But the IT people know computers and so management always things that because computers are controlled by software and they have hired one or two programmers that instantly the problem is in the software and so its a problem with the IT staff. Whereas the problem could be legacy/underpowered hardware + growing business = stuff breaks which most IT people understand but management does not.
...But the IT people already know what is broken and what needs to be fixed. The problem is, upgrading the servers, replacing equipment, changing vendors all cost money something that most businesses don't have a ton of today and aren't going to give it to the IT people. Even if you show them that, they will say "well, it isn't broken all the time..." or something like that. The management's job is to save money, not to spend it. If it isn't broken you are going to have a hard time convincing them that it is worth it. They don't care about productivity because that isn't usually "measured" in the way that cost savings is.
But you will always, always have stupid users. Users who think something is broken when it isn't, users who will call for the stupidest reasons (such as calling because a dialog box came up), users who will complain about updates and upgrades (such as even though my keyboard's "M" key didn't work, I could type faster on it, but this new keyboard I can barely use it), and users who are generally computer illiterate (such as asking where to find a certain program whenever you have already told them 1000 times). Sure, the logical conclusion would be to fire them, but all too often it is the managers or the higher-ups who have these problems.
I consider IT's primary goal to be as transparent to the user as possible, thus this metric was rather troubling to me. Shouldn't we be focused on reducing calls, rather than simply closing them quickly?
Not for "stupid" users, the ones you see on a day-to-day basis. Now, this all depends on who you are giving support to, competent IT professionals or the day-to-day office worker. If you are giving them to fellow IT people, it should be a goal to be transparent. For the office worker the main job is productivity, that means fix the problem as soon as possible or tell them there is no problem and have a good day.
The kind of line item you imagine might allow the executive branch to change the meaning of a law which disallowed a specific act/event into one that specifically required that same act/event.
Thats why I wanted a congressional line-item-veto type thing. Where rather than voting for Bill number 2323, they would vote on bill number 2323 item 1, if that passes than the one item becomes law without the bill going to the congressional equivalent to development hell.
What really needs to happen is a line-item veto type thing for congress. Where they can choose to support only part of legislation, if that part passes, the bill passes, if that part fails, that part of the bill fails.
Sure, and thats a reason why standards aren't a panacea in the being able to buy it department. The Apple dock connector is proprietary in the extreme, yet its licensed enough that almost anyone can buy things that use the dock connector.
The general trend from the article seems to be when you try to make things "easier" for your users, you end up failing. And even though its not classic, I think the "underpowered" Vista machines deserve at least a mention.
I don't know what internet connection you are on, but 50 MBs only takes 5-10 minutes on my pathetically slow DSL connection. If you mean the 6 MB that only takes a minute or two at most.
But, you don't seem to get the idea of dependencies. To put it with a different language, you are complaining that a program coded in Java requires a Java VM to run, or that a program coded in python requires a python interpreter.
I'm not sure that would really work. The reason being is that these people can use keyboards (as in, they have use of their hands) but its simply painful or slow for them to type. Waving around head-mounted laser pointers isn't going to give them more productivity. Sure, for people who can only move their necks its a godsend, but for the average injured geek, that isn't worth the trouble.
Yes, there was a market, we just called it "Ultra mobile PCs". The problem was they were too annoyingly expensive. The specs of an ordinary $400 desktop, or a $700 laptop would be crammed into a $1200 UMPC. What Atom did was make the netbook even cheaper, which helped fuel netbooks, its not that everyone likes the fact that they are tiny, but when the cheapest full sized laptop that runs Windows is ~$400, and you can get a cheap netbook for ~$300 with XP installed, its no surprise that people want the cheap one especially with the current economic situation.
Really Intel could excel in the smartphone chip market where they can't in the netbook market because of MS and their speed/power restrictions on netbooks. The problem I see with the smartphone market is that x86 is terribly hard to make power-efficient enough and still be fast. Could Intel do it, sure, but unlike desktop CPUs they can't just increase the clock speed and get faster CPUs, they have to work at it.
The problem is, you can't argue for market forces when the market is against it. Its like trying to market ham at a kosher deli, they aren't going to want it, and no matter how many times you want to "let the free market decide" they simply don't want it. Same with Wikipedia, the market (Wikipedia) is opposed to paid editing of articles.
This isn't about Wikipedia hiring editors, but rather companies or groups hiring editors for Wikipedia, sometimes in violation of policies. For example, if GM hired someone to change the article to make it have a positive spin on it.
Any person with substantial knowledge on a topic, particularly one that isn't well known, is bound to have bias in some form. Unless the thing is a spec sheet, expect bias somewhere. Its simply human nature. For example, if the device was simply vaporware, many people will think it undeserving of an article, on the other hand if there is a strong following for the device, well, perhaps it warrants a second look. Especially on Wikipedia where policy seems to be "delete all content".
I think there are two types of paid editors, one as an image improver, the other as writing good articles. For example, an "image improver" would be one who goes to a company's page and changes earning reports to make the company seem profitable. Or someone who carefully edits information on the latest politician involved in a scandal. Those type of things should be expressly banned. On the other hand there are some who can focus on writing good articles. For example, an author of, say a band might hire someone to add in more things about the band, particularly if they aren't that well-known yet, things that are verifiable yet add things to the article such as home towns, personal info, discography, etc. Things that if written correctly would not be objectionable.
In later testing, it should be dected, but to overflow 32 bits thats over 2 billion messages. For being founded as a not-so-major project, I don't think they would think that in 3 years that it would reach that much.
Is it just me or does Twitter seem to be the most unreliable of all social networking sites? I mean, between these outages and the "fail whale" that appears every day or so, can't they get some decent servers? I mean, even Facebook which has way more people consuming way more bandwidth doesn't go down near this often.
Meh, its not my place its a relative's vacation home that he lets family stay at when they aren't using it. I don't usually watch too much TV when I'm down there, but occasionally I like to check up on the news, etc.
I never really got what made SSDs less reliable than HDs, I mean having bought cheap flash drives, used them extensively and the only ones that I have had break were broken from physically breaking them in some way. On the other hand, I've had several "name-brand" drives either fail for no reason or give me the "click of death", along with an EEE with moderate use with an early SSD that hasn't failed yet.
Yes, but what happens if this leads to more filtering? Such as "Your computer has been using a lot of P2P, install this to scan for any unwanted programs" and it sends all the data to the RIAA/MPAA?
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But the IT people know computers and so management always things that because computers are controlled by software and they have hired one or two programmers that instantly the problem is in the software and so its a problem with the IT staff. Whereas the problem could be legacy/underpowered hardware + growing business = stuff breaks which most IT people understand but management does not.
...But the IT people already know what is broken and what needs to be fixed. The problem is, upgrading the servers, replacing equipment, changing vendors all cost money something that most businesses don't have a ton of today and aren't going to give it to the IT people. Even if you show them that, they will say "well, it isn't broken all the time..." or something like that. The management's job is to save money, not to spend it. If it isn't broken you are going to have a hard time convincing them that it is worth it. They don't care about productivity because that isn't usually "measured" in the way that cost savings is.
And similar items for every other server/service that IT supports. If nothing else, it will show exactly where the problems really are.
But you will always, always have stupid users. Users who think something is broken when it isn't, users who will call for the stupidest reasons (such as calling because a dialog box came up), users who will complain about updates and upgrades (such as even though my keyboard's "M" key didn't work, I could type faster on it, but this new keyboard I can barely use it), and users who are generally computer illiterate (such as asking where to find a certain program whenever you have already told them 1000 times). Sure, the logical conclusion would be to fire them, but all too often it is the managers or the higher-ups who have these problems.
I consider IT's primary goal to be as transparent to the user as possible, thus this metric was rather troubling to me. Shouldn't we be focused on reducing calls, rather than simply closing them quickly?
Not for "stupid" users, the ones you see on a day-to-day basis. Now, this all depends on who you are giving support to, competent IT professionals or the day-to-day office worker. If you are giving them to fellow IT people, it should be a goal to be transparent. For the office worker the main job is productivity, that means fix the problem as soon as possible or tell them there is no problem and have a good day.
The kind of line item you imagine might allow the executive branch to change the meaning of a law which disallowed a specific act/event into one that specifically required that same act/event.
Thats why I wanted a congressional line-item-veto type thing. Where rather than voting for Bill number 2323, they would vote on bill number 2323 item 1, if that passes than the one item becomes law without the bill going to the congressional equivalent to development hell.
What really needs to happen is a line-item veto type thing for congress. Where they can choose to support only part of legislation, if that part passes, the bill passes, if that part fails, that part of the bill fails.
Sure, and thats a reason why standards aren't a panacea in the being able to buy it department. The Apple dock connector is proprietary in the extreme, yet its licensed enough that almost anyone can buy things that use the dock connector.
Actually Mini-Displayport is actually rather open, and while not a standard (yet) you can get the specs from Apple for nothing.
The general trend from the article seems to be when you try to make things "easier" for your users, you end up failing. And even though its not classic, I think the "underpowered" Vista machines deserve at least a mention.
A 20 minute download for a note-taking app?
I don't know what internet connection you are on, but 50 MBs only takes 5-10 minutes on my pathetically slow DSL connection. If you mean the 6 MB that only takes a minute or two at most.
But, you don't seem to get the idea of dependencies. To put it with a different language, you are complaining that a program coded in Java requires a Java VM to run, or that a program coded in python requires a python interpreter.
I'm not sure that would really work. The reason being is that these people can use keyboards (as in, they have use of their hands) but its simply painful or slow for them to type. Waving around head-mounted laser pointers isn't going to give them more productivity. Sure, for people who can only move their necks its a godsend, but for the average injured geek, that isn't worth the trouble.
If you develop on Linux, particularly if you are a sysadmin or are very very good at Linux-only code.
Yes, there was a market, we just called it "Ultra mobile PCs". The problem was they were too annoyingly expensive. The specs of an ordinary $400 desktop, or a $700 laptop would be crammed into a $1200 UMPC. What Atom did was make the netbook even cheaper, which helped fuel netbooks, its not that everyone likes the fact that they are tiny, but when the cheapest full sized laptop that runs Windows is ~$400, and you can get a cheap netbook for ~$300 with XP installed, its no surprise that people want the cheap one especially with the current economic situation.
Really Intel could excel in the smartphone chip market where they can't in the netbook market because of MS and their speed/power restrictions on netbooks. The problem I see with the smartphone market is that x86 is terribly hard to make power-efficient enough and still be fast. Could Intel do it, sure, but unlike desktop CPUs they can't just increase the clock speed and get faster CPUs, they have to work at it.
The problem is, you can't argue for market forces when the market is against it. Its like trying to market ham at a kosher deli, they aren't going to want it, and no matter how many times you want to "let the free market decide" they simply don't want it. Same with Wikipedia, the market (Wikipedia) is opposed to paid editing of articles.
This isn't about Wikipedia hiring editors, but rather companies or groups hiring editors for Wikipedia, sometimes in violation of policies. For example, if GM hired someone to change the article to make it have a positive spin on it.
Any person with substantial knowledge on a topic, particularly one that isn't well known, is bound to have bias in some form. Unless the thing is a spec sheet, expect bias somewhere. Its simply human nature. For example, if the device was simply vaporware, many people will think it undeserving of an article, on the other hand if there is a strong following for the device, well, perhaps it warrants a second look. Especially on Wikipedia where policy seems to be "delete all content".
I think there are two types of paid editors, one as an image improver, the other as writing good articles. For example, an "image improver" would be one who goes to a company's page and changes earning reports to make the company seem profitable. Or someone who carefully edits information on the latest politician involved in a scandal. Those type of things should be expressly banned. On the other hand there are some who can focus on writing good articles. For example, an author of, say a band might hire someone to add in more things about the band, particularly if they aren't that well-known yet, things that are verifiable yet add things to the article such as home towns, personal info, discography, etc. Things that if written correctly would not be objectionable.
In later testing, it should be dected, but to overflow 32 bits thats over 2 billion messages. For being founded as a not-so-major project, I don't think they would think that in 3 years that it would reach that much.
Is it just me or does Twitter seem to be the most unreliable of all social networking sites? I mean, between these outages and the "fail whale" that appears every day or so, can't they get some decent servers? I mean, even Facebook which has way more people consuming way more bandwidth doesn't go down near this often.
Meh, its not my place its a relative's vacation home that he lets family stay at when they aren't using it. I don't usually watch too much TV when I'm down there, but occasionally I like to check up on the news, etc.
Any decent server is at the very least hooked up to a UPS, I would imagine that any mission-critical desktops would be too.
I never really got what made SSDs less reliable than HDs, I mean having bought cheap flash drives, used them extensively and the only ones that I have had break were broken from physically breaking them in some way. On the other hand, I've had several "name-brand" drives either fail for no reason or give me the "click of death", along with an EEE with moderate use with an early SSD that hasn't failed yet.
Yes, but what happens if this leads to more filtering? Such as "Your computer has been using a lot of P2P, install this to scan for any unwanted programs" and it sends all the data to the RIAA/MPAA?