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The Biggest Time Suck at the Office Might Be Your Computer (bloomberg.com)
Sharing personal anecdotes and recent studies, a new report on Bloomberg blames outdated computers, decade-old operating systems and ageing equipments for being one of the biggest hurdles that prevents people from doing actual work in their offices. From the article: Slow, outdated computers and intermittent internet connections demoralize workers, a survey of 6,000 European workers said. Half of U.K. employees said creaking computers were "restrictive and limiting," and 38 percent said modern technology would make them more motivated, according to the survey, commissioned by electronics company Sharp. Scott's (a 25-year-old researcher who works at an insurance firm) PC runs the relatively up-to-date Windows 8 operating system, but his computer sometimes struggles to handle large spreadsheets and multiple documents open simultaneously, slowing him down. Others are in a worse spot. One in every eight business laptops and desktops worldwide still run Windows XP, which was introduced in 2001. [...] Some businesses can't help using old hardware or operating systems, because they use specialized software that also hasn't been brought up-to-date.
The cost of a new high-end PC over a three-year lifetime is trivial compared to a typical office-worker salary. The cost of a decent chair over its 10-20 year lifetime is even smaller. Yet somehow companies refuse to spend 1% of a salary on something that will make people 5% more efficient.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I have seen a bunch of those, but the speed seems to be a secondary consideration. You can't tell whether the results are correct in any more than trivial cases.
> ...it would've stepped down the O(n) complexity by a couple levels and made the whole calculation run in seconds.
ITYM "it would've reduced the constant factors by many orders of magnitude". Linear complexity is not bad. It's the best you can do for something that has to consider every piece of input data at least once.
What a concept. We've eighty-seven thousand versions of microsoft office later. Does anyone's book report need anything newer than wordperfect? And if you thought that was dating myself, wordstar? It's black text on white page. Textart became useless when tractor-feed paper was gone -- you can't do banners on pre-cut paper. Count the number of office workers who use anything more than bold, italics, underline, a bulleted list, and maybe a numbered list. Even pivot tables have been around for decades now.
You need the latest hardware to run the latest software. But you don't need the latest software to do the latest business -- because the latest business, most of the time, is nothing new.
McAfee slows and jams up lots of stuff at our org.
The cyber security team has used very aggressive McAfee settings. The security manager gets awards for security, but there is no anti-award for jamming productivity to counter. Thus, his incentive is to crank McAfee to 11. Productivity is somebody else's problem.
For example, McAfee is set to On Access scanning on every desktop and server, meaning it scans almost every file accessed. Java "compressed" files, such as JAR's take forever to de-compress and scan, often more than 2 minutes. Thus, anything that uses Java as its engine is almost useless.
One can request such files be white-listed on a case-by-case basis, but the security team is too bogged down to get to them in a timely manner, and they often use a narrow interpretation "to be safe" such that they miss some files, requiring multiple rounds of requests to get such apps use-able.
McAfee's scan logs don't give enough info to be useful for up-front white-listing. Most users stopped bothering and just avoid using Java-based apps, paying for the more expensive alternatives. They blame Java instead of McAfee because they don't know the difference. (Arguably it could be said that large compressed libraries are a bad idea on Java's part. I hope they rid that feature. Or McAfee could make its scanners more Java-friendly.)
On a more general level, performance consultants have looked at our slow systems and concluded we should get PC's with SSD's instead of disks. But there's (allegedly) no budget for that, so even new PC's are disk-based and McAfee and On Access scanning gradually eats them up over time as typical Windows time-bloat piles up. Thus, we go through PC's faster, and in the end DON'T save money by using disks (productivity aside).
And lately they install more security doo-dads from other companies. They don't talk much about them to keep them stealthy. Those just add slugs on top of snails.
We joke we don't get hacked because our slow systems make the hackers fall asleep waiting for response. Security through Snoozativity.
I guess I shouldn't entirely blame the fastidious security manager because breaches could cause real havoc at our org. But, resources are not allocated to deal with the downsides of such fastidious cyber security. That's the top boss's fault.
Table-ized A.I.