Do mechanics have to drop 3-4 thousand dollars (or more) for their tools annually? How about electricians? Sure, if they're running the shop on their own and they've got a stake in things, it makes sense. Most IT people are fairly powerless and low down the chain. We're not seen as 'producers', we're seen as cogs that cost money.
Are you kidding me? End user devices are a marginal cost compared to everything these days.
20 run-of-the-mill workstations with Office and a monitor will cost you about $12,000, or roughly the cost of one decent server. This is also probably about the cost of employing a single sysadmin (after you factor in HR and taxes) for a month.
In contrast, how much does it cost in man hours to get all those different systems set up, maintain them, fix them when the users fuck them up or the user can't work because their personal device broke, deal with different software versions as they relate to the network equipment, and so on?
The only reason divergent devices like tablets work at all is because of standards. Standards which were put there in the first place to make things uniform and improve interoperability. The fact remains, however, that this interoperability is not uniform: any sufficiently complex environment will require very specific versions of specific software. (Anyone have to deal with sites/applications which -still- require IE6 or IE7, for instance?)
You accuse the IT department of thinking the company revolves around them.
... but companies DO revolve around IT (and Plant/Facilities).
See what happens when they're short staffed or don't come into work. Unlike sales people being gone, or executives, or even accountants (which can be quickly supplanted for basic stuff), IT work is often existential to everyone. The only people less replaceable in a business are probably the people who sign the checks directly.
Here's an idea: I thwart your use of esoteric shit (esoteric, defined as "not controlled by me and my team" in this case) for the following reasons:
* I have limited time and limited resources. Supporting your so-called smartphone, tablet, or other personal device costs me time, which in time costs me money. This isn't time I'd otherwise dedicate to your office-supplied machine; it's time spent above and beyond that, because it's different and requires manual settings. * IT Professionals don't just use random shit, typically. We select our gadgets and tools on technical merit not how cool it is. That means we're rolling out laptops with a standard image which we have QA'd to some degree and know how they will perform. We do this so we don't have to deal with things like, for instance, Apple products which can't retain a wireless connection to save their lives or be managed centrally. * Your crap introduces security problems above and beyond what is possible to regulate, short of running Snort on every switch port. In the past month, I have seen Android phones, Apple laptops, and Windows 7 systems which are "fully up to date" etc. running on 'secure' networks - and having malware of one form or another on them. In one such case it was a VIP's personal laptop, and the malware was both very intrusive and undiscovered by any of half a dozen antivirus/malware tools used to remove it. (I still need to isolate that forensically and submit it to 'the authorities' for inclusion... yet something else I'd not have "had" to do if it wasn't allowed). * It usually goes like this: User wants to use Shitware Uberspunk to perform $office_task. They get manager approval, and everything goes fine. Then one of your (thoroughly planned) server/application/etc. rollouts breaks their very important program (or vice versa), and they're no longer able to "get work done". They bitch up the chain of command, and since stink flows towards IT when people don't want to deal with it, you ultimately need to find a workaround for their stupidity, even if the expectation was "no IT support" from the start. (Quickbooks crashing due to using Google Talk within IE is a good example of this, but there are a myriad others.) FWIW, shit 'cloud' services fit this mold pretty well, too.
I can understand that people want to have their cake and eat it too, but that's been the desire since forever. Cloud computing, mobile devices, etc. don't change this desire any, or make it any more obtainable: things still break; things are still incompatible; users still do stupid shit. The closest you're going to get is with a virtualized environment and remote desktops of some sort, allowing people to connect to them from a portal or mobile applications. We still can't do the modern equivalent of supporting Bonzai Buddy - on the contrary, we're more overworked now than IT has ever been before, and extra burdens often mean having to pick between "patch important systems for security" or "replacing aging hardware".
People who write shit like this (and think like this) should just stick to tort laywering and politics.
Metrics is just a management word for "bad statistics".
With a distribution of 3, it's not really possible to have statistics of meaningful nature. You've got shared responsibilities and bounce things off of each other. One person may open and close more tickets, have a shorter duration for tickets, etc. - but he's only doing the actual "work". The others may be giving him all the input necessary to complete the task(s).
Ideally, your ticketing system will reflect, very vaguely, who's doing work and who is not, but even then it's not going to be well representative of what's actually going on.
People do different types of work, of different levels of difficulty. For instance, I may do one ticket on Monday, three on Tuesday, and one for Wednesday through Friday. Why? Aside from the fact that I'm bad about actually doing tickets for my work (my god, I'd not have the time for work, and then there'd be more things that aren't getting done, making us -all- look bad), there's the reality that my tickets aren't terribly easy, often requiring hours of log perusal and research to try to fix problems. Meanwhile, the guy who knocks out 40 tickets a week - malware disinfection, workstation reinstalls, etc. - has fairly wrote work of a repetitive nature, comparably. Also, he's following instructions or asking for advice on a regular basis, even if I'm not his boss.
You said so yourself: you're a member of a 3-person IT team. The only use 'metrics' have here aside from what should be plainly obvious in a group of 3 (who's fucking up, who's not getting back to people, who's not doing work) is to keep track of what amounts to customer requests and problems. X workstation needs to be reinstalled, Y server has a crashing whatever, and so on. If you're working on and sharing a ticket queue, you are all mutually responsible for all of the tickets: if something isn't getting done, it's everyone's fault (or nobody's fault). You may consider presenting your metrics in the light of this reality (like statistics, metrics can lie, too).
This may be surprising to you, but this probably just means you're old now, possibly with responsibilities or a more diverse social life.
I've not done a LAN party since CounterStrike 1.6 was new. I would if I had the time, money, and people to attend. Life is too busy now that I've got responsibilities to even consider something like that.
You do realize that widget building assembly line work is what most managers think IT is, right? Same for programming.
If it were any other way, they'd not instill assembly line logic (x per y) as a guide for requirements, and the West wouldn't have to contend with Indian accents anytime we actually need to get something done.
Oh? I've got friends who are judged by that very metric. It incentivises their coworkers to cut corners and do things poorly, if not at all: close the ticket and get credit. Someone calls in with the same issue "again", it's another ticket. Nobody protests, because that's another resolution for them, too... (The other big one is "number of calls ber hour, but that's basically the same thing, isn't it? You're supposed to be an automatron, getting off the call faster than a telemarketer gets hung up on.)
Phrased another way, "number of tickets closed". I'm currently being judged by such criteria, and I'm not even in support. If my systems don't have problems, there are fewer tickets that make it up the ladder to me. (What kind of incentive is that?)
Of course, these are all tracking "is the customer happy enough to keep paying?" not "are we doing a good job?" Maybe I'm just familiar with a different kind of tech than you are - what you describe sounds more akin to customer support at a very large call center with scripted 'support'. That's not at all what I do or see.
I once worked at a company that used exactly one metric for determining employees' bonuses -- company profit.
I'm pretty sure I work for a company that does that. Guess what? "The company isn't profitable this quarter, no bonuses" all while the owner pockets a million dollars in pay for the year.
*gasp* What're you talking about? Programmers with a high LOCPH (lines of code per hour) are rock stars. MOTHERFUCKING ROCK STARS, you hear? It doesn't matter if it's good code, it doesn't even matter if it's maintainable. They're putting out the features and making the big dollars.
Where it used to be one skilled manager overseeing per 5-7 employees, it can now be one schmuck manager with an Excel spreadsheet overseeing 30 employees.
This is short-sighted thinking. Sure, they make a lot in 6 months, a year, maybe two years. But then something goes horribly wrong (in their eyes), and shit starts to fall apart.
I suppose it's great if you plan to pump and dump, as the inclination is in this culture... a bit of a catch 22, I suppose.
God save the children, because they're not going to inherit much of anything.
On the third hand, you've got those of us who put our effort into work instead, bill accurately, and don't dick about with meaningless excel spreadsheet metrics. We do our work, ignoring the rest, and end up getting a lot more done than ticket munching assholes.
Then we quit for a substantially higher paid job when the idiots start thinking you're doing nothing. Maybe we steal our previous boss's clients (because they like our work). Maybe we start our own company.
Metrics are what kill small IT companies. IT (and programming) are some of the least trackable/accountable things you can think of - it's how people get by doing absolutely nothing for years and years while still making close to $100k a year: their lack of work and fuck ups fall in someone else's lap, while they spend their time attempting to look important and knowledgeable (while they are neither).
The problem is that the people doing these things - metrics - don't know better. That's what they were taught in management school, and that's what so-called industry knowledge says you should do. (It works in India, right? So it's gotta work here. Except, it doesn't really work in India, and that's why their product is shit.)
Ultimately, it will be their end. No company can thrive without actually paying attention to what the smallest unit within their organization is actually producing and accomplishing, to some level. Metrics just attempt to abstract actual work into a number discernible by those who don't understand anything but numbers. It doesn't end well.
Because gleefully exclaiming that the money is worth the risk is probably an indicator of an unstable personality at best, if not a depressed/suicidal disorder.
Money isn't worth the risk, it's a bonus on top of the risk. You do realize that there are many people who make a career out of risky situations for the risk itself, not the pay, right?
People are so damn risk averse these days they hardly live. If you've got nothing holding you down, why not live a bit and do something different? Lots of people take the yuppie way out and go work in Asia or Europe; not many do something different, like work in a war zone.
There are too many pussies in today's Western societies.
I wasn't referring to you by that statement, it was a more global, "royal" you. And yes, I agree: people are afraid of typing commands and reading documentation. They'll search the web for -hours- copy/pasting shit they randomly find to see if it does the trick, and then ultimately give up saying "it doesn't work", blaming the tool not themselves.
So don't use linux if you are opposed to keyboard-based configuration. Mouse-driven configuration environments are inherently limited in capability, and this is played out in the tools' functionality.
I can't think of anything in Linux which is inherently more complicated than the Windows counterpart to configure. I'd be curious to hear which programs you've run into which are "without a GUI configuration tool", because frankly, I can't think of anything at this point.
Networking and system settings? Sure, those are lackluster. The truth be told, though, 99% of what you'd want to is easily configurable or installable through a GUI, and your bitching isn't really all that justified (unless you can provide a counter-example).
Again, I'd be curious to hear of some examples. If you're using, say, Ubuntu, anything which has a package available usually tells you "add this to your sources.list file" or "add it through the Package Manager" (for which there is a very full GUI). Package Manager (plus apt and dpkg) rivals anything that Windows has in its completeness and scope.
That really isn't that difficult unless you're completely inexperienced. (You've figured out slashcode syntax, so I'm guessing it's within your capabilities.) That said, even my wife has managed to get Apache set up and configured in a couple hours on Ubuntu (and she's only had about a total of 2 days of Linux exposure, total).
If you're going to compare, say, IIS to Apache, consider: you can spend an hour or two clicking around until you get it "right" with IIS - and have a misconfigured, easily rooted system - or you can spend a couple hours, read the documentation, and have it configured properly with Apache. The GUI, in this case, just gives you the perception that you set it up and are "using" the software.effectively, in many cases of complexity.
As a counter-example: Latex software is a pain in the ass in Windows. There's a delicate balance of versions of miktex and various editors which must be reached, and then often, the editors or auxiliary software simply "doesn't work". This is not really a problem in Linux: you install it, and it works.
Likewise, "my" Windows installs have similar stuff done:
* enable RDP * disable all window transition and animation effects (except 'show contents while dragging/resizing') * list or long Explorer file view * disable "hide files" and "hide extensions" * Classic theme (or at least the basic Aero, it's not so bad). * small icons on start and task bar
It really irritates me that these basic profile properties are not (easily) transportable from machine to machine as they would be with a Unix variant (ie standard text-based configuration files). There really aren't all that many options in Explorer and Windows UI in general that they couldn't all be thrown into one or two 10Kb text files.
Users were never supposed to be allowed to 'install' anything, though.
And if you're having a hard time editing a string in a text file, I suggest something my be wrong with you, not with the system. It's not like editing text files is something new or novel.
That said, you're grossly over-exagerating. You're not just stalling "something" you're either installing something incorrectly, or something esoteric not in repositories.
And, contextually, hdiff and cgrep will make perfect sense.
There's already egrep, as well as a handful of *diff type implementations. Strange how common use by professionals who know what they're doing tends to result in a lot of similar, technical things!
(If you can't hack it, go back to Windows desktop support. I hear they're hiring in India.)
Yes, the history of decades old programming decisions isn't really something you want to learn to use an OS (or any other software). But what's the alternative?
And what of the people who live near the lime pits necessary to make the massive (and quickly-needing-replacement) wind turbines? The massive amount of energy needed to make the silica-based solar panels (and its relatively small availability)?
Versus what, the residents of West Virginia, China, or anywhere else where coal is the predominant source of electricity?
People are stupid. "Nuclear power is dangerous, look at Fukishima". The following month, a nuclear power plant (IIRC of the same vintage) in Omaha, Nebraska was flooded. No permanent harm came of the flooding. Why was that not "big news"?
The problem is that the Japanese put too much stock in their government, and their nuclear reactors were both out of date and ill maintained. This tragedy has been used politically well beyond the scope of the problem. The problem wasn't nuclear power, it was incompetence and negligence.
People talk about there being a "good, green alternative". I've got news for you: there are nuclear reactor designs which can take weapons grade whatever and turn it into relatively inert materials, all while being designed in a fashion which does not allow for a meltdown to occur using passive safety methods and different approaches in the reactors. China is doing this. France, to a limited degree, is doing this.
There's also talk about nuke power being expensive. Why is it expensive? The impoverished (relatively) Chinese seem to think it's an economically feasible situation, even though they've got more than enough coal and hydroelectric to power things completely if they wanted to. Is it more expensive than the loss of health, longevity, environment, and mental accuity that other power methods produce? Not really.
The real truth here is that Greenpeace is a group of crazed radicals. They burn industrial complexes in the name of saving the environment, kill animals off in the name of preserving them (particularly through subsidiaries like PETA), and protest the only clear, viable power source we have for the future (the US has hundreds of years of nuclear power in nuclear waste alone).
Inappropriate record access is a scrapegoat for IT, though, especially in smaller hospitals. I was fired for that from one. What'd I do? I took backups. I was fixing a "corrupt file" problem and put one of the wrong files on my 'shared' (accessible 'only' to me) drive, and my boss "found out" (was snooping through my directory). Of course, that provided my boss with the opportunity she was looking for...
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Do mechanics have to drop 3-4 thousand dollars (or more) for their tools annually? How about electricians? Sure, if they're running the shop on their own and they've got a stake in things, it makes sense. Most IT people are fairly powerless and low down the chain. We're not seen as 'producers', we're seen as cogs that cost money.
Are you kidding me? End user devices are a marginal cost compared to everything these days.
20 run-of-the-mill workstations with Office and a monitor will cost you about $12,000, or roughly the cost of one decent server. This is also probably about the cost of employing a single sysadmin (after you factor in HR and taxes) for a month.
In contrast, how much does it cost in man hours to get all those different systems set up, maintain them, fix them when the users fuck them up or the user can't work because their personal device broke, deal with different software versions as they relate to the network equipment, and so on?
The only reason divergent devices like tablets work at all is because of standards. Standards which were put there in the first place to make things uniform and improve interoperability. The fact remains, however, that this interoperability is not uniform: any sufficiently complex environment will require very specific versions of specific software. (Anyone have to deal with sites/applications which -still- require IE6 or IE7, for instance?)
You accuse the IT department of thinking the company revolves around them.
... but companies DO revolve around IT (and Plant/Facilities).
See what happens when they're short staffed or don't come into work. Unlike sales people being gone, or executives, or even accountants (which can be quickly supplanted for basic stuff), IT work is often existential to everyone. The only people less replaceable in a business are probably the people who sign the checks directly.
Here's an idea: I thwart your use of esoteric shit (esoteric, defined as "not controlled by me and my team" in this case) for the following reasons:
* I have limited time and limited resources. Supporting your so-called smartphone, tablet, or other personal device costs me time, which in time costs me money. This isn't time I'd otherwise dedicate to your office-supplied machine; it's time spent above and beyond that, because it's different and requires manual settings.
* IT Professionals don't just use random shit, typically. We select our gadgets and tools on technical merit not how cool it is. That means we're rolling out laptops with a standard image which we have QA'd to some degree and know how they will perform. We do this so we don't have to deal with things like, for instance, Apple products which can't retain a wireless connection to save their lives or be managed centrally.
* Your crap introduces security problems above and beyond what is possible to regulate, short of running Snort on every switch port. In the past month, I have seen Android phones, Apple laptops, and Windows 7 systems which are "fully up to date" etc. running on 'secure' networks - and having malware of one form or another on them. In one such case it was a VIP's personal laptop, and the malware was both very intrusive and undiscovered by any of half a dozen antivirus/malware tools used to remove it. (I still need to isolate that forensically and submit it to 'the authorities' for inclusion... yet something else I'd not have "had" to do if it wasn't allowed).
* It usually goes like this: User wants to use Shitware Uberspunk to perform $office_task. They get manager approval, and everything goes fine. Then one of your (thoroughly planned) server/application/etc. rollouts breaks their very important program (or vice versa), and they're no longer able to "get work done". They bitch up the chain of command, and since stink flows towards IT when people don't want to deal with it, you ultimately need to find a workaround for their stupidity, even if the expectation was "no IT support" from the start. (Quickbooks crashing due to using Google Talk within IE is a good example of this, but there are a myriad others.) FWIW, shit 'cloud' services fit this mold pretty well, too.
I can understand that people want to have their cake and eat it too, but that's been the desire since forever. Cloud computing, mobile devices, etc. don't change this desire any, or make it any more obtainable: things still break; things are still incompatible; users still do stupid shit. The closest you're going to get is with a virtualized environment and remote desktops of some sort, allowing people to connect to them from a portal or mobile applications. We still can't do the modern equivalent of supporting Bonzai Buddy - on the contrary, we're more overworked now than IT has ever been before, and extra burdens often mean having to pick between "patch important systems for security" or "replacing aging hardware".
People who write shit like this (and think like this) should just stick to tort laywering and politics.
Metrics is just a management word for "bad statistics".
With a distribution of 3, it's not really possible to have statistics of meaningful nature. You've got shared responsibilities and bounce things off of each other. One person may open and close more tickets, have a shorter duration for tickets, etc. - but he's only doing the actual "work". The others may be giving him all the input necessary to complete the task(s).
Ideally, your ticketing system will reflect, very vaguely, who's doing work and who is not, but even then it's not going to be well representative of what's actually going on.
People do different types of work, of different levels of difficulty. For instance, I may do one ticket on Monday, three on Tuesday, and one for Wednesday through Friday. Why? Aside from the fact that I'm bad about actually doing tickets for my work (my god, I'd not have the time for work, and then there'd be more things that aren't getting done, making us -all- look bad), there's the reality that my tickets aren't terribly easy, often requiring hours of log perusal and research to try to fix problems. Meanwhile, the guy who knocks out 40 tickets a week - malware disinfection, workstation reinstalls, etc. - has fairly wrote work of a repetitive nature, comparably. Also, he's following instructions or asking for advice on a regular basis, even if I'm not his boss.
You said so yourself: you're a member of a 3-person IT team. The only use 'metrics' have here aside from what should be plainly obvious in a group of 3 (who's fucking up, who's not getting back to people, who's not doing work) is to keep track of what amounts to customer requests and problems. X workstation needs to be reinstalled, Y server has a crashing whatever, and so on. If you're working on and sharing a ticket queue, you are all mutually responsible for all of the tickets: if something isn't getting done, it's everyone's fault (or nobody's fault). You may consider presenting your metrics in the light of this reality (like statistics, metrics can lie, too).
This may be surprising to you, but this probably just means you're old now, possibly with responsibilities or a more diverse social life.
I've not done a LAN party since CounterStrike 1.6 was new. I would if I had the time, money, and people to attend. Life is too busy now that I've got responsibilities to even consider something like that.
You do realize that widget building assembly line work is what most managers think IT is, right? Same for programming.
If it were any other way, they'd not instill assembly line logic (x per y) as a guide for requirements, and the West wouldn't have to contend with Indian accents anytime we actually need to get something done.
Oh? I've got friends who are judged by that very metric. It incentivises their coworkers to cut corners and do things poorly, if not at all: close the ticket and get credit. Someone calls in with the same issue "again", it's another ticket. Nobody protests, because that's another resolution for them, too... (The other big one is "number of calls ber hour, but that's basically the same thing, isn't it? You're supposed to be an automatron, getting off the call faster than a telemarketer gets hung up on.)
Phrased another way, "number of tickets closed". I'm currently being judged by such criteria, and I'm not even in support. If my systems don't have problems, there are fewer tickets that make it up the ladder to me. (What kind of incentive is that?)
Of course, these are all tracking "is the customer happy enough to keep paying?" not "are we doing a good job?" Maybe I'm just familiar with a different kind of tech than you are - what you describe sounds more akin to customer support at a very large call center with scripted 'support'. That's not at all what I do or see.
I once worked at a company that used exactly one metric for determining employees' bonuses -- company profit.
I'm pretty sure I work for a company that does that. Guess what? "The company isn't profitable this quarter, no bonuses" all while the owner pockets a million dollars in pay for the year.
*gasp* What're you talking about? Programmers with a high LOCPH (lines of code per hour) are rock stars. MOTHERFUCKING ROCK STARS, you hear? It doesn't matter if it's good code, it doesn't even matter if it's maintainable. They're putting out the features and making the big dollars.
Oh, I see what you did there.
It's wrecking more than our society.
Where it used to be one skilled manager overseeing per 5-7 employees, it can now be one schmuck manager with an Excel spreadsheet overseeing 30 employees.
This is short-sighted thinking. Sure, they make a lot in 6 months, a year, maybe two years. But then something goes horribly wrong (in their eyes), and shit starts to fall apart.
I suppose it's great if you plan to pump and dump, as the inclination is in this culture... a bit of a catch 22, I suppose.
God save the children, because they're not going to inherit much of anything.
Talented or not, those people are not ethical.
On the third hand, you've got those of us who put our effort into work instead, bill accurately, and don't dick about with meaningless excel spreadsheet metrics. We do our work, ignoring the rest, and end up getting a lot more done than ticket munching assholes.
Then we quit for a substantially higher paid job when the idiots start thinking you're doing nothing. Maybe we steal our previous boss's clients (because they like our work). Maybe we start our own company.
Metrics are what kill small IT companies. IT (and programming) are some of the least trackable/accountable things you can think of - it's how people get by doing absolutely nothing for years and years while still making close to $100k a year: their lack of work and fuck ups fall in someone else's lap, while they spend their time attempting to look important and knowledgeable (while they are neither).
The problem is that the people doing these things - metrics - don't know better. That's what they were taught in management school, and that's what so-called industry knowledge says you should do. (It works in India, right? So it's gotta work here. Except, it doesn't really work in India, and that's why their product is shit.)
Ultimately, it will be their end. No company can thrive without actually paying attention to what the smallest unit within their organization is actually producing and accomplishing, to some level. Metrics just attempt to abstract actual work into a number discernible by those who don't understand anything but numbers. It doesn't end well.
Because gleefully exclaiming that the money is worth the risk is probably an indicator of an unstable personality at best, if not a depressed/suicidal disorder.
Money isn't worth the risk, it's a bonus on top of the risk. You do realize that there are many people who make a career out of risky situations for the risk itself, not the pay, right?
People are so damn risk averse these days they hardly live. If you've got nothing holding you down, why not live a bit and do something different? Lots of people take the yuppie way out and go work in Asia or Europe; not many do something different, like work in a war zone.
There are too many pussies in today's Western societies.
I wasn't referring to you by that statement, it was a more global, "royal" you. And yes, I agree: people are afraid of typing commands and reading documentation. They'll search the web for -hours- copy/pasting shit they randomly find to see if it does the trick, and then ultimately give up saying "it doesn't work", blaming the tool not themselves.
So don't use linux if you are opposed to keyboard-based configuration. Mouse-driven configuration environments are inherently limited in capability, and this is played out in the tools' functionality.
I can't think of anything in Linux which is inherently more complicated than the Windows counterpart to configure. I'd be curious to hear which programs you've run into which are "without a GUI configuration tool", because frankly, I can't think of anything at this point.
Networking and system settings? Sure, those are lackluster. The truth be told, though, 99% of what you'd want to is easily configurable or installable through a GUI, and your bitching isn't really all that justified (unless you can provide a counter-example).
Again, I'd be curious to hear of some examples. If you're using, say, Ubuntu, anything which has a package available usually tells you "add this to your sources.list file" or "add it through the Package Manager" (for which there is a very full GUI). Package Manager (plus apt and dpkg) rivals anything that Windows has in its completeness and scope.
That really isn't that difficult unless you're completely inexperienced. (You've figured out slashcode syntax, so I'm guessing it's within your capabilities.) That said, even my wife has managed to get Apache set up and configured in a couple hours on Ubuntu (and she's only had about a total of 2 days of Linux exposure, total).
If you're going to compare, say, IIS to Apache, consider: you can spend an hour or two clicking around until you get it "right" with IIS - and have a misconfigured, easily rooted system - or you can spend a couple hours, read the documentation, and have it configured properly with Apache. The GUI, in this case, just gives you the perception that you set it up and are "using" the software.effectively, in many cases of complexity.
As a counter-example: Latex software is a pain in the ass in Windows. There's a delicate balance of versions of miktex and various editors which must be reached, and then often, the editors or auxiliary software simply "doesn't work". This is not really a problem in Linux: you install it, and it works.
Likewise, "my" Windows installs have similar stuff done:
* enable RDP
* disable all window transition and animation effects (except 'show contents while dragging/resizing')
* list or long Explorer file view
* disable "hide files" and "hide extensions"
* Classic theme (or at least the basic Aero, it's not so bad).
* small icons on start and task bar
It really irritates me that these basic profile properties are not (easily) transportable from machine to machine as they would be with a Unix variant (ie standard text-based configuration files). There really aren't all that many options in Explorer and Windows UI in general that they couldn't all be thrown into one or two 10Kb text files.
Users were never supposed to be allowed to 'install' anything, though.
And if you're having a hard time editing a string in a text file, I suggest something my be wrong with you, not with the system. It's not like editing text files is something new or novel.
That said, you're grossly over-exagerating. You're not just stalling "something" you're either installing something incorrectly, or something esoteric not in repositories.
This is pretty obvious as to "why".
Java: mostly written by inexperienced undergraduates and Indians with only a couple months of experience.
Cobol: mostly written by the (relatively speaking) Gods of Computing, in a better age.
So say we all.
Does this mean I will one day be able to make sense of postfix logs?
And, contextually, hdiff and cgrep will make perfect sense.
There's already egrep, as well as a handful of *diff type implementations. Strange how common use by professionals who know what they're doing tends to result in a lot of similar, technical things!
(If you can't hack it, go back to Windows desktop support. I hear they're hiring in India.)
Yes, the history of decades old programming decisions isn't really something you want to learn to use an OS (or any other software). But what's the alternative?
Um, then you're probably a fan of PowerShell?
Oh, wait.
And what of the people who live near the lime pits necessary to make the massive (and quickly-needing-replacement) wind turbines? The massive amount of energy needed to make the silica-based solar panels (and its relatively small availability)?
Versus what, the residents of West Virginia, China, or anywhere else where coal is the predominant source of electricity?
People are stupid. "Nuclear power is dangerous, look at Fukishima". The following month, a nuclear power plant (IIRC of the same vintage) in Omaha, Nebraska was flooded. No permanent harm came of the flooding. Why was that not "big news"?
The problem is that the Japanese put too much stock in their government, and their nuclear reactors were both out of date and ill maintained. This tragedy has been used politically well beyond the scope of the problem. The problem wasn't nuclear power, it was incompetence and negligence.
People talk about there being a "good, green alternative". I've got news for you: there are nuclear reactor designs which can take weapons grade whatever and turn it into relatively inert materials, all while being designed in a fashion which does not allow for a meltdown to occur using passive safety methods and different approaches in the reactors. China is doing this. France, to a limited degree, is doing this.
There's also talk about nuke power being expensive. Why is it expensive? The impoverished (relatively) Chinese seem to think it's an economically feasible situation, even though they've got more than enough coal and hydroelectric to power things completely if they wanted to. Is it more expensive than the loss of health, longevity, environment, and mental accuity that other power methods produce? Not really.
The real truth here is that Greenpeace is a group of crazed radicals. They burn industrial complexes in the name of saving the environment, kill animals off in the name of preserving them (particularly through subsidiaries like PETA), and protest the only clear, viable power source we have for the future (the US has hundreds of years of nuclear power in nuclear waste alone).
The obvious choice is to blow it up into two independent planets, then.
Inappropriate record access is a scrapegoat for IT, though, especially in smaller hospitals. I was fired for that from one. What'd I do? I took backups. I was fixing a "corrupt file" problem and put one of the wrong files on my 'shared' (accessible 'only' to me) drive, and my boss "found out" (was snooping through my directory). Of course, that provided my boss with the opportunity she was looking for...