, hmmm? Not really. If one of my companies went out of business, I'd just set up a new one. But I'd do a better* job next time.
* Better from whose point of view is left for the reader to interpret.
You cannot actually be so far removed from the plight of 150 million other Americans that you intend this question to be taken seriously, unless you're clinically retarded. Perhaps I am clinically retarded, but I would gladly give up 14 days' salary to keep my driver's license and avoid jail time. You wouldn't have to ask me twice, I'd have a check written just as fast as my clinically retarded fingers could write.
So instead it comes off just like your other comment about how you would never even notice losing $100 - a brazen exercise is massaging your own overinflated ego. Not sure what to say here. It's not really overinflated ego when the median household income in my city is almost $100,000. Everyone around me is in a situation such that the fines for traffic violations are not meaningful, so I guess I don't see it as ego. Perhaps it came off that way, but if you look at it from my point of view, that statement would not be regarded as such if I said it around here.
The fact of the matter is, someone who makes $100,000 per year* is not going to miss $100, but he damn well is going to miss his driver's license and/or his freedom.
* I am not claiming to make $100,000.00 per year. In fact, I can assure you that I make either less than or greater than that amount, but not that amount exactly.
And what would it cost to pack meat in China and ship to the US?
What would be the cost to mechanize meat packing?
The world has changed significantly since 1980. US cotton (picked mechanically) is shipped abroad to foreign textile mills and then finished clothing is shipped back here. The textile industry found this to be cheaper than hiring unionized domestic workers.
Legalizing the illegals isn't going to drive up wages. It's just going to cause the meat packers to choose the next cheapest option, and I guarantee that paying everyone $53.55 per hour ($20 in 1980 converted to 2006 dollars) is NOT going to be the next-cheapest option.
That's why in America we have three types of penalties: monetary, incarceration, and administrative.
Monetary: That's the fines. To somebody like Paris Hilton, the fine means nothing. In fact, to most people, the amount of the fine is trivial. In my state, the fine for speeding is $5 for each MPH over the speed limit. If I get a ticket for going 45 MPH in a 25 MPH zone, my fine is $100.
$100 means nothing to me. If I were to lose $100 walking down the street, I would never even notice. So why do I not just drive like a maniac? Read on...
Administrative: If you get too many tickets within a certain period of time, you lose your right to drive. They take your license away. It doesn't matter if you are rich or poor. You get too many tickets, you lose your license. Just ask Paris Hilton.
Incarceration: Drive without a license? You're going to jail. Doesn't matter if your are Paris Hilton or some bum on the street. Hell, in my state, you'll get jail time for serious enough speeding infractions. Even if you can afford the $5 for each mile ticket, if you're caught going 120 in a 55 MPH zone, you're going to jail. Doesn't matter if you can afford a $325 ticket or not.
Doing a percentage scale for tickets is just stupid. In Sweden, a speeding fine is calculated at 14 days pay. Would you really miss 14 days pay no matter what you earned?
What about if you earned $500,000 per year? Your fine would be $19230.76. But if you earned $500k/yr, would you really care that much about a $20k fine? Jail time and loss of license are much bigger deterrents to the wealthy.
Slashdot Mirror
In the case of the crashed computer, your department has totally dropped the ball. It has nothing to do with "tell me when it can be done". Trust me, I don't give one tenth of one hoot how slowly or quickly you can repair a computer or even if you can predict how long it will take to fix. I want to know, "When am I going to be back up and running?" as opposed to "When will you fix the computer?" These are two extremely different things.
Let me explain to you how it's supposed to work. I am a landlord. One of the huge selling points for my properties is my maintenance guarantee. The guarantee is as follows: when you notify me of a repair issue in your apartment, your problem will be solved within 3 business days. If it is not solved in 3 business days, you do not pay rent until it is resolved. How am I able to offer such a guarantee when other landlords let repairs fester for months and get taken to court for "not fixing anything"? Because I focus on solving my residents' problems.
Let's say a roof springs a leak and water is dripping into the apartment. This is a problem for the resident that needs solving, probably with a new roof. Does that mean that the building is getting a new roof in 3 days? No, there is no roof fairy that delivers roofs in 3 days--I'm lucky to even have a bid after 3 days. But what it does mean is that I will do some type of remediation to keep the water from dripping down on their heads within 3 days. Because really, a building's residents don't care about the roof itself, they care about the shelter it provides. Same with a furnace dying. New furnaces don't magically appear in 3 days, but come hell or high water heat will be restored to the building within 3 days (not that I'd wait 3 days to restore heat, but the guarantee says 3 days). Residents don't care about the furnace itself, they care about the heat it provides.
How does this translate to your (lack of) service department? It means when someone's computer crashes, you give them a loaner laptop with their image on it, their data files are on the network, and they're good to go. You can fix the desktop at your leisure.
Your lack of focus on solving the actual problem causes stress for both you and the users you support. I don't stress about maintenance issues because I know that my residents are happy. I've never once been sued for "not fixing anything" and I get great word of mouth advertising. Sure, I have to give out a few days of rent rebates here and there, but it's well worth it in the end. My residents know that I care about their problem and that I'm trying as hard as I can to solve it because if I don't, it's going to hit my bottom line.
Again, it's all about expectations. No one's saying that you have to stay after 5 to install some software. It's better for the requester and the requestee if you set expectations and stick to them.
For instance, say installation of supported software will, come hell or high water, be done within 16 business hours (or whatever you can deliver with the resources that you have). If I make a request at 9am on Monday, I know it's guaranteed to be done by Tuesday COB and I don't have to worry about it. I don't have to ride you. As a customer, I want my problem solved in a predictable manner. I want to know that my request hasn't vanished into thin air.
I'm going to go so far as to assert that I understand customer service better than you. You want to know why? Because while you are busy browbeating your customers for "thinking that they are special", I actually go out of my way to make sure my residents feel special and that they understand that resolving their problem is important to me.
Maybe you can think about this the next time you're plugging in a printer.
This is going to be an expensive waste of time.
Being a good detection dog has more to do with personality than with raw olfactory skill.
Two dogs with the same DNA won't necessarily have similar personalities. Think about the identical twins that you know. Same DNA, different personalities.
You can't clone personality. What a waste of time and resources.
At this point, I'll still submit requests to them through email, but if I don't hear anything after 8 business hours, I'm going to call on the phone and get it resolved then and there. Otherwise, for all I know it's never going to get done.
Don't want me to call you? Acknowledge my request ASAP, tell me when it's going to get done, and then do what you promised me you would do, and by when you promised me that you would do it. Do that, and your users will leave you alone so you can post to slashdot.
If someone's riding you like this, it's probably because he expects that the work will never be done.
Why would he expect that? Could it be because you have failed to do the work in the past?
Perhaps you need to do a better job managing people's expectations by performing the work that you say that you'll perform in the time that you said you would perform it.
c'mon. Calling an average of 25 times per month? If I had to call 25 times per month because of billing issues, I'd be thrilled to death that they let me out of my contract.
For the record, sprint is horrible. I've received crazy bills from them for Sprint long distance service over 5 years after I canceled my long distance service for calls made years after I canceled. It took several calls to resolve the issue that basically went, "I do not have your service anymore." "Yes, I see that." "So can you please tell billing to stop attempting to bill me?" "No, it shows the charges are valid." "How could they be valid if I am not a customer?"
Yay sprint.
I need a large car probably 5 days a year. For the rest of the time, I drive an economical car.
I get on a bus right in front of my house that takes me to the subway that takes me to work. Maybe public transport in your city is not run well, but it is run fine here.
Anyhow, the companies are giving you value for reporting vulnerabilities. They are fixing them. That gives value to a user of that product, anyway.
Most people are not engineers and have zero discipline. They act on their emotions and do illogical things. The average person does not enter his true maximum bid into the proxy system. He enters some idea of his max, but then his emotions take over. "Am I willing to lose this auction over $1 or $2?" And he raises his bid.
Watch the bidding on an item for evidence. You'll see some joker increasing his "maximum" bid by $1 or $2 for about a dozen iterations. Sniping protects against this inane bidding behavior.
Multisnipe is also a cool tool, although there is nothing specific to sniping about it. It just bids on every auction in the group until you win one, and then it stops bidding on that group. You could just as easily implement something like that without sniping, but it just happens to typically be bundled with sniping tools.
Pot, kettle, black.
I have no relationship with the LinRails project, and this is the first I've heard of it, but even I can tell you why they include mysql database. They include it because it's more popular and quicker to get up and running.
The idea of LinRails isn't to spread good database ideology. It's to get Ruby on Rails up and running as quickly as possible for the greatest number of users.
The whole thing is irrelevant, anyhow. Chances are if you want to make a Rails app, you already know what database server you'll be using and already have your database configured. Even if you use LinRails, it takes 0.2 seconds of config file editing to point your app at postgres is that's your thing. Rails doesn't really care what database server it's connecting to.
What a truly sad state of affairs we are in when I have to agree with a post like this.
After working with computers for god knows how many years, I have developed a well-learned mistrust for computers to do the right thing with any regularity.
How sad is it then, that I still trust a computer to do the right thing more often than I trust a cop?
I've never replaced a battery, but I've never had a phone cost $500, either.
If my phone cost $500, I'd want to get some extra life out of it.
Sure.
Somehow, that makes me think that the domestic worker might be asking for a little too much. And yes, I think that $55 per hour in 2006 dollars is too much to ask for a unionized factory worker.
So go to EuroDisney. The money still comes back to the motherland, anyhow.
Don't forget, that's domestic and foreign tourism.
Most US citizens travel, just not abroad. Most US tourism dollars are spent by domestic tourists.
That is a strange definition of "offsite backup".
Dreamhost's interface for file transfer is scp or ftp.
Any more statements you'd like to share with the group?
* Better from whose point of view is left for the reader to interpret.
The fact of the matter is, someone who makes $100,000 per year* is not going to miss $100, but he damn well is going to miss his driver's license and/or his freedom.
* I am not claiming to make $100,000.00 per year. In fact, I can assure you that I make either less than or greater than that amount, but not that amount exactly.
And what would it cost to pack meat in China and ship to the US?
What would be the cost to mechanize meat packing?
The world has changed significantly since 1980. US cotton (picked mechanically) is shipped abroad to foreign textile mills and then finished clothing is shipped back here. The textile industry found this to be cheaper than hiring unionized domestic workers.
Legalizing the illegals isn't going to drive up wages. It's just going to cause the meat packers to choose the next cheapest option, and I guarantee that paying everyone $53.55 per hour ($20 in 1980 converted to 2006 dollars) is NOT going to be the next-cheapest option.
Any more thoughts?
- Monetary: That's the fines. To somebody like Paris Hilton, the fine means nothing. In fact, to most people, the amount of the fine is trivial. In my state, the fine for speeding is $5 for each MPH over the speed limit. If I get a ticket for going 45 MPH in a 25 MPH zone, my fine is $100.
- Administrative: If you get too many tickets within a certain period of time, you lose your right to drive. They take your license away. It doesn't matter if you are rich or poor. You get too many tickets, you lose your license. Just ask Paris Hilton.
- Incarceration: Drive without a license? You're going to jail. Doesn't matter if your are Paris Hilton or some bum on the street. Hell, in my state, you'll get jail time for serious enough speeding infractions. Even if you can afford the $5 for each mile ticket, if you're caught going 120 in a 55 MPH zone, you're going to jail. Doesn't matter if you can afford a $325 ticket or not.
Doing a percentage scale for tickets is just stupid. In Sweden, a speeding fine is calculated at 14 days pay. Would you really miss 14 days pay no matter what you earned?$100 means nothing to me. If I were to lose $100 walking down the street, I would never even notice. So why do I not just drive like a maniac? Read on...
What about if you earned $500,000 per year? Your fine would be $19230.76. But if you earned $500k/yr, would you really care that much about a $20k fine? Jail time and loss of license are much bigger deterrents to the wealthy.