You're serious, right? I'm gonna help you out. Go find some evidence that dinosaurs lived in the same time period as writing/farming/animal-domesticating/civilization- creating humans. Find any evidence.
But there is one catch. You have to really look. You can't accept somebody relaying stories they hear about some study somewhere that proves it. You have to see the study yourself. You have to have a published account of first hand evidence that shows T-Rex lived at the same time as tool-using humans. That means any published account by the scientist or group of scientists themselves.
By the time you've found some evidence, not just the word of your pastor, but some real evidence, I garantee you'll have learned some great lessons. I don't want to spoil them for you. you'll understand. Take the journey with a clear head and honest heart and you will truly learn something wonderful.
It would be very easy not to take up this challenge. It would be incredibly easy to ask someone you already know and trust and just take their word for it. But I urge you to take the hard road. Really look. I already know you have faith, but do you have determination and a logical mind? No, no no, don't prove it to ME. Prove it to yourself. Look. Discover. You can't possibly lose.
For some reason known only to them, Apple chooses to have only a tiny market share of the PC industry. They are certainly smart enough to redefine the industry on their terms.
Trust me, Apple is very happy to have the lions market share of digital music player market and they would be delighted to own the PC market too. The fact that they have a tiny market share has absolutely nothing to do with their aspirations.
The power of the Mac Faithful to believe that everything their beloved company does must be for a good reason is just astounding. This statement is the equivelant of noticing your mom is poor and saying "she always wanted to be poor". Only in this case the there are enough old lottery tickets laying around to plainly point out the her real desires.
"You're not 'wantonly deleting executables,' you're moving and deleting the entire application."
I'm curious how accurate this is. Are there no no libraries or.DLL equivilants that are installed in another location? Are there no configuration settings in the equivilant of a registry that must be removed?
This is a genuine question and I hope you have the time to answer. If you happen to have a link lying around to some place on the web that discusses the topic ('OS X + applications' does not yield useful results on google) I'd really appreciate it.
...to develop all that for a ridiculously small percentage of people hitting the site with a cellphone.
Of course if you designed it to work well on a phone, maybe that ridiculously small percentage would grow. The horrible experience browsing on the phone is why most people dont pop out their mobile browsers, not because they don't want to surf on a phone.
I know I'm saying egg and you're saying chicken, but I've seen too many people excited and subsequantly annoyed by their mobile web browsers. My boss is one of these guys. He never surfs on his phone except to one site, our corporate Outlook Web Access site. No, he'd never go to the full size one, but he loves the Outlook Mobile Access version. Why? It's light, it loads fast and it gives him the info he needs (it's plain text for those not familiar).
If you designed your sites like this, people would flock to them. I regularly use several small sites but avoid the big ones like the plague. Slashdot happens to have a pretty good small site that I visit often (add the ability to view more comments!) but the regular site is a pain.
If I know I can take it to every new Windows/Mac/linux computer I use and I can play it on just about any digital music player I buy then DRM wouldn't be much of a problem. Sharing it with my friends and family would be a plus, but not a requirement.
If your system doesn't need it, it just won't use it, so no use disabling it.
Not true. Windows will page regardless of your available memory. Check your task manager and add up the damage. If you're like me you have plenty of RAM to hold the paged data, yet it's still paged.
But that one day when you run out of RAM in a very bad way because you've disabled your swap file could kill you (or at least your data), depending on what you're doing. Windows PC's do not like it when they run out of memory without expecting to.
Ok, but what if you have a two gig page file and then add two gigs of memory and remove the page file? It's all just bits; if you have enough space to store them then you have enough space to store them.
What I object to is the unfair extrapolation. Lot of machines are infected and lots aren't.
Nowhere near 100% of the windows computers in my company are infected; nowhere near 100% of our employees home computers are infected; and nowhere near 100% of the people I know have infected computers.
You see 100% (or close to that) and I don't. Blame it on some strange time/space probability warp if you like. I'd prefer to think that neither my nor your anecdotal evidence is remotely close to the national truth.
Look, I'm sorry about the troll comment if you didn't mean it that way, but my bullshit detector always starts flashing when anyone makes blanket (and inflammatory) statements like "close to 100%". It's like elections. Show me the elections where some candidate won by "close to 100%"? I don't know of too many in the U.S., but I have heard of a few abroad. Saddam Hussein won his "election" in Iraq by more than 99% a few years back. Yes, I was very skeptical of that, too.
Man, I sympathise with you. Everyone writing policy for a police department should have impecable spelling and grammer on every memo that leaves their desk.
BUT.. when they post to slashdot, use instant messaging or send a quick email to tell their lacky to dump the trash, spelling and grammer do not need to be their number one priority. Give it a rest when it's on "instant" media. You no more need to correct a slashdotters grammer than you need to correct the guy who talks in incomplete sentences. As long as they get their point accross, let them be.
TW
P.S. Haven't loaded spellbound yet. Please give ME a break if I misspelled something.
If a google just returned some random version if the Bible, what kind of message would some fundie think was being said?
This is a common complaint of nearly every search result on Goodle. Someone always thinks their site should have a higher ranking. Google "fixes" this problem by never actually fixing anything. Their defense has always been "we don't mess with who gets a higher ranking... it's all just prebuilt math."
So, this makes me curious. if you put "bible" into the normal google search engine you get biblegatway.com and bible.com as your first two hits. You can actually read the bible at both of those places. But if you put "book bible" into google you'd be hard pressed to find a bible you can actually read in the "book results".
Is it just that print.google.com is too new or is there some other reason? I would hope that it's not because google cooked the books to avoid trouble with fundamentalists.
Out of print, copyrighted, whatever. This is how google has chosen to deal with the subject:
Thank you for using Google Print.
You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.
Google protects works that are under copyright by restricting access to certain pages and restricting the number of pages you can view. You may continue to take advantage of Google Print by clicking on About this Book. Thank you for using Google Print.
I had thought that they were putting "books" online. Turns out they're just putting the ability to search through books online.
BTW, this came up when I hit next page too many times on "Origin of Species" who's original text, I presume, is not copyrighted.
It's not that surprising when you consider the demographic of Google people; probably one of the least Judeo-Christian oriented groups of people in the country.
I'm not reliegious at all and I find it very surprising. The fact is, whether you're religious or not, you must have an understanding of religion if you intent to have an understanding of society. For that reason alone, non-reliegious people make great use of this particular book.
Thanks for the info, but he wan't trolling. It was one of the first books I checked for and amazingly "bible" and "the bible" do not yeild the desired results either. It's a little surprising to have to be so specific for this particular book.
Dude, you weren't paying attention. They, basically, _get_ the donated equipment that others are busy writing off. As long as they're doing backups and have suitable spare equipment on hand (not a problem at these prices) then hardware failure is little risk. Software failure is only a risk if their vendor won't support them, but many of these companies will support them nearly forever as long as they keep getting 20% a year.
Yes, they will eventually have to upgrade. They will eventually be unable to get suitable hardware and it will bet impossible to get support at some point. But what does it help them to do that now as opposed to 3-5 years from now? The risk of riding it out 'til the end is far less than the risk to most companies of not haveing that extra capital to use for something else. They should milk it as long as it's working, they don't need anything better and they can support their hardware and software.
TW
P.S. Microsoft no longer supports MS-DOS, but it still works plenty well. As long as their call-center software vendor stands by their DOS-based product, they can live without support from Microsoft.
Windows 95 isn't so much "broken" as it is now just really, really old.
I don't understand why it should matter if it's old? Those games we play on MAME are older. TCP/IP is older. C and C++ are older.
I happen to have a couple of Win98 SE boxes at my place. They work terrifically for playing games that were made in the late nineties and as backup boxes for web surfing or homework if one of my family's other boxes are down. I also happen to have a Win95 box which doesn't get much use, but has even older games on it that are fun to play sometimes.
I run these computers on late nineties hardware and run late nineties programs on them with a little bit of Firefox and OpenOffice thrown in to the mix. I'd just as soon load Linux, but it won't play those games. I already have the Windows licenses (came with the hardware they're running on) so why not make use of this resource?
Cars wear out. Clothes wear out. My computer hardware will eventually wear out. But my software and the OS that works best to run it on, wont wear out. Why is everyone so hung up on the latest version of stuff _if_ the old version is doing the job? Win98 didn't all of a sudden "go bad" so I'm gonna keep on using it.
BTW, some people refer to Windows, especially old versions, as terrible OSs. If you're comparing them to the most recent version of Windows or to some other modern OSs I can think of, you may be right. If you intend to use the OS as your only computer, you may be right. But if you just want to run a few older Windows programs and you want to run everything with older hardware, they really work terrifically.
Your kid will do wonderfully on their schoolwork with Office 97. It'll look great when printed on that old Laserjet 4. You run almost zero virus risk if you have a cheap hardware firewall on your cable connection and limit where your kids can surf. And, most of all, you're not going to see the limits in this setup if you're not trying to run everything under the sun on it. As secondary or tertiary boxes, there is no problem whatsoever with old versions of Windows.
The fact that you are asking this indicates that you don't understand the question. blah, blah, blah Certs answer none of those. Remember, past "experience" is no guarantee of future performance. At all. Ever.
The fact that you answered the question in this way indicates _you_ do not understand the question. The question is: "What will get me more money and be most relevant to my job for the least amount of effort on my part?" It's a damn good question, It shows he's willing to work, but doesn't want to do unnecessary work, and his goals are most certainly something employers highly value.
Part of the answer is easy to find. More money means more respect, at least within the context of this subject, so salary surveys (which he has already attempted to look at) will point at the truth. The other parts about relevance and ease, do not appear to be answered by salary surveys, hence the question put to the/. community.
So, my recommendation: Make an attempt to answer his highly relevant and well worded question which he appears to understand very well. Denegrating him for asking it only helps to drive another eager, fresh mind from IT.
Add on top of that people have routinely rejected thin-clients.
Well, yes and no. They love having both. Citrix is immensily poplular, yet all of the people I personally know who access Citrix servers do so from a fat-client computer.
Thin mail is also hugely popular but is, once again, almost always accessed from a fat client.
Hell, the web has been accessible from web-tv, etc for years, but I'm personally doing this on P-IV 3.4Ghz.
The truth is, people want access to networked data and are willing to access it using thin client software. But the utility, ubiquity and inexpensiveness of fat client computers will keep them on people's desktops for some time to come.
If you hate Microsoft, good job. If you hate the US, good job.
See, this is what I dislike about conversing in modern America. I point out that I dislike some thing my country is doing and I have to deal with people implying that I may hate my country.... or, even Microsoft!
Listen: It is posible to bring up issues with an entity without hating it. You got that?
On the flip side, it also _should_ be possible to bring up issues with an entity even if you love it. You got that, too?
Comments like this make it very difficult to have a constructive conversation. They bring fear that you'll be labled if you dare to disagree. They make other people quick to lable so others will know they're on the "correct" side of the discussion.
If you dislike what I said, point it out. Even call me an idiot for thinking the way I do. But dont' call me anti-American for making my point.
Security isn't as tight as you would like to believe.
Although I tend to agree with this, especially for Corporate America, the fact that they're giving it to the Air Force first tends to mitegate the problem somewhat. It's not that spies never get into the military, but they have a much harder time and the military tends to know someone fairly well before handing out security clearances.
Put another way: if you can't trust military security, what kind of security, exactly, would you expect to be better?
If you were the Japanese government, would you want to know that the US were getting referential treatment?
If you were the Chinese government, would you want to know the US is getting free help from Microsoft to spy on you? Probably not.
If you were a concerned person living in another county who happens to find out about an exploit in Windows, would you want the US government getting a month-long head start on hacking/spying on the rest of the world, possibly even including the country you live in?
Microsoft has spent years trying to convince people who find exploits to "do the ethical thing" and tell them about it before letting the rest of the world know. If you happen to be a citizen of another country, this puts a very big question mark on whether giving MS the exploit is "the ethical thing" to do.
My best guess is that otherwise helpful security proffesionals who happen to live outside our borders will be posting more and more exploits directly to the web because of this policy. Ironically, that will end up making things _less_ secure for the Air Force in the long run.
Ummm...this sounds like something coming from a manager with zippo technical skills put in charge of an IT department (it's always easy to bash geeks for poor social skills btw). Let your wonder girl get into some trouble that she can't find in someone else's documentation and then tell me how valuable your loser geeky worker is then? When your lovable woman goody two shoes is scrambling for help.
Actually, I am their manager, though my tech skills rate somewhat above "Zippo". On a geekiness and technical ability scale, I'd rate myself about 7 or 8 out of 10.
The geek who works for me is very important. Never meant to imply that he's not important. But he's only one piece of the puzzle. Truth be told, I'd find it very difficult to get the job of IT done if I was missing either piece. But on most days, our IT department better serves the end users with her skills than with his.
His ability to solve tough problems and understand complex back-end solutions does not make up for his lack of ability to deliver something others can actually make use of. If he didn't have her (and many others like her) to compliment his skills, we would be very much in trouble.
Slashdot Mirror
You're serious, right? I'm gonna help you out. Go find some evidence that dinosaurs lived in the same time period as writing/farming/animal-domesticating/civilization- creating humans. Find any evidence.
But there is one catch. You have to really look. You can't accept somebody relaying stories they hear about some study somewhere that proves it. You have to see the study yourself. You have to have a published account of first hand evidence that shows T-Rex lived at the same time as tool-using humans. That means any published account by the scientist or group of scientists themselves.
By the time you've found some evidence, not just the word of your pastor, but some real evidence, I garantee you'll have learned some great lessons. I don't want to spoil them for you. you'll understand. Take the journey with a clear head and honest heart and you will truly learn something wonderful.
It would be very easy not to take up this challenge. It would be incredibly easy to ask someone you already know and trust and just take their word for it. But I urge you to take the hard road. Really look. I already know you have faith, but do you have determination and a logical mind? No, no no, don't prove it to ME. Prove it to yourself. Look. Discover. You can't possibly lose.
TW
For some reason known only to them, Apple chooses to have only a tiny market share of the PC industry. They are certainly smart enough to redefine the industry on their terms.
Trust me, Apple is very happy to have the lions market share of digital music player market and they would be delighted to own the PC market too. The fact that they have a tiny market share has absolutely nothing to do with their aspirations.
The power of the Mac Faithful to believe that everything their beloved company does must be for a good reason is just astounding. This statement is the equivelant of noticing your mom is poor and saying "she always wanted to be poor". Only in this case the there are enough old lottery tickets laying around to plainly point out the her real desires.
TW
Thanks for the info. This helps a lot.
TW
"You're not 'wantonly deleting executables,' you're moving and deleting the entire application."
.DLL equivilants that are installed in another location? Are there no configuration settings in the equivilant of a registry that must be removed?
I'm curious how accurate this is. Are there no no libraries or
This is a genuine question and I hope you have the time to answer. If you happen to have a link lying around to some place on the web that discusses the topic ('OS X + applications' does not yield useful results on google) I'd really appreciate it.
Thanks,
TW
I know I'm saying egg and you're saying chicken, but I've seen too many people excited and subsequantly annoyed by their mobile web browsers. My boss is one of these guys. He never surfs on his phone except to one site, our corporate Outlook Web Access site. No, he'd never go to the full size one, but he loves the Outlook Mobile Access version. Why? It's light, it loads fast and it gives him the info he needs (it's plain text for those not familiar).
If you designed your sites like this, people would flock to them. I regularly use several small sites but avoid the big ones like the plague. Slashdot happens to have a pretty good small site that I visit often (add the ability to view more comments!) but the regular site is a pain.
TW
Why is everyone so hung up on "free" mail? for $20.00 a _year_ you can get Yahoo Mail Plus with 2GB, POP3 and no ads.
Are you guys so unwilling to pay _any_ amount for _any_ thing?
TW
If I know I can take it to every new Windows/Mac/linux computer I use and I can play it on just about any digital music player I buy then DRM wouldn't be much of a problem. Sharing it with my friends and family would be a plus, but not a requirement.
TW
Ok, but what if you have a two gig page file and then add two gigs of memory and remove the page file? It's all just bits; if you have enough space to store them then you have enough space to store them.
TW
What I object to is the unfair extrapolation. Lot of machines are infected and lots aren't.
Nowhere near 100% of the windows computers in my company are infected; nowhere near 100% of our employees home computers are infected; and nowhere near 100% of the people I know have infected computers.
You see 100% (or close to that) and I don't. Blame it on some strange time/space probability warp if you like. I'd prefer to think that neither my nor your anecdotal evidence is remotely close to the national truth.
Look, I'm sorry about the troll comment if you didn't mean it that way, but my bullshit detector always starts flashing when anyone makes blanket (and inflammatory) statements like "close to 100%". It's like elections. Show me the elections where some candidate won by "close to 100%"? I don't know of too many in the U.S., but I have heard of a few abroad. Saddam Hussein won his "election" in Iraq by more than 99% a few years back. Yes, I was very skeptical of that, too.
TW
Insightful instead of troll? Funny.
Any computer industry statement that starts with "something close to 100%" should be suspect right from the start.
TW
Man, I sympathise with you. Everyone writing policy for a police department should have impecable spelling and grammer on every memo that leaves their desk.
BUT.. when they post to slashdot, use instant messaging or send a quick email to tell their lacky to dump the trash, spelling and grammer do not need to be their number one priority. Give it a rest when it's on "instant" media. You no more need to correct a slashdotters grammer than you need to correct the guy who talks in incomplete sentences. As long as they get their point accross, let them be.
TW
P.S. Haven't loaded spellbound yet. Please give ME a break if I misspelled something.
Also keep away from fireplaces, errant sparks, or anything that may trigger flame.
:-)
(is there a -1 Bad Joke? I hope not)
If a google just returned some random version if the Bible, what kind of message would some fundie think was being said?
This is a common complaint of nearly every search result on Goodle. Someone always thinks their site should have a higher ranking. Google "fixes" this problem by never actually fixing anything. Their defense has always been "we don't mess with who gets a higher ranking... it's all just prebuilt math."
So, this makes me curious. if you put "bible" into the normal google search engine you get biblegatway.com and bible.com as your first two hits. You can actually read the bible at both of those places. But if you put "book bible" into google you'd be hard pressed to find a bible you can actually read in the "book results".
Is it just that print.google.com is too new or is there some other reason? I would hope that it's not because google cooked the books to avoid trouble with fundamentalists.
TW
I had thought that they were putting "books" online. Turns out they're just putting the ability to search through books online.
BTW, this came up when I hit next page too many times on "Origin of Species" who's original text, I presume, is not copyrighted.
TW
It's not that surprising when you consider the demographic of Google people; probably one of the least Judeo-Christian oriented groups of people in the country.
I'm not reliegious at all and I find it very surprising. The fact is, whether you're religious or not, you must have an understanding of religion if you intent to have an understanding of society. For that reason alone, non-reliegious people make great use of this particular book.
TW
Thanks for the info, but he wan't trolling. It was one of the first books I checked for and amazingly "bible" and "the bible" do not yeild the desired results either. It's a little surprising to have to be so specific for this particular book.
TW
Dude, you weren't paying attention. They, basically, _get_ the donated equipment that others are busy writing off. As long as they're doing backups and have suitable spare equipment on hand (not a problem at these prices) then hardware failure is little risk. Software failure is only a risk if their vendor won't support them, but many of these companies will support them nearly forever as long as they keep getting 20% a year.
Yes, they will eventually have to upgrade. They will eventually be unable to get suitable hardware and it will bet impossible to get support at some point. But what does it help them to do that now as opposed to 3-5 years from now? The risk of riding it out 'til the end is far less than the risk to most companies of not haveing that extra capital to use for something else. They should milk it as long as it's working, they don't need anything better and they can support their hardware and software.
TW
P.S. Microsoft no longer supports MS-DOS, but it still works plenty well. As long as their call-center software vendor stands by their DOS-based product, they can live without support from Microsoft.
I don't understand why it should matter if it's old? Those games we play on MAME are older. TCP/IP is older. C and C++ are older.
I happen to have a couple of Win98 SE boxes at my place. They work terrifically for playing games that were made in the late nineties and as backup boxes for web surfing or homework if one of my family's other boxes are down. I also happen to have a Win95 box which doesn't get much use, but has even older games on it that are fun to play sometimes.
I run these computers on late nineties hardware and run late nineties programs on them with a little bit of Firefox and OpenOffice thrown in to the mix. I'd just as soon load Linux, but it won't play those games. I already have the Windows licenses (came with the hardware they're running on) so why not make use of this resource?
Cars wear out. Clothes wear out. My computer hardware will eventually wear out. But my software and the OS that works best to run it on, wont wear out. Why is everyone so hung up on the latest version of stuff _if_ the old version is doing the job? Win98 didn't all of a sudden "go bad" so I'm gonna keep on using it.
BTW, some people refer to Windows, especially old versions, as terrible OSs. If you're comparing them to the most recent version of Windows or to some other modern OSs I can think of, you may be right. If you intend to use the OS as your only computer, you may be right. But if you just want to run a few older Windows programs and you want to run everything with older hardware, they really work terrifically.
Your kid will do wonderfully on their schoolwork with Office 97. It'll look great when printed on that old Laserjet 4. You run almost zero virus risk if you have a cheap hardware firewall on your cable connection and limit where your kids can surf. And, most of all, you're not going to see the limits in this setup if you're not trying to run everything under the sun on it. As secondary or tertiary boxes, there is no problem whatsoever with old versions of Windows.
TW
The fact that you are asking this indicates that you don't understand the question. blah, blah, blah Certs answer none of those. Remember, past "experience" is no guarantee of future performance. At all. Ever.
/. community.
The fact that you answered the question in this way indicates _you_ do not understand the question. The question is: "What will get me more money and be most relevant to my job for the least amount of effort on my part?" It's a damn good question, It shows he's willing to work, but doesn't want to do unnecessary work, and his goals are most certainly something employers highly value.
Part of the answer is easy to find. More money means more respect, at least within the context of this subject, so salary surveys (which he has already attempted to look at) will point at the truth. The other parts about relevance and ease, do not appear to be answered by salary surveys, hence the question put to the
So, my recommendation: Make an attempt to answer his highly relevant and well worded question which he appears to understand very well. Denegrating him for asking it only helps to drive another eager, fresh mind from IT.
TW
Well, yes and no. They love having both. Citrix is immensily poplular, yet all of the people I personally know who access Citrix servers do so from a fat-client computer.
Thin mail is also hugely popular but is, once again, almost always accessed from a fat client.
Hell, the web has been accessible from web-tv, etc for years, but I'm personally doing this on P-IV 3.4Ghz.
The truth is, people want access to networked data and are willing to access it using thin client software. But the utility, ubiquity and inexpensiveness of fat client computers will keep them on people's desktops for some time to come.
TW
Every mouse I've gotten for quite some time has had a scroll wheel as well.
Let's hope this report is just missing some of the details.
TW
If you hate Microsoft, good job. If you hate the US, good job.
... or, even Microsoft!
See, this is what I dislike about conversing in modern America. I point out that I dislike some thing my country is doing and I have to deal with people implying that I may hate my country.
Listen: It is posible to bring up issues with an entity without hating it. You got that?
On the flip side, it also _should_ be possible to bring up issues with an entity even if you love it. You got that, too?
Comments like this make it very difficult to have a constructive conversation. They bring fear that you'll be labled if you dare to disagree. They make other people quick to lable so others will know they're on the "correct" side of the discussion.
If you dislike what I said, point it out. Even call me an idiot for thinking the way I do. But dont' call me anti-American for making my point.
TW
Security isn't as tight as you would like to believe.
Although I tend to agree with this, especially for Corporate America, the fact that they're giving it to the Air Force first tends to mitegate the problem somewhat. It's not that spies never get into the military, but they have a much harder time and the military tends to know someone fairly well before handing out security clearances.
Put another way: if you can't trust military security, what kind of security, exactly, would you expect to be better?
TW
If you were the Japanese government, would you want to know that the US were getting referential treatment?
If you were the Chinese government, would you want to know the US is getting free help from Microsoft to spy on you? Probably not.
If you were a concerned person living in another county who happens to find out about an exploit in Windows, would you want the US government getting a month-long head start on hacking/spying on the rest of the world, possibly even including the country you live in?
Microsoft has spent years trying to convince people who find exploits to "do the ethical thing" and tell them about it before letting the rest of the world know. If you happen to be a citizen of another country, this puts a very big question mark on whether giving MS the exploit is "the ethical thing" to do.
My best guess is that otherwise helpful security proffesionals who happen to live outside our borders will be posting more and more exploits directly to the web because of this policy. Ironically, that will end up making things _less_ secure for the Air Force in the long run.
TW
Ummm...this sounds like something coming from a manager with zippo technical skills put in charge of an IT department (it's always easy to bash geeks for poor social skills btw). Let your wonder girl get into some trouble that she can't find in someone else's documentation and then tell me how valuable your loser geeky worker is then? When your lovable woman goody two shoes is scrambling for help.
Actually, I am their manager, though my tech skills rate somewhat above "Zippo". On a geekiness and technical ability scale, I'd rate myself about 7 or 8 out of 10.
The geek who works for me is very important. Never meant to imply that he's not important. But he's only one piece of the puzzle. Truth be told, I'd find it very difficult to get the job of IT done if I was missing either piece. But on most days, our IT department better serves the end users with her skills than with his.
His ability to solve tough problems and understand complex back-end solutions does not make up for his lack of ability to deliver something others can actually make use of. If he didn't have her (and many others like her) to compliment his skills, we would be very much in trouble.
TW