OK, this is stating the obvious, but there might be less e-waste if (a) the stuff was more durable, and (b) fewer companies ran on a forced obsolescence business plan. Just sayin'.
We are past the days where every device had a different, proprietary charger. A few well-made charging solutions save money in the long run over a big box of junk.
The last time I had to get rid of a fridge, it was a nightmare. It may depend on where you live, but recycling centers won't take them, many the appliance stores won't remove the old one when you buy a new one, and you can't take it to the dump. When we shopped for a new fridge, our show-stopping criteria is whether they'd take away the old one. Which reduced one's choices considerably.
The most expensive, wasteful, credibility damaging, productivity reducing, and sheer chaos producing IT management mistake in my experience was the decision by a certain freight company to outsource IT. The two-letter outsourcing company, who will remain nameless, in sales presentations (which I attended) painted a rosy picture of a "right shore" solution with capable vendor-trained personnel in several call centers across the world, so that no matter what the local time, the call center would be on local daytime, which would help them draw the best talent for the job, etc etc. They were offering best-in-class for a fraction of the cost of in-house IT.
Upper management, who honestly thought that the entire job of IT was to push a button whenever a light came on, bought it hook line and cancellation penalty. As is often the case, they shook their collective fingers at us and told us "you'd better document your job thoroughly before you leave". Devops, my department, maintained a fairly extensive knowledge base, so it was only a matter of printing out all of our written procedures and handing them over (with two hands, because it was a lot of paper)to management of the outsourcing vendor. And, they lost them. So we printed them out again and handed them over. And they lost the second batch too. I'm convinced that they never intended to keep them. (More on that below.)
Our last day was Friday, which was also the cutover day. I had transferred to a department that was being retained, so got to stick around and see the carnage. It was fascinating in exactly the same way a high speed head-on collision between two passenger trains is fascinating. You're retching, but you can't look away.
This was back when Blackberry was still a thing, and all the execs carried one. BES went down Saturday and remained down for two weeks. This was the sign to upper management that things were perhaps not going as swimmingly as advertised.
The helpdesk was a shambles. You couldn't understand them, they didn't know what to do or whom to contact, and major incidents would just disappear in the system and never get addressed. Employees would come to those of us who survived the layoff and BEG us not to make them call the helpdesk.
The outsourcing vendor shook their fingers at us and said that those damned former employees had not documented their jobs well enough. I had a (third) copy of our procedures, and the names of the managers I'd handed them to both other times, and argued that we had in fact made a good faith effort, just ask these people. Only to find out that those managers no longer worked for the company. Curious.
The vendor said they could recover from our former IT employees' incompetence, but it'd Cost More Money. And that was the other shoe dropping.
Some former IT personnel were rebadged, so occasionally stuff still got done. They worked long hours in very stressful situations. Most of them moved on as soon as the economy started to improve.
Promises of a "right shore" solution were absolute fabrications. The entirety of IT, except for those few overworked rebadged employees, was a single call center in lower central India, manned by people apparently plucked off the street, sitting at card tables with IP phones.
The company tried to improve response by sending a number of people over to India to train the personnel there, but ran into an interesting phenomena -- as soon as employees of the outsource service got training, they WENT ON TO BETTER PAYING JOBS. This training effort served to flush out the people with any experience, causing an influx of new people who couldn't find an "enter" key with a gun to their head.
A major plumb for people who got a little experience was getting off night shift, which was our day shift. So as soon as we'd built a relationship with an admin and taught him to do valuable things, he'd brag about how he's finally getting off night shift, and we'd never hear from him again.
As others have said, these works have not kept themselves relevant. So the current situation may be on them. On the other hand, the last three companies I worked for (since shortly after the beginning of this century) had no training budget and no mechanism for employees to "sharpen the saw", except on their own dime. When the company needed a certain expertise, the philosophy was "buy, not build", which meant hiring someone with that expertise rather than retraining existing personnel. In such an environment, it's difficult to get training in any product where training has significant cost, and it's nearly impossible to get certifications. (I actually had one IT director tell me that he doesn't pay for certifications, because why would he pay money to fill out an employee's resume for their next job?)
During boom.dot.bust, it was relatively easy to get training, as every tech company had money to throw around. But training received then is probably not very relevant now.
As always, your mileage may vary. Some people sink a significant part of their disposable income back into training costs, and manage to stay relevant on their own. (Companies really like this scenario.) But this doesn't work for everyone.
Moreover, it's easier to get low cost or free training in open systems software products. But that's not always true either.
The most bizarre situation I was in, two jobs ago, was being responsible for a large, complicated, expensive application, the very expensive license for which, also included free passes to all the admins for their otherwise very expensive training. The catch 22 was that the company had no training *travel* budget, so even though I could get training for free, the company wouldn't send me to the training centers or put me up when I got there. No problem, the nearest center is a little over 200 miles, and I can stay with a local friend there.
But no, that's not allowed either. Because, (as it was explained to me) if you're traveling for training purposes, the company incurs liability if you go there in your own vehicle.
So, every year when the contract was renewed, the vendor granted fairly expensive training to us for free, and we were never allowed to use it.
So, we tried to stay up on the product, but it was a struggle. A needless struggle.
Wishful thinking on my part. No personal interest in sports whatsoever, and I have a wife who, when there's any game on that features a prolate sphereoid, will only leave the couch if there's a sports bar where she can watch the game over my shoulder.
No interest plus or minus in the protests, except for an admittedly unbalanced hope that it destroys the industry. But that's just me.
...that what they were offered to watch for free was not what they wanted to watch? That they found new titles that interested them with the free offering but not the titles they had previously been downloading? That, in summary, the objective was not "free tv", (most of us can get that with an antenna) or even "free tv on demand", but to watch a certain collection of titles that either (a) weren't conveniently available, or (b) somewhat available, but across several pay TV services?
Guess you have never been in a hospital room when a "code blue" is called. It's sort of busy and someone is sent to check the DNR status only when enough people are already working to save a life. And, yes, some heartbreaking "saves" are made in this situation.
Correct. And as someone who has been the recipient of that care, (bad motorcycle accident a few years ago) I am grateful that they didn't let me bleed out from a ruptured spleen while they checked some theoretical DNR status.
"I associate with relatively hardcore motorcycle crowds,"
Lookout, we got a badass mofo here!
Shooo-wheee.
No, we really don't.
I do not claim to be in any way a badass mofo. I'm a sometimes-hanger-on, a bit player, a viewer from the distance, what in "bad mofo" language might be called a "lone wolf", but I'm even uncomfortable with that. There's quite a few patches on my jacket, but none of them are skulls, and I don't belong to a club. But there are occasional gatherings where I bump [1] into the archetype.
When I received ERT training in Oregon, we were told explicitly to *not* honor DNR tattoos, as a tattoo was not considered a legal DNR order in this state. As always your mileage may vary.
I associate with relatively hardcore motorcycle crowds, and DNR tattoos are...if not common, at least not unknown. But I wonder how many of them are misguided bravado? (I'm guessing, many.) According to my own training (admittedly a few years ago), the tattoo would not be honored in my state. But ride into a different state and then spill your bike, and EMTs might just let you pass. Wouldn't that be a stupid way to die.
What really pisses me off with Windows 10 is its self importance. I play a full screen game and suddenly the game disappears and Windows informs me that I have to choose a time for a restart because some update was installed in the background. I generally hate applications that steal the focus, but this shit goes even beyond that.
Not only that, but don't you notice your game lagging while the update is being downloaded, a process over which you have little control?
Yes, and that includes over reactions by ignorant and paranoid S.O.B.s like them.
Every city I've been in since wifi became common there are several networks named "FBI surveillance van". It's a childish joke, and nobody has ever been arrested for impersonating a federal officer because of it. And before anyone says the obvious joke, no, they are not the FBI either. (Out of curiosity as to who set up some of those I've tracked them down, most are university students.)
This is true. But seeing "FBI surveillance van", (I've seen similar things myself in wifi scans) which poses no immediate threat, is different from being on a plane and seeing a SID that says "bomb on board". Planes are small, fragile, enclosed spaces that take significant time to get safely back on the ground. These things must be taken seriously. The cost of not taking them seriously is too high.
A better example might be the sid "ImGoingToShootMyNeighbor". If I saw that pop up in my neighborhood, I'd notify the authorities. Sure, it might be a joke, but it might not be. And different from "FBI surveillance van", the phrase makes a direct threat, just as "bomb on board" makes a direct threat.
why would you want to criminalize someone for naming an access point?
Not just for naming an access point. For naming an access point "bomb on board". For the same reason that you can say pretty much anything you want in the TSA line, as long as it's not a variation of "I'm going to blow up this plane". Of course, this wouldn't stop at least some people from saying "He was just talking. Is talking criminalized now?"
Not everyone who tolerates Windows 10 is a corporate shill. For one thing, for anyone who has suffered through Windows 8.X, Windows 10 seems comparatively like the sound of angels, the taste of an expertly made macchiato and the feeling of deep carpeting beneath your feet. That's not shilling, that's just a tremendous feeling of relief.
Moreover, there's still some of us who's essential apps still run on Windows, and won't run well under Wine, at least not yet, and running individual apps in Virtualbox (a) is clumsy, and (b) doesn't actually achieve the goal of getting rid of Windows.
So praising M$ for Windows 10, which is actually solid and reliable and not too obnoxious to use like XP used to be, can be said by someone who doesn't have SJ branded on their forehead. Really.
I'd leave M$ on the desktop in a heartbeat if my apps would work elsewhere in a reasonable fashion, and the laptop I take into the field runs Mint, but I nevertheless agree with you, especially about getting the heck rid of Balmer. And I have to admit other than persistently nagging me to use Cortana and Edge, (which I now understand can be turned off) Windows 10 isn't all that bad. Microsoft is (at least at the moment) acting like a company that realize that a balance must be maintained between the annoyance of using Windows and the cost of switching to something else. If that's the outcome of Nadella's leadership, good on him.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, this is stating the obvious, but there might be less e-waste if (a) the stuff was more durable, and (b) fewer companies ran on a forced obsolescence business plan. Just sayin'.
We are past the days where every device had a different, proprietary charger. A few well-made charging solutions save money in the long run over a big box of junk.
The last time I had to get rid of a fridge, it was a nightmare. It may depend on where you live, but recycling centers won't take them, many the appliance stores won't remove the old one when you buy a new one, and you can't take it to the dump. When we shopped for a new fridge, our show-stopping criteria is whether they'd take away the old one. Which reduced one's choices considerably.
I think "sea gull manager" is my new favorite term.
The most expensive, wasteful, credibility damaging, productivity reducing, and sheer chaos producing IT management mistake in my experience was the decision by a certain freight company to outsource IT. The two-letter outsourcing company, who will remain nameless, in sales presentations (which I attended) painted a rosy picture of a "right shore" solution with capable vendor-trained personnel in several call centers across the world, so that no matter what the local time, the call center would be on local daytime, which would help them draw the best talent for the job, etc etc. They were offering best-in-class for a fraction of the cost of in-house IT.
Upper management, who honestly thought that the entire job of IT was to push a button whenever a light came on, bought it hook line and cancellation penalty. As is often the case, they shook their collective fingers at us and told us "you'd better document your job thoroughly before you leave". Devops, my department, maintained a fairly extensive knowledge base, so it was only a matter of printing out all of our written procedures and handing them over (with two hands, because it was a lot of paper)to management of the outsourcing vendor. And, they lost them. So we printed them out again and handed them over. And they lost the second batch too. I'm convinced that they never intended to keep them. (More on that below.)
Our last day was Friday, which was also the cutover day. I had transferred to a department that was being retained, so got to stick around and see the carnage. It was fascinating in exactly the same way a high speed head-on collision between two passenger trains is fascinating. You're retching, but you can't look away.
This was back when Blackberry was still a thing, and all the execs carried one. BES went down Saturday and remained down for two weeks. This was the sign to upper management that things were perhaps not going as swimmingly as advertised.
The helpdesk was a shambles. You couldn't understand them, they didn't know what to do or whom to contact, and major incidents would just disappear in the system and never get addressed. Employees would come to those of us who survived the layoff and BEG us not to make them call the helpdesk.
The outsourcing vendor shook their fingers at us and said that those damned former employees had not documented their jobs well enough. I had a (third) copy of our procedures, and the names of the managers I'd handed them to both other times, and argued that we had in fact made a good faith effort, just ask these people. Only to find out that those managers no longer worked for the company. Curious.
The vendor said they could recover from our former IT employees' incompetence, but it'd Cost More Money. And that was the other shoe dropping.
Some former IT personnel were rebadged, so occasionally stuff still got done. They worked long hours in very stressful situations. Most of them moved on as soon as the economy started to improve.
Promises of a "right shore" solution were absolute fabrications. The entirety of IT, except for those few overworked rebadged employees, was a single call center in lower central India, manned by people apparently plucked off the street, sitting at card tables with IP phones.
The company tried to improve response by sending a number of people over to India to train the personnel there, but ran into an interesting phenomena -- as soon as employees of the outsource service got training, they WENT ON TO BETTER PAYING JOBS. This training effort served to flush out the people with any experience, causing an influx of new people who couldn't find an "enter" key with a gun to their head.
A major plumb for people who got a little experience was getting off night shift, which was our day shift. So as soon as we'd built a relationship with an admin and taught him to do valuable things, he'd brag about how he's finally getting off night shift, and we'd never hear from him again.
Speaking of which, I don't think th
As others have said, these works have not kept themselves relevant. So the current situation may be on them. On the other hand, the last three companies I worked for (since shortly after the beginning of this century) had no training budget and no mechanism for employees to "sharpen the saw", except on their own dime. When the company needed a certain expertise, the philosophy was "buy, not build", which meant hiring someone with that expertise rather than retraining existing personnel. In such an environment, it's difficult to get training in any product where training has significant cost, and it's nearly impossible to get certifications. (I actually had one IT director tell me that he doesn't pay for certifications, because why would he pay money to fill out an employee's resume for their next job?)
During boom.dot.bust, it was relatively easy to get training, as every tech company had money to throw around. But training received then is probably not very relevant now.
As always, your mileage may vary. Some people sink a significant part of their disposable income back into training costs, and manage to stay relevant on their own. (Companies really like this scenario.) But this doesn't work for everyone.
Moreover, it's easier to get low cost or free training in open systems software products. But that's not always true either.
The most bizarre situation I was in, two jobs ago, was being responsible for a large, complicated, expensive application, the very expensive license for which, also included free passes to all the admins for their otherwise very expensive training. The catch 22 was that the company had no training *travel* budget, so even though I could get training for free, the company wouldn't send me to the training centers or put me up when I got there. No problem, the nearest center is a little over 200 miles, and I can stay with a local friend there.
But no, that's not allowed either. Because, (as it was explained to me) if you're traveling for training purposes, the company incurs liability if you go there in your own vehicle.
So, every year when the contract was renewed, the vendor granted fairly expensive training to us for free, and we were never allowed to use it.
So, we tried to stay up on the product, but it was a struggle. A needless struggle.
HP pre-installs a keylogger so I don't have to click on pr0n popups to get one installed. Just another customer service from HP. Yay.
News at 11.
Wishful thinking on my part. No personal interest in sports whatsoever, and I have a wife who, when there's any game on that features a prolate sphereoid, will only leave the couch if there's a sports bar where she can watch the game over my shoulder.
No interest plus or minus in the protests, except for an admittedly unbalanced hope that it destroys the industry. But that's just me.
Wouldn't bitcoin be driving faster, lower power computing? Doesn't that help everyone, including, maybe, climate modeling?
And why do electric cars get a pass?
People still watch NFL games?
If they are not resuscitated why would they care? (Not meant to be funny by the way)
Their family might.
Guess you have never been in a hospital room when a "code blue" is called. It's sort of busy and someone is sent to check the DNR status only when enough people are already working to save a life. And, yes, some heartbreaking "saves" are made in this situation.
Correct. And as someone who has been the recipient of that care, (bad motorcycle accident a few years ago) I am grateful that they didn't let me bleed out from a ruptured spleen while they checked some theoretical DNR status.
"I associate with relatively hardcore motorcycle crowds,"
Lookout, we got a badass mofo here!
Shooo-wheee.
No, we really don't.
I do not claim to be in any way a badass mofo. I'm a sometimes-hanger-on, a bit player, a viewer from the distance, what in "bad mofo" language might be called a "lone wolf", but I'm even uncomfortable with that. There's quite a few patches on my jacket, but none of them are skulls, and I don't belong to a club. But there are occasional gatherings where I bump [1] into the archetype.
[1] Not literally, of course.
"Why the hell would anyone tattoo themselves with something they don't want?"
Like I said, bravado.
When I received ERT training in Oregon, we were told explicitly to *not* honor DNR tattoos, as a tattoo was not considered a legal DNR order in this state. As always your mileage may vary.
I associate with relatively hardcore motorcycle crowds, and DNR tattoos are ...if not common, at least not unknown. But I wonder how many of them are misguided bravado? (I'm guessing, many.) According to my own training (admittedly a few years ago), the tattoo would not be honored in my state. But ride into a different state and then spill your bike, and EMTs might just let you pass. Wouldn't that be a stupid way to die.
I'll do it. I've got like 1000 hours in Falcon 4.0.
Where's the switch for the AMRAAMs?
What really pisses me off with Windows 10 is its self importance. I play a full screen game and suddenly the game disappears and Windows informs me that I have to choose a time for a restart because some update was installed in the background. I generally hate applications that steal the focus, but this shit goes even beyond that.
Not only that, but don't you notice your game lagging while the update is being downloaded, a process over which you have little control?
If you're using Edge, this is good news.
But, why are you using Edge?
Yes, and that includes over reactions by ignorant and paranoid S.O.B.s like them.
Every city I've been in since wifi became common there are several networks named "FBI surveillance van". It's a childish joke, and nobody has ever been arrested for impersonating a federal officer because of it. And before anyone says the obvious joke, no, they are not the FBI either. (Out of curiosity as to who set up some of those I've tracked them down, most are university students.)
This is true. But seeing "FBI surveillance van", (I've seen similar things myself in wifi scans) which poses no immediate threat, is different from being on a plane and seeing a SID that says "bomb on board". Planes are small, fragile, enclosed spaces that take significant time to get safely back on the ground. These things must be taken seriously. The cost of not taking them seriously is too high.
A better example might be the sid "ImGoingToShootMyNeighbor". If I saw that pop up in my neighborhood, I'd notify the authorities. Sure, it might be a joke, but it might not be. And different from "FBI surveillance van", the phrase makes a direct threat, just as "bomb on board" makes a direct threat.
why would you want to criminalize someone for naming an access point?
Not just for naming an access point. For naming an access point "bomb on board". For the same reason that you can say pretty much anything you want in the TSA line, as long as it's not a variation of "I'm going to blow up this plane". Of course, this wouldn't stop at least some people from saying "He was just talking. Is talking criminalized now?"
Not everyone who tolerates Windows 10 is a corporate shill. For one thing, for anyone who has suffered through Windows 8.X, Windows 10 seems comparatively like the sound of angels, the taste of an expertly made macchiato and the feeling of deep carpeting beneath your feet. That's not shilling, that's just a tremendous feeling of relief.
Moreover, there's still some of us who's essential apps still run on Windows, and won't run well under Wine, at least not yet, and running individual apps in Virtualbox (a) is clumsy, and (b) doesn't actually achieve the goal of getting rid of Windows.
So praising M$ for Windows 10, which is actually solid and reliable and not too obnoxious to use like XP used to be, can be said by someone who doesn't have SJ branded on their forehead. Really.
I'd leave M$ on the desktop in a heartbeat if my apps would work elsewhere in a reasonable fashion, and the laptop I take into the field runs Mint, but I nevertheless agree with you, especially about getting the heck rid of Balmer. And I have to admit other than persistently nagging me to use Cortana and Edge, (which I now understand can be turned off) Windows 10 isn't all that bad. Microsoft is (at least at the moment) acting like a company that realize that a balance must be maintained between the annoyance of using Windows and the cost of switching to something else. If that's the outcome of Nadella's leadership, good on him.
So you're saying it's not "disruptive" enough?
I'm pretty sure that's not what "disruptive" was supposed to mean.
Exactly. It's not a Bold New Thing unless it makes you re-learn how to get your work done.