Why spend money on something which provides no value?
30 years ago, I was in charge of IT for a medium company (150-200 employees). We had some PCs running 1-2-3 in the planning departments and a UNIX box with about 12 users on serial terminals.
Back them, 1-2-3 skills were not prevalent as Excel skils are expected to be, and upper management was always glad I could pull out “complex” reports in a few hours. What was impressive was the complete trust upper management had in my young squirtness of the time. They litterally gave me the keys to their company (I could have brought it down anytime) without any questions asked.
Familiarity breeds contempt, and as computers became more and more widespread, it only got downhill from there, to the point I got out of IT as a primary carreer goal and pursued work in other directions, only to come back to IT once in a while and getting more and more disgusted each time.
Then I pause to think that, had I had gone to work for the railroad as I had seriously envisioned 35 years ago, I would have had my pension for a long time now. Not so with IT.
Ever wondered why accountants’ calculators have a huge “+” button? Because their little puny, cockroach brains haven’t progressed beyond the stage of addition and maybe, when the wind blows correctly, subtraction.
So this is why MIS departments are always underfunded and have to suffer from hare-brained decisions.
Forty years later the situation does not appear to have changed. Target, Equifax, ransomware, etc. show pathetically bad IT design and operation. Why does this pattern of underinvestment in and under-appreciation of IT continue?
Because bean-counters make the decisions.
Ever wondered why accountants’ calculators have a huge “+” button? Because their little puny, cockroach brains haven’t progressed beyond the stage of addition and maybe, when the wind blows correctly, subtraction.
So this is why MIS departments are always underfunded and have to suffer from hare-brained decisions.
The solution to this is quite simple : remove anonymity.
No goddammed fucking way.
Removing anonymity absolutely empowers any netk00k who wants your hide just because you ruffled his feather because his pathology cannot stand something that is perfectly normal for 99.44% of people.
Or if you have the misfortune of angering some corporate behemoth with an agenda, without anonymity, you are just toast.
On Facebook, newspapers have the power to ban you completely for the whole of Facebook for 30 days if you question or mock their editorial line: I know this from personal experience. This is what “accountability” really means; you do not face a rigid, democratically-selected set of guidelines where you know what is okay or not, but an ever changing whim of corporate drones who haven’t got laid last night.
Have you given a thought to PL/1? It has the same data declarations as COBOL, but is a much more structured syntax...
(Back when I programmed in COBOL, I would label the fist line of procedure “XXXX000” and the last one “XXXX999”, so I would always call a procedure with “PERFORM XXXX000 THROUGH XXXX999”; that was my way of bringing some kind of structure to the COBOL code I was didling with).
30 years ago, I had a job maintaining Business-Basic programs for an non-IT company. It was okay, and I ran around Business-Basic limitations by writing a "pre-compiler" (a bit modelled after "CPP") that enabled the use of long variable names and labels instead of line numbers. Over the time, the final Business-Basic source-code was pretty well documented so you could work without the pre-compiler.
Then I left for other pastures, never to return.
About 5 years ago, I took a Business-Basic gig where I had to maintain old code (heck, it paid $45/hour), as the guy in charge of it was dying of cancer. But in 25 years, Business-Basic had evolved; it got long variable names, labels, functions, procedures and even objects! Wow wee!
So, when I was handed a program to fix, it was old legacy code, as it was written 40 years prior. The variable references were all listed in a series of binders full of dot-matrix faded dog-eared sheets of paper full of hand-written notes in some pre-glagolitic script.
After spending a week making sense out of the spaghetti (and billing them upwards of $2000) where I have given meaningful names to variables and properly labelled the program branch points and subroutines (functions? Ha!), I was told to stop doing this “because we have standards”.
But just as I was going to tell the dude to shove his job where you thin, he asked me if I could do a much more urgent project: converting XML data from a 15 year old application to import in a 40 year old application. So I took my sweet fucking time writing it in Python (ha!) for a good month and a half. What helped is that the dude was working in a “okay, let’s do this”. Then when you’re through “Oh, and it should also do this”, and so on for several weeks...
This year, I took a 4 months vacation far enough to not be bothered by phone calls...
Users don't lack curiosity they simply have no motivation to be curious when it comes to tech.
Jesus. When I started working (in IT), users were afraid they’d get electric shocks when you introduced them to the computer terminal...
But it was kinda a blessing, because the most enthusiastic users were the ones who would fuck up things... Heck, I once saw a financial analyst dance of joy, calling himself “space cadet” when I finished installing a CP/M computer in his office...
I often see people not using the systems they have to their full potential.
Oh god. I stopped counting the times I got shit for putting some user’s 17 inch CRT to 1024 x 768 resolution up from their customary 800x600... “Everything is too small!”...
They’re the source of their own problem. Whenever they manage to hire brilliant people, they hold them back with arcane process and lengthy byzantine procedures (mostly enacted to internally cover the bosses’ asses).
Representing the Crown Prosecution Service, Aaron Watkins it would be absurd for defendants to be "rewarded with effective immunity" simply for having evaded proceedings for long enough.
Fuck THEM. It’s them who are at fault for not being able to secure the arrest of Assange. So why should they be “rewarded” by punishing Assange?
You can only blame yourselves. It’s only the Americans who elected Trump, and no one else. From abroad, we’ll enjoy see the US dwindle into total irrelevance.
I remember seeing about 40 years ago either in Radio Electronics or Popular Electronics instructions to make an ultra-compact multi-meter, where the DIP chips were staked together, and wires and components run on the sides of the chips stack...
Slashdot Mirror
Why spend money on something which provides no value?
30 years ago, I was in charge of IT for a medium company (150-200 employees). We had some PCs running 1-2-3 in the planning departments and a UNIX box with about 12 users on serial terminals.
Back them, 1-2-3 skills were not prevalent as Excel skils are expected to be, and upper management was always glad I could pull out “complex” reports in a few hours. What was impressive was the complete trust upper management had in my young squirtness of the time. They litterally gave me the keys to their company (I could have brought it down anytime) without any questions asked.
Familiarity breeds contempt, and as computers became more and more widespread, it only got downhill from there, to the point I got out of IT as a primary carreer goal and pursued work in other directions, only to come back to IT once in a while and getting more and more disgusted each time.
Then I pause to think that, had I had gone to work for the railroad as I had seriously envisioned 35 years ago, I would have had my pension for a long time now. Not so with IT.
So this is why MIS departments are always underfunded and have to suffer from hare-brained decisions.
Because bean-counters make the decisions.
Ever wondered why accountants’ calculators have a huge “+” button? Because their little puny, cockroach brains haven’t progressed beyond the stage of addition and maybe, when the wind blows correctly, subtraction.
So this is why MIS departments are always underfunded and have to suffer from hare-brained decisions.
The solution to this is quite simple : remove anonymity.
No goddammed fucking way.
Removing anonymity absolutely empowers any netk00k who wants your hide just because you ruffled his feather because his pathology cannot stand something that is perfectly normal for 99.44% of people.
Or if you have the misfortune of angering some corporate behemoth with an agenda, without anonymity, you are just toast.
On Facebook, newspapers have the power to ban you completely for the whole of Facebook for 30 days if you question or mock their editorial line: I know this from personal experience. This is what “accountability” really means; you do not face a rigid, democratically-selected set of guidelines where you know what is okay or not, but an ever changing whim of corporate drones who haven’t got laid last night.
The Space Shuttle was new, back then, and it was totally the cool technology. Way more cool than VR or 3D modeling
Hire a maid, it will solve half of your list.
You mean a fembot?
There’s nothing wrong with COBOL, as long as it works as it should.
(Back when I programmed in COBOL, I would label the fist line of procedure “XXXX000” and the last one “XXXX999”, so I would always call a procedure with “PERFORM XXXX000 THROUGH XXXX999”; that was my way of bringing some kind of structure to the COBOL code I was didling with).
30 years ago, I had a job maintaining Business-Basic programs for an non-IT company. It was okay, and I ran around Business-Basic limitations by writing a "pre-compiler" (a bit modelled after "CPP") that enabled the use of long variable names and labels instead of line numbers. Over the time, the final Business-Basic source-code was pretty well documented so you could work without the pre-compiler.
Then I left for other pastures, never to return.
About 5 years ago, I took a Business-Basic gig where I had to maintain old code (heck, it paid $45/hour), as the guy in charge of it was dying of cancer. But in 25 years, Business-Basic had evolved; it got long variable names, labels, functions, procedures and even objects! Wow wee!
So, when I was handed a program to fix, it was old legacy code, as it was written 40 years prior. The variable references were all listed in a series of binders full of dot-matrix faded dog-eared sheets of paper full of hand-written notes in some pre-glagolitic script.
After spending a week making sense out of the spaghetti (and billing them upwards of $2000) where I have given meaningful names to variables and properly labelled the program branch points and subroutines (functions? Ha!), I was told to stop doing this “because we have standards”.
But just as I was going to tell the dude to shove his job where you thin, he asked me if I could do a much more urgent project: converting XML data from a 15 year old application to import in a 40 year old application. So I took my sweet fucking time writing it in Python (ha!) for a good month and a half. What helped is that the dude was working in a “okay, let’s do this”. Then when you’re through “Oh, and it should also do this”, and so on for several weeks...
This year, I took a 4 months vacation far enough to not be bothered by phone calls...
I worked with one dev who took smoke breaks in the server room.
I once worked for $BIG_CIGARETTE_MANUFACTURER. On the IBM mainframe computer CPU cabinet was a big ashtray with a sign “thank-you for smoking”...
"Good IT is expensive. Bad IT is costly"
Was it the president of Harvard who said “You think education is expensive? How about ignorance?”...
Users don't lack curiosity they simply have no motivation to be curious when it comes to tech.
Jesus. When I started working (in IT), users were afraid they’d get electric shocks when you introduced them to the computer terminal...
But it was kinda a blessing, because the most enthusiastic users were the ones who would fuck up things... Heck, I once saw a financial analyst dance of joy, calling himself “space cadet” when I finished installing a CP/M computer in his office...
I often see people not using the systems they have to their full potential.
Oh god. I stopped counting the times I got shit for putting some user’s 17 inch CRT to 1024 x 768 resolution up from their customary 800x600...
“Everything is too small!”...
That and the Data General you use for legacy applications.
There, fixed it for you.
They’re the source of their own problem. Whenever they manage to hire brilliant people, they hold them back with arcane process and lengthy byzantine procedures (mostly enacted to internally cover the bosses’ asses).
Math is rarely controversial. Math is right, or it isn't.
Try that with politics.
You have been banned from /r/Pyongyang
but when a local newspaper does not like the comments you post on their stupid, racist stories, they block your Facebook account for 30 days.
Fuck THEM. It’s them who are at fault for not being able to secure the arrest of Assange. So why should they be “rewarded” by punishing Assange?
And, given how Filipinos are hated throughout Asia, who in is right mind would invade them to be stuck with them afterwards?
Plus all Chinese look the same.
It’s not a problem; it’s the Uyghur they are monitoring.
I've seen them all, but "buying products or services from Oracle" ranks pretty high up.
“Nobody ever got fired for buying from IBM”...
Focusing the department on nothing but fire stomping and not focusing on preventative design/administration.
LOL! Try doing anything else when the company you work for sees IT as nothing else than a cost-center!!!
If it’s anything like Amazon in Canada, stuff will be anywhere from 4 to 40 times more expensive than in the U.S.
You can only blame yourselves. It’s only the Americans who elected Trump, and no one else. From abroad, we’ll enjoy see the US dwindle into total irrelevance.
I remember seeing about 40 years ago either in Radio Electronics or Popular Electronics instructions to make an ultra-compact multi-meter, where the DIP chips were staked together, and wires and components run on the sides of the chips stack...