What about realizing that the mandate given to IT is schizophrenic?
They are supposedly a "service organization."
Their job is to "keep things running smoothly", "improve user productivity", and "Keep the company secure." And it's that LAST one that has major fucking legal ramifications for the company.
Have some moron user let loose a keylogger behind the firewall from an infected USB stick? Guess what, the lawyers are going to be screaming to disable all USB flash drives. Have some moron user downloading porn or pirating software? Guess what happens next. Have some moron user not doing their job because they've installed 1001 "free games" or other little widgets? Guess what, we get called in and the PHB then screams to remove rights for all users.
Right up until the point where we remove those same rights from the PHB and he can't jerk off to his porn in his private corner office anymore, or his secretary whines about how she can't open her IM windows anymore before she gives him his afternoon blowjob.
never forget that IT is not in charge
Which you promptly started doing. Most of the worst, most asinine policies don't come from IT, they come from the lawyers and the accountants and the PHBs.
and that their job is not to make things easy for IT
If you ever think IT has it "easy", you've never spent a day in their shoes. The reality is every single IT desk is understaffed, underappreciated, and beset by trying to figure out how to "accomplish" schizophrenic orders that demand they do contradictory things all at once.
In my 30 years out in the working world, I've seen more screws up by IT staff than by users.
Generic comment about kids getting off your lawn here, gramps.
Now in the real world, I've seen the screwups by users outnumber screwups by IT, everywhere I go. IT are the ones getting to clean up the messes left by idiots who thought they knew what they were doing, right before they deleted something they shouldn't have, or downloaded and ok'ed something they shouldn't have, or tried to do something they shouldn't have.
I kid you not, I had a user bitching about his laptop which "wouldn't run right" and corrupted a bunch of files. We finally got this asshole to bring it in, and his power line for the damn thing looked like a rat had been chewing on it. His response: "Oh yeah it sparked a couple times and it zapped me once. I guess that's not normal huh?"
(full disk virus scans in the middle of the workday
We tried scheduling them in the middle of the night, but some fuckwits kept turning the machine off and then turning off the surge strip so that Wake-On-Lan couldn't call the machine back online at 2AM when we had the scans scheduled so as not to impact the users - and they KEPT doing it even after the 5th time they were told not to. So we had to go with plan B and scan during the day.
password changes every 30 days
Actually where I am, it's 90. And the blame there lies with some PHB who wrote the legislation/regulations at government levels.
Think before you blame IT for "coming up with" things like this.
emails older than 90 days are deleted
Where the hell do you work? We have the opposite problem, nobody deletes anything, ever. Storage gets to be a bitch. But don't dare even trying to clean out 20 year old files that haven't been referenced in 15 years, "we might need them sometime."
no personal flashdrives
After the 500th time some fucktard got a worm with a traveling USB loader package on their home machine and brought in a flashdrive to infect the network.
Or after the 5th time someone walked out on their last day with a ton of company documents and handed them over to a rival company...
This isn't an IT decision. This is a decision made by the lawyers to limit liability.
firewall monitoring
You like worms, do you?
180-day new software approval processes
Given the number of exploits in software like Adobe Acrobat?
requiring a "code" to use the color printer
Talk to the bean counters in accounting, who ran the numbers on cost per page on color versus monochrome and came up with that policy, not us.
The end result: Frustration, annoyance, anger... like road-rage; we feel that the computer, (like a slow guy blocking the fast lane) is holding us up, and keeping us from accomplishing our goals, and that leads to "keyboard rage." If people are breaking their machines to get upgrades, that's a sure-sign that the organization is failing to provide a suitable IT environment.
The end result: IT has been given the screaming fit from the PHB over and over again to make things "secure." Then IT gets a screaming fit from assholes like you who think you know everything that's going on.
Is it any wonder we see what you DON'T see above and consider you a bloody fucking moron for not paying attention? Fuck, half this stuff isn't even our decision.
The medical world is a nightmare all its own. Nurses, doctors? Unable to cope with the most basic of technology unless they were specifically trained on it during their residency.
Then there are all the nightmare apps for various medical machinery, which are often only sanctioned for very specific OS builds (I've seen a hospital with medical diagnostic machines still running on Win2k SP1 because if they updated to SP2 the application could no longer be certified to work correctly, but the company that made it which is long out of business so any hope of an update is laughable).
Then there are all the federal medical-privacy regulations that have to apply ON TOP OF regular security for the machines. Data breaches under HIPAA are, in no uncertain terms, a Big Fucking Deal.
IT side 2 - if only the fucktard user hadn't then gone and pirated the software he wanted, causing us to be in the middle of a fucking BSA audit and further slowing us down since IT is busy going through the audit paperwork on top of all the stuff we need to do otherwise.
For every one of you, there are a thousand brain-dead morons who cause problems.
Yeah. It sucks to be you. And it sucks to know there are clueless IT people around.
Oh and btw... "Then again, I have always worked in engineering firms." Now go around to a business that's primarily a bunch of construction jocks with 75-if-they're-lucky IQs. Now go around to a business that hires a bunch of marketing morons. Now go around to a business where your "managers" are managing department store floors. Now go around to a business where your "managers" are running grocery stores floors. Now go around to a business where your workers are spending most of their day making cold sales calls or "lead generation." Now go around to a business where your workers' primary task is scanning documents and data entry or processing.
I guarantee you, you'll find one or two of you for every thousand people. You'll find about 300 who don't want to touch a computer. And you'll find 598-599 of them who THINK they know what they are doing around computers and are busy, if they manage to get install/admin rights on a machine, filling it up with a bunch of "ooh free crap hey bonzi buddy yay facebook virus ooh free screensaver of puppies" and then complaining to the IT crew that "omg my computer is slow can u fix it pls?" or worse yet, getting it actually infected with something downright malicious.
If they are engineering or comp-sci professors? Okay, I can see your end.
Now try dealing with the nightmare of IT that is Social Work, English, HRM... where you have essentially a bunch of 5-year-olds who've gotten through the tenure system and can't be removed for love or money, and have no idea of how to handle technology.
Try to lock down campus ports? "OMG YOU STOPPED MY LIMEWIRE UNDO WHATEVER YOU DID RIGHT NOW I NEED IT FOR RESEARCH!" Try to not give them admin rights? See previous. Try to get them to change their password at least every 6 months and follow basic complexity requirements? "OMG YOU CAN'T DO THAT I CAN'T BE BOTHERED TO REMEMBER A NEW PASSWORD I WANT TO USE 'GOD' JUST LIKE I ALWAYS HAVE"
Then again, these are the same assholes who cause HIPAA/FERPA violations all over the place by giving their grad students their login/pass to "do things for me." All of a sudden, the grad student has access to everything - gradebooks, confidential student data, the works. Maybe they don't do anything with it. Doesn't matter. IT gets reprimanded or fired if they find out the student has access and don't report it, whether the professor "trusts the grad student not to do anything wrong" or not.
Those were breaking anyways. The little ball-wheels were complete shit.
We had a series of users with them and even before the Curve came out we were receiving the ball-roller ones back in droves. Same problem in every case: it ceased to register when you tried to scroll the ball upwards. Those old roller-ball BB's were just fucking defective.
The argument always goes back and forth like this:
IT Side - we have the following reasons that normal users shouldn't be installing programs themselves. - Security risk of adware/malware/bundleware - Number of incidents where machines have been compromised. - Number of incidents where complaints of "my machine is slow" turn out to be the result of user filling drive up with crap
User side - - "But it takes more than 5 minutes for them to come down and install (program X that's actually work related) for me." Nevermind that these installs happen maybe once per year and if they would bother SCHEDULING with us... - "But I want to try out (program y) to see if we can use it in the business..." - User happens to be the PHB's son or is fucking the PHB on the side.
Brain-dead PHB side- - "My employees are complaining that you IT guys are getting in the way of their work! Fix it so they can install things!" - One month later: "Megan's machine got infected again. Why the hell aren't you IT guys stopping this from happening? Do whatever it takes to stop this from happening again!" - One more month later: "Megan's complaining you took away her install rights! I need her to be working as best as possible, give them back to her! She can't possibly cause problems with that!"
Now add in that you might be working in an EDUCATION environment - where every tenured faculty member is also a brain-dead PHB.
Part of the cost problem is that it currently costs NASA roughly 12x more than it costs SpaceX to get payload into LEO (based on $450 million per shuttle launch). It's hard to do such a mission affordably when your costs are so obscenely high.
The joke there is the number of OTHER things NASA does on the same shuttle launch that nobody else in the fucking world can do. Satellite launches are a sideline; the rest is science.
Seems like the standard Retardican line always fails to consider this. NASA does the things that would never get done in their fabled "free market" because they're not "cost effective" at first to do - but when we count up how much we've benefitted from it since, it was obviously worth every penny.
I can't decide if they just want to make money out of repairs or if they want to make the price so high you just go out and buy a new machine.
"A little from column A, a little from column B..."
That's really the answer. For some things (like back when the iMac had everything crammed into a shell with a built in CRT and you didn't want the user killing themselves accidentally touching a high-voltage capacitor while trying to attach a PCI card) there were user-reasons to not have end users taking them apart.
For some of it, they recognize that the network of Apple Stores and third-party "authorized service centers" really do rely on a certain price premium to repair a lot of the stuff. Plus, the various warranty terms and difficulty of opening most of the systems condition their users to "just bring it in" rather than trying to repair things themselves.
Now when it comes to the third... well, I've had to take apart a few of these things now and again. The desk-lamp iMacs were annoying as fuck. Current crop of iMacs, likewise. But neither compares to the idiocy of the Mac Mini, which doesn't even give you an access panel to swap the fucking RAM.
I'd be very doubtful unless he has good proof he was working for the government.
Uhm.. the government ALREADY ADMITTED that they were using him as an undercover informant.
One of those things about the word "undercover" is that unless you are participating in what is going on, chances are the people you are trying to inform on will peg you real quick. "Hey, don't talk to that guy, everyone he talks to gets busted by the feds."
The Secret Service is no different than any other law enforcement agency. The dirtiest, most corrupt wing is always "Vice", simply because in order to find the guys they're trying to bust the cops have to get very, very, very dirty themselves. Sometimes they go native, sometimes they really go native, sometimes they get really freaking insane (more here. Sometimes it's even worse. Undercover cops on major mafia infiltration cases have had almost carte blanche to participate in anything that went on, so long as they testified later.
Am I completely convinced he's telling the truth? No. Is it reasonably plausible that someone in the Secret Service gave him verbal instructions to do certain things in order to keep his credibility up so as to set up future busts, but then decided he wasn't worth it and used him as a scapegoat? Absolutely.
Interestingly, Tilapia - now a common staple of seafood restaurants - was considered a trash fish and commonly thrown back as not worth even trying to sell until the early 1990s when someone realized that (a) they grew relatively well in captivity and (b) you can basically feed them garbage (they are scavengers in the wild, with a diet mostly of carcass-feeding and "detritus", aka eating other fish's poop) and they'll just keep growing anyways.
They also happen to have more fat (by percentage basis) than a typical greasy hamburger, making tilapia horribly unhealthy to ingest. But people buy them because they have been conditioned with "fish=healthy" and "fish=omega-3s" marketing crap, and tilapia (by virtue of being a dietarily worthless trash fish) are usually far cheaper than other fish in the marketplace.
In case you were wondering: yes, in some markets McDonald's "filet-o-fish" does use Tilapia these days and yes, if that is the case in your market then it is actually less healthy than a McD's hamburger.
The standing joke among scientists in the field is that there are three modern-day evolutions that determine whether a creature will survive the next two centuries.
#1 - Lives in an environment humans can't survive in long enough to colonize (deep sea, extremely high mountain, antarctic) #2 - Looks "extremely cute" by human standards such that either humans will feed them, or humans will not get pissed off when they break into the garbage looking for food (raccoons, foxes, pigeons, etc) #3 - Small enough and numerous enough that they are just not fucking going to go away because we don't notice them until they are present in EXTREMELY high numbers. Roaches, ants, mice/rats, etc.
If you are a new editor and you take the time to read the various policies, procedures, manuals of style, etc and then start editing, you will immediately be accused of being a "sockpuppet of someone" because your "edits betray a familiarity with wikipedia."
Then, the witch hunt will begin. Eventually they'll decide whose "sockpuppet" they want to call you, ban you without benefit of any way to clear your name or argue against their behavior, and that's that.
On the other hand, if you DON'T read the various policies, procedures, manuals of style, etc and then start trying to edit or learn as you go, you'll see the scenario put up above, get trodden on by the neckbeards who have nothing to do but jack off all day while clicking the automated leveling tools in their great big MMORPG to raise their experience level (aka edit count), and quickly realize that 99% of the dicks who are currently editing wikipedia are the sort of people that nobody wants to be around.
Well, here's a great case study from the former wikipedia admin I referred you to earlier.
Most interesting is the old "Enviroknot" case, where an editor whose edit contribution list was nothing but positive got lumped in with two trolls via "secret evidence" and banned... mostly because he crossed an editor named "Yuber", who was a protectionate of the abusive bitch SlimVirgin at the time. They had fun for the next two years accusing dozens of editors of being "Enviroknot" and banning them without any evidence or proof. At one point, an editor named "Dreamguy" who has major [[WP:OWN]] issues concerning fantasy creature subjects (vampires, werewolves, etc) started accusing all his opposition of being "enviroknot"... simply to gain an advantage. As you can see looking at the history of some of the bans (Devilbat, Pukachu, CountPointercount) shows no editing pattern to corroborate, but simply a pattern of abusive users and admins using the accusation as a tool because it was an easy way to get that hair-trigger douchebag David Gerard, one of the worst "editors" ever to disgrace the encyclopedia, to issue a ban.
The problem is: the admins, the people running the show, are all dicks. And even the non-admin dicks have admin buddies to call in.
Get into one argument with them and it doesn't matter about "letting them win." They have the block buttons. They have the control. You can't drag these lying dicks into "dispute resolution" because long before you get there, you will be accused of being a "sockpuppet", you will be blocked repeatedly by their friends on spurious reasons, you will be insulted and lied about, and then when you finally get into the nitty-gritty they'll stand up and say "well on the one hand I'm an admin with 1000000000 edits proving I have no life but wikipedia, and on the other hand you have this guy who has been blocked repeatedly and is guilty of the crime of harassing an admin. I say we ban him. All admins who agree?"
And of course, ALL the admins will agree, because if they don't, then they run the risk of others not agreeing with them later when they pull the same stunt.
Wikipedia edits are not based on consensus. They are based on providing a citation to a reliable source that verifies the information [wikipedia.org]. If you make such an edit that follows those guidelines and it gets reverted, there are policies in place to resolve the dispute.
Just try to actually follow them as a "new editor" (e.g. less than thousands on thousands of edits proving you have no fucking life outside of Wikipedia). What you'll find in practice is that you are immediately accused of being a "sockpuppet", or will immediately be assaulted as the person removing it calls their buddies in. They'll be completely rude to you, perhaps call you all kinds of names, perhaps worse, then if you respond in kind their pet admin will block you for "incivility."
Lather, rinse, repeat.
I have used these, and the disputes do get resolved. More often than not, however, the dispute is resolved by the person who is not following the rules slinking away and complaining about how unfair Wikipedia is.
But most often, disputes are resolved by someone having their pet admin ban the opposition as a "sockpuppet" or come up with some other excuse for an indefinite block. The merit of the edit never enters into it: the goal is to get rid of the newcomer.
For example, when an article doesn't contain citations as it should, the article is deleted according to Wikipedia's policies (because there is no way to verify the information in the article), and people come to Slashdot an complain about "deletionists".
No, the reason people complain about "deletionists" is because they run around screaming to remove things rather than to try to improve them. There are numerous articles which have been deleted despite having citations - either because the webpages providing the citations died, or because the sourcing was necessarily on a subject that did NOT have a lot of web citations.
Back in the day, I tried to contribute to Wikipedia. I provided several citations on an article (now deleted alas) that went to an older book on the subject. In my citation, I included page number and ISBN number.
My citations were not deemed good enough because there was, and I quote the fucking neckbeard who waged a war against the article, "no way for other editors to easily verify the content of the quote and citation because book is out of print and not available on web."
So yeah. That is how Wikipedia really works. It's a tool of the lazy fucking neckbeard who can't even be arsed to go to the local public library to look up a source. According to Wikipedia, if it isn't on the web, it doesn't exist.
If he's "written 60,000 edits" it's more likely he's one of the no-lifed neckbeards sitting around pushing buttons, automating everything via automated tools and has never read more than 100 or so edits in his entire Wikipedia time.
His name should likely be "Professor Revert-Monkey."
Here's how wikipedia really works. I've found this to be an incredibly helpful resource in understanding the mentality of the behavior of people on Wikipedia.
Remember: Wikipedia is about keeping people away to most wikipedians. They see their site as always "under attack." If consensus is changing on an article, they want to STOP that - so they need to get the newcomers to either leave on their own, or ban them. If 10 new editors show on the article over time and all stay, that could cause consensus to change. Run them off or ban them one by one as they arrive, and you can completely control the article.
since any edit by anyone who isn't a 60000+ contributor will automatically be reverted.
This one just about sums it up. Make an edit that looks "too experienced"? Be booted out as a "suspected sockpuppet" of whatever the abusive admin of the day's pet target is. Make an edit otherwise? A thousand and one neckbeards wanking off thinking they are "editing" will compete to see who's faster on the button with the automated fucking tools that make it so they don't even have to bother reading and assessing an edit before they zap it.
The second response is: the collaborative nature of the apparatus means that the right data tends to emerge, ultimately, even if there is turmoil temporarily as dichotomous viewpoints violently intersect. To which I reply: that does not inspire confidence. In fact, it makes the whole effort even more ridiculous. What you've proposed is a kind of quantum encyclopedia, where genuine data both exists and doesn't exist depending on the precise moment I rely upon your discordant fucking mob for my information. - credit: Tycho Brahe, Penny Arcade.
Slashdot Mirror
What about realizing that the mandate given to IT is schizophrenic?
They are supposedly a "service organization."
Their job is to "keep things running smoothly", "improve user productivity", and "Keep the company secure." And it's that LAST one that has major fucking legal ramifications for the company.
Have some moron user let loose a keylogger behind the firewall from an infected USB stick? Guess what, the lawyers are going to be screaming to disable all USB flash drives. Have some moron user downloading porn or pirating software? Guess what happens next. Have some moron user not doing their job because they've installed 1001 "free games" or other little widgets? Guess what, we get called in and the PHB then screams to remove rights for all users.
Right up until the point where we remove those same rights from the PHB and he can't jerk off to his porn in his private corner office anymore, or his secretary whines about how she can't open her IM windows anymore before she gives him his afternoon blowjob.
never forget that IT is not in charge
Which you promptly started doing. Most of the worst, most asinine policies don't come from IT, they come from the lawyers and the accountants and the PHBs.
and that their job is not to make things easy for IT
If you ever think IT has it "easy", you've never spent a day in their shoes. The reality is every single IT desk is understaffed, underappreciated, and beset by trying to figure out how to "accomplish" schizophrenic orders that demand they do contradictory things all at once.
In my 30 years out in the working world, I've seen more screws up by IT staff than by users.
Generic comment about kids getting off your lawn here, gramps.
Now in the real world, I've seen the screwups by users outnumber screwups by IT, everywhere I go. IT are the ones getting to clean up the messes left by idiots who thought they knew what they were doing, right before they deleted something they shouldn't have, or downloaded and ok'ed something they shouldn't have, or tried to do something they shouldn't have.
I kid you not, I had a user bitching about his laptop which "wouldn't run right" and corrupted a bunch of files. We finally got this asshole to bring it in, and his power line for the damn thing looked like a rat had been chewing on it. His response: "Oh yeah it sparked a couple times and it zapped me once. I guess that's not normal huh?"
the tax payers have just decided that our district should not have a 5 year replacement cycle, but a 10 year cycle
Lemme guess, Retardican stronghold? Tax breaks for the rich, fuck the kids?
(full disk virus scans in the middle of the workday
We tried scheduling them in the middle of the night, but some fuckwits kept turning the machine off and then turning off the surge strip so that Wake-On-Lan couldn't call the machine back online at 2AM when we had the scans scheduled so as not to impact the users - and they KEPT doing it even after the 5th time they were told not to. So we had to go with plan B and scan during the day.
password changes every 30 days
Actually where I am, it's 90. And the blame there lies with some PHB who wrote the legislation/regulations at government levels.
Think before you blame IT for "coming up with" things like this.
emails older than 90 days are deleted
Where the hell do you work? We have the opposite problem, nobody deletes anything, ever. Storage gets to be a bitch. But don't dare even trying to clean out 20 year old files that haven't been referenced in 15 years, "we might need them sometime."
no personal flashdrives
After the 500th time some fucktard got a worm with a traveling USB loader package on their home machine and brought in a flashdrive to infect the network.
Or after the 5th time someone walked out on their last day with a ton of company documents and handed them over to a rival company...
This isn't an IT decision. This is a decision made by the lawyers to limit liability.
firewall monitoring
You like worms, do you?
180-day new software approval processes
Given the number of exploits in software like Adobe Acrobat?
requiring a "code" to use the color printer
Talk to the bean counters in accounting, who ran the numbers on cost per page on color versus monochrome and came up with that policy, not us.
The end result: Frustration, annoyance, anger... like road-rage; we feel that the computer, (like a slow guy blocking the fast lane) is holding us up, and keeping us from accomplishing our goals, and that leads to "keyboard rage." If people are breaking their machines to get upgrades, that's a sure-sign that the organization is failing to provide a suitable IT environment.
The end result: IT has been given the screaming fit from the PHB over and over again to make things "secure." Then IT gets a screaming fit from assholes like you who think you know everything that's going on.
Is it any wonder we see what you DON'T see above and consider you a bloody fucking moron for not paying attention? Fuck, half this stuff isn't even our decision.
Two words: Medical apps
The medical world is a nightmare all its own. Nurses, doctors? Unable to cope with the most basic of technology unless they were specifically trained on it during their residency.
Then there are all the nightmare apps for various medical machinery, which are often only sanctioned for very specific OS builds (I've seen a hospital with medical diagnostic machines still running on Win2k SP1 because if they updated to SP2 the application could no longer be certified to work correctly, but the company that made it which is long out of business so any hope of an update is laughable).
Then there are all the federal medical-privacy regulations that have to apply ON TOP OF regular security for the machines. Data breaches under HIPAA are, in no uncertain terms, a Big Fucking Deal.
IT side 2 - if only the fucktard user hadn't then gone and pirated the software he wanted, causing us to be in the middle of a fucking BSA audit and further slowing us down since IT is busy going through the audit paperwork on top of all the stuff we need to do otherwise.
For every one of you, there are a thousand brain-dead morons who cause problems.
Yeah. It sucks to be you. And it sucks to know there are clueless IT people around.
Oh and btw... "Then again, I have always worked in engineering firms."
Now go around to a business that's primarily a bunch of construction jocks with 75-if-they're-lucky IQs.
Now go around to a business that hires a bunch of marketing morons.
Now go around to a business where your "managers" are managing department store floors.
Now go around to a business where your "managers" are running grocery stores floors.
Now go around to a business where your workers are spending most of their day making cold sales calls or "lead generation."
Now go around to a business where your workers' primary task is scanning documents and data entry or processing.
I guarantee you, you'll find one or two of you for every thousand people. You'll find about 300 who don't want to touch a computer. And you'll find 598-599 of them who THINK they know what they are doing around computers and are busy, if they manage to get install/admin rights on a machine, filling it up with a bunch of "ooh free crap hey bonzi buddy yay facebook virus ooh free screensaver of puppies" and then complaining to the IT crew that "omg my computer is slow can u fix it pls?" or worse yet, getting it actually infected with something downright malicious.
If they are engineering or comp-sci professors? Okay, I can see your end.
Now try dealing with the nightmare of IT that is Social Work, English, HRM... where you have essentially a bunch of 5-year-olds who've gotten through the tenure system and can't be removed for love or money, and have no idea of how to handle technology.
Try to lock down campus ports? "OMG YOU STOPPED MY LIMEWIRE UNDO WHATEVER YOU DID RIGHT NOW I NEED IT FOR RESEARCH!"
Try to not give them admin rights? See previous.
Try to get them to change their password at least every 6 months and follow basic complexity requirements? "OMG YOU CAN'T DO THAT I CAN'T BE BOTHERED TO REMEMBER A NEW PASSWORD I WANT TO USE 'GOD' JUST LIKE I ALWAYS HAVE"
Then again, these are the same assholes who cause HIPAA/FERPA violations all over the place by giving their grad students their login/pass to "do things for me." All of a sudden, the grad student has access to everything - gradebooks, confidential student data, the works. Maybe they don't do anything with it. Doesn't matter. IT gets reprimanded or fired if they find out the student has access and don't report it, whether the professor "trusts the grad student not to do anything wrong" or not.
Those were breaking anyways. The little ball-wheels were complete shit.
We had a series of users with them and even before the Curve came out we were receiving the ball-roller ones back in droves. Same problem in every case: it ceased to register when you tried to scroll the ball upwards. Those old roller-ball BB's were just fucking defective.
Try working in most actual business environments.
The argument always goes back and forth like this:
IT Side - we have the following reasons that normal users shouldn't be installing programs themselves.
- Security risk of adware/malware/bundleware
- Number of incidents where machines have been compromised.
- Number of incidents where complaints of "my machine is slow" turn out to be the result of user filling drive up with crap
User side -
- "But it takes more than 5 minutes for them to come down and install (program X that's actually work related) for me." Nevermind that these installs happen maybe once per year and if they would bother SCHEDULING with us...
- "But I want to try out (program y) to see if we can use it in the business..."
- User happens to be the PHB's son or is fucking the PHB on the side.
Brain-dead PHB side-
- "My employees are complaining that you IT guys are getting in the way of their work! Fix it so they can install things!"
- One month later: "Megan's machine got infected again. Why the hell aren't you IT guys stopping this from happening? Do whatever it takes to stop this from happening again!"
- One more month later: "Megan's complaining you took away her install rights! I need her to be working as best as possible, give them back to her! She can't possibly cause problems with that!"
Now add in that you might be working in an EDUCATION environment - where every tenured faculty member is also a brain-dead PHB.
Part of the cost problem is that it currently costs NASA roughly 12x more than it costs SpaceX to get payload into LEO (based on $450 million per shuttle launch). It's hard to do such a mission affordably when your costs are so obscenely high.
The joke there is the number of OTHER things NASA does on the same shuttle launch that nobody else in the fucking world can do. Satellite launches are a sideline; the rest is science.
Seems like the standard Retardican line always fails to consider this. NASA does the things that would never get done in their fabled "free market" because they're not "cost effective" at first to do - but when we count up how much we've benefitted from it since, it was obviously worth every penny.
I can't decide if they just want to make money out of repairs or if they want to make the price so high you just go out and buy a new machine.
"A little from column A, a little from column B..."
That's really the answer. For some things (like back when the iMac had everything crammed into a shell with a built in CRT and you didn't want the user killing themselves accidentally touching a high-voltage capacitor while trying to attach a PCI card) there were user-reasons to not have end users taking them apart.
For some of it, they recognize that the network of Apple Stores and third-party "authorized service centers" really do rely on a certain price premium to repair a lot of the stuff. Plus, the various warranty terms and difficulty of opening most of the systems condition their users to "just bring it in" rather than trying to repair things themselves.
Now when it comes to the third... well, I've had to take apart a few of these things now and again. The desk-lamp iMacs were annoying as fuck. Current crop of iMacs, likewise. But neither compares to the idiocy of the Mac Mini, which doesn't even give you an access panel to swap the fucking RAM.
Yeah, I remember my uncle's Mac. Looked like a giant tower of crap, piled 8 pieces high.
I'd be very doubtful unless he has good proof he was working for the government.
Uhm.. the government ALREADY ADMITTED that they were using him as an undercover informant.
One of those things about the word "undercover" is that unless you are participating in what is going on, chances are the people you are trying to inform on will peg you real quick. "Hey, don't talk to that guy, everyone he talks to gets busted by the feds."
The Secret Service is no different than any other law enforcement agency. The dirtiest, most corrupt wing is always "Vice", simply because in order to find the guys they're trying to bust the cops have to get very, very, very dirty themselves. Sometimes they go native, sometimes they really go native, sometimes they get really freaking insane (more here. Sometimes it's even worse. Undercover cops on major mafia infiltration cases have had almost carte blanche to participate in anything that went on, so long as they testified later.
Am I completely convinced he's telling the truth? No. Is it reasonably plausible that someone in the Secret Service gave him verbal instructions to do certain things in order to keep his credibility up so as to set up future busts, but then decided he wasn't worth it and used him as a scapegoat? Absolutely.
Re: your #4 suggestion: you're not far off.
Interestingly, Tilapia - now a common staple of seafood restaurants - was considered a trash fish and commonly thrown back as not worth even trying to sell until the early 1990s when someone realized that (a) they grew relatively well in captivity and (b) you can basically feed them garbage (they are scavengers in the wild, with a diet mostly of carcass-feeding and "detritus", aka eating other fish's poop) and they'll just keep growing anyways.
They also happen to have more fat (by percentage basis) than a typical greasy hamburger, making tilapia horribly unhealthy to ingest. But people buy them because they have been conditioned with "fish=healthy" and "fish=omega-3s" marketing crap, and tilapia (by virtue of being a dietarily worthless trash fish) are usually far cheaper than other fish in the marketplace.
In case you were wondering: yes, in some markets McDonald's "filet-o-fish" does use Tilapia these days and yes, if that is the case in your market then it is actually less healthy than a McD's hamburger.
The standing joke among scientists in the field is that there are three modern-day evolutions that determine whether a creature will survive the next two centuries.
#1 - Lives in an environment humans can't survive in long enough to colonize (deep sea, extremely high mountain, antarctic)
#2 - Looks "extremely cute" by human standards such that either humans will feed them, or humans will not get pissed off when they break into the garbage looking for food (raccoons, foxes, pigeons, etc)
#3 - Small enough and numerous enough that they are just not fucking going to go away because we don't notice them until they are present in EXTREMELY high numbers. Roaches, ants, mice/rats, etc.
Wikipedia is its own Catch-22.
If you are a new editor and you take the time to read the various policies, procedures, manuals of style, etc and then start editing, you will immediately be accused of being a "sockpuppet of someone" because your "edits betray a familiarity with wikipedia."
Then, the witch hunt will begin. Eventually they'll decide whose "sockpuppet" they want to call you, ban you without benefit of any way to clear your name or argue against their behavior, and that's that.
On the other hand, if you DON'T read the various policies, procedures, manuals of style, etc and then start trying to edit or learn as you go, you'll see the scenario put up above, get trodden on by the neckbeards who have nothing to do but jack off all day while clicking the automated leveling tools in their great big MMORPG to raise their experience level (aka edit count), and quickly realize that 99% of the dicks who are currently editing wikipedia are the sort of people that nobody wants to be around.
On the other hand, I'm certain you only posted that anonymous because you play the game of anonymous insults to protect your own karma, troll.
Well, here's a great case study from the former wikipedia admin I referred you to earlier.
Most interesting is the old "Enviroknot" case, where an editor whose edit contribution list was nothing but positive got lumped in with two trolls via "secret evidence" and banned... mostly because he crossed an editor named "Yuber", who was a protectionate of the abusive bitch SlimVirgin at the time. They had fun for the next two years accusing dozens of editors of being "Enviroknot" and banning them without any evidence or proof. At one point, an editor named "Dreamguy" who has major [[WP:OWN]] issues concerning fantasy creature subjects (vampires, werewolves, etc) started accusing all his opposition of being "enviroknot"... simply to gain an advantage. As you can see looking at the history of some of the bans (Devilbat, Pukachu, CountPointercount) shows no editing pattern to corroborate, but simply a pattern of abusive users and admins using the accusation as a tool because it was an easy way to get that hair-trigger douchebag David Gerard, one of the worst "editors" ever to disgrace the encyclopedia, to issue a ban.
The problem is: the admins, the people running the show, are all dicks. And even the non-admin dicks have admin buddies to call in.
Get into one argument with them and it doesn't matter about "letting them win." They have the block buttons. They have the control. You can't drag these lying dicks into "dispute resolution" because long before you get there, you will be accused of being a "sockpuppet", you will be blocked repeatedly by their friends on spurious reasons, you will be insulted and lied about, and then when you finally get into the nitty-gritty they'll stand up and say "well on the one hand I'm an admin with 1000000000 edits proving I have no life but wikipedia, and on the other hand you have this guy who has been blocked repeatedly and is guilty of the crime of harassing an admin. I say we ban him. All admins who agree?"
And of course, ALL the admins will agree, because if they don't, then they run the risk of others not agreeing with them later when they pull the same stunt.
Bullcrap.
Wikipedia edits are not based on consensus. They are based on providing a citation to a reliable source that verifies the information [wikipedia.org]. If you make such an edit that follows those guidelines and it gets reverted, there are policies in place to resolve the dispute.
Just try to actually follow them as a "new editor" (e.g. less than thousands on thousands of edits proving you have no fucking life outside of Wikipedia). What you'll find in practice is that you are immediately accused of being a "sockpuppet", or will immediately be assaulted as the person removing it calls their buddies in. They'll be completely rude to you, perhaps call you all kinds of names, perhaps worse, then if you respond in kind their pet admin will block you for "incivility."
Lather, rinse, repeat.
I have used these, and the disputes do get resolved. More often than not, however, the dispute is resolved by the person who is not following the rules slinking away and complaining about how unfair Wikipedia is.
But most often, disputes are resolved by someone having their pet admin ban the opposition as a "sockpuppet" or come up with some other excuse for an indefinite block. The merit of the edit never enters into it: the goal is to get rid of the newcomer.
For example, when an article doesn't contain citations as it should, the article is deleted according to Wikipedia's policies (because there is no way to verify the information in the article), and people come to Slashdot an complain about "deletionists".
No, the reason people complain about "deletionists" is because they run around screaming to remove things rather than to try to improve them. There are numerous articles which have been deleted despite having citations - either because the webpages providing the citations died, or because the sourcing was necessarily on a subject that did NOT have a lot of web citations.
Back in the day, I tried to contribute to Wikipedia. I provided several citations on an article (now deleted alas) that went to an older book on the subject. In my citation, I included page number and ISBN number.
My citations were not deemed good enough because there was, and I quote the fucking neckbeard who waged a war against the article, "no way for other editors to easily verify the content of the quote and citation because book is out of print and not available on web."
So yeah. That is how Wikipedia really works. It's a tool of the lazy fucking neckbeard who can't even be arsed to go to the local public library to look up a source. According to Wikipedia, if it isn't on the web, it doesn't exist.
If he's "written 60,000 edits" it's more likely he's one of the no-lifed neckbeards sitting around pushing buttons, automating everything via automated tools and has never read more than 100 or so edits in his entire Wikipedia time.
His name should likely be "Professor Revert-Monkey."
You nailed it.
Here's how wikipedia really works. I've found this to be an incredibly helpful resource in understanding the mentality of the behavior of people on Wikipedia.
Remember: Wikipedia is about keeping people away to most wikipedians. They see their site as always "under attack." If consensus is changing on an article, they want to STOP that - so they need to get the newcomers to either leave on their own, or ban them. If 10 new editors show on the article over time and all stay, that could cause consensus to change. Run them off or ban them one by one as they arrive, and you can completely control the article.
since any edit by anyone who isn't a 60000+ contributor will automatically be reverted.
This one just about sums it up. Make an edit that looks "too experienced"? Be booted out as a "suspected sockpuppet" of whatever the abusive admin of the day's pet target is. Make an edit otherwise? A thousand and one neckbeards wanking off thinking they are "editing" will compete to see who's faster on the button with the automated fucking tools that make it so they don't even have to bother reading and assessing an edit before they zap it.
It IS a subjective and ALWAYS political process when deciding to grant tenure.
There, fixed that for you.
Obligatory:
The second response is: the collaborative nature of the apparatus means that the right data tends to emerge, ultimately, even if there is turmoil temporarily as dichotomous viewpoints violently intersect. To which I reply: that does not inspire confidence. In fact, it makes the whole effort even more ridiculous. What you've proposed is a kind of quantum encyclopedia, where genuine data both exists and doesn't exist depending on the precise moment I rely upon your discordant fucking mob for my information. - credit: Tycho Brahe, Penny Arcade.
Indeed. From what I've looked up of AUM's college rankings, "Secondary High School" would be a better description of it than "University."