> What exactly does telling the level zero answering machines what the problem is have to do with corporate management understanding the MAINTENANCE does NOT mean RUN IT 'TILL IT BREAKS.
I'm having trouble parsing that. I'm going to assume the third "the" is supposed to be "that". Ok, now it scans.
Ok NOW, I'm having trouble relating what you wrote to what I wrote.
> You sir are NOT an IT support person.
I, um, sir, have been an IT support person since 1984, the date of my first post to net.news.newsite, until late last year. (How old did you say you were, again?) I have for years made a side living as a photographer, and haven't decided at this point whether I want to continue doing that full time or get back into IT.
But I'm going to assume that this was all a misunderstanding, and I'd like to invite you to make your case using more words.
You are right, for processes that can be described in a small enough number of steps. You definitely don't want to take up the time of a big brain with lots of experience doing the same operation over and over. But I would submit that a modern Enterprise installation is just too big and too varied to expect any practical set of procedures to cover, say, 80% of issues. The fall back in my experience is typically to (a) apply patches, and (b) hope the problem goes away.
I think this is why, when a company decides they've had enough and insource their IT, they leave the helpdesk offshore. Because that really *is* a set of procedures that are easy enough to document. Communication issues are another matter, but that's not germane to this discussion.
I think that's true in some cases, but I've met people who couldn't apply the scientific method to a problem to save their lives. (Form a theory, devise a test, perform test, collect results, revise theory.) There are apparently people who don't understand this at a fundamental level, and even learned as a procedure, are at a loss as to how to apply. System administration is a skill that not everyone has, and one that can't be taught to just anyone. You get outsourced IT on scratchy phone lines who when presented with a problem, call the vendor, who's outsourced tech support advise patching firmware or OS or drivers to latest level, (because that's all they know) which not only does not fix the original issue, but often creates new ones (up to and including bricking the server). That is not problem solving. It's a ghastly parody of same.
Similarly, I have met people who can't dig procedural languages, at all. Otherwise smart people who will never in their career get beyond simple batch files with hard coded arguments.
I'm a photographer, and I sell my work through a web service. They bring together the finishing providers (prints, calendars, t-shirts, etc) and take care of payment, and all I have to do is provide content and manage sales. When I finish post-processing on a new photo, the tool I use (Adobe Lightroom) automatically uploads to the web service in the album I select. I cover events, so there's often a massive number (600 or so) of photos to upload.
Yesterday I was getting sporadic "service not available" messages from the service. After doing some triage to verify the problem was not at my end, I contacted customer support. Mind you, this was 10:30 PM PST. But that's the way it is with photographers -- we often take photos during the day and process them at night, which is somewhat the opposite of a standard use case. (And should be borne in mind when said services schedule maintenance. Just sayin'.)
Browsing the service's forum, I saw others were seeing the same error message, and people were starting to get excited. (This is our livelihood, after all.)
I got an answer to my service ticket in less than 30 minutes, that they were struggling with with network problems with one of their service providers (probably a cloud service). I got a followup shortly after that they thought the service was up now but they were still testing. And I got another followup at 6:30 AM that the problem had been resolved and they had put steps in place to insure it would not happen again. They also implemented a "status page" that we could consult in the future (which should have already existed, but live and learn).
Now, *that's* the way to handle an incident like this. Very commendable. But it does point up the problems a business sometimes has when they rely too much on external services. Just my opinion, but the main difference I can see between in-house and outsourced is one of motivation. If you're providing an online service, your employees realize in their heart of hearts that outages can easily result in business failure and loss of jobs. But if you're renting all the pieces of your service from outside vendors, you soon find that those vendors may be concerned about their contract with you, and the money they make off you, which isn't at the same level in the hierarchy of needs as the live-or-die situation you are in.
True, to a certain point, and also to a certain point, it's true that the more IT goes offshore, the worse this is going to get. Fortunately, it looks like some companies are waking up, and realizing that contrary to what the IT service provider is telling them, IT isn't "just following procedures, which anyone could do".
I don't use optical disks for backup. They're too slow and there's too much data. I use hot swappable hard drives for backup now, and I suspect I'll be using solid state drives for this purpose in the near future. There just isn't anything fast enough or dense enough to be practical. The most recent backup drives are on-site, and the previous backups are offsite.
...and I don't back up to "the cloud", for several reasons I won't go into now.
...but I still use CDs, even today. I have a photography business, and I find that some customers are uncomfortable buying photos off a website (similar to buying things off Amazon, which some people also prefer not to do) and don't want to use Dropbox or other cloud services for delivery. I have a surprising number of customers who want to call me with a list of photos they want, burned to a CD or DVD (depending on quantity) and shipped to their location, despite the extra charge for this service.
I'm trying to wean them off CDs and onto thumb drives (which you can buy in quantity amazingly cheap these days) and maybe, who knows, they'll start buying online in the future.
The point being, it's about comfort zone, and it's bad karma to argue with a customer who's trying to give you money.
90 pixels is (lessee, carry the one...) ten percent of a screen that's 900 pixels tall. (Common screen resolution in laptops.) That's pretty significant.
Ok, hang on, take a breath. For years, probably decades, it's been possible to turn browser headings on and off in most non-M$ browsers. It's as simple as a check box for most heading add-ons (which I never use, but it's still a good example).
So a reasonable solution would be to make it optional to turn all that junk on or off. I'm *not*, repeat *not* suggesting that Mozilla pull a Windows Eight and force-remove valuable and heavily used gui features. But what I have in the back of my mind is to make optional a different way to access those features. There are all these buttons on the mouse -- for power users on smaller (I'm thinking tablet and netbook, not phone) devices. Maybe we should make use of them?
For example, a few months ago I resurrected an older laptop with a solid state drive, max memory, and a new battery, running Linux Mint. It runs like blazes, it's light and easy to carry around, and it has significantly longer battery life than it did as a conventional Winders laptop. The screen doesn't have much real-estate, but that's *usually* ok. The noted exception being, the browser. So yeah, not talking about phones.
> If you leave a website open that is busy and does busy things, how is the browser supposed to know that you did not, in fact, want it to do those things?
Ok, good point, but an answer that occurs to me is "any time that page is not being displayed".
As far as "look", I want to see the non-content part take up less vertical space. It's fine on a 1920X1200 screen, but on smaller screens I have to rock the page up and down to use it effectively. Find a way to offer browser features without taking up space at the top of the frame.
As far as function, I'd like the browser to not consume the entire four cores, please. When I'm doing something else (example, Lightroom) and the response is extremely sluggish, Task Manager will show Firefox consuming most of my memory and nearly pegging all CPUs, reminding me yet again that I forgot to dismiss Firefox before doing, well, pretty much anything else. It's just a browser, for chrissake. Just sitting there it shouldn't take up that much in resources.
I wish him the best of luck. Nokia got the royal shaft during their "partnership" with Microsoft, and it would be really nice to see them succeed again.
You might consider outing him. Surreptitiously film him getting in and out of his luxury car in his work clothes, and upload to youtube. You might even get the local news to run a story. It's happened before.
They didn't say *manned* mission. There exists a possibility of an unmanned probe. It could take its time getting there and back. The people who launched it wouldn't live to see it return, but there would be all kinds of cool data to be had from it while it went. Like Voyager today.
I watched the first run of LiS in glorious black in white. I was, um, pretty young, but remembered loving the first season, and disliking the show more and more as it descended into camp. (Although I didn't know what "camp" meant at the time. I just found the later episodes awkward and frivolous). When the SciFi channel first started, they ran reruns of LiS, Voyage, and Time Tunnel back to back for awhile, and I was able to confirm my earlier impressions.
I used the movie trailer because I thought more of the people here would remember it. We all loved the movie, despite the fact it falls apart about 2/3 of the way through. Incidentally, right at the time when Allen's material ran out, and Akiva Goldsman was on his own.
But the point is, in all incarnations of LiS (including comic book) their destination was the Centauri system.
On a completely unrelated note, how is it that we're just *now* discovering that the nearest star to us save the sun has a possibly habitable planet? Shouldn't we have been checking there, like, first?
I appreciate the part about travel to a city where relatives or friends may help. A bus ticket during a dark period in my life admittedly turned things around for me, and I probably wouldn't be where I am now without it.
That said, you ask who are we to force our own solution on people? Well, not to put too fine a point on it, we are the people with the money to give. We would be irresponsible if we just threw it in the air and hoped for the best.
I can't give details (don't ask) but I'm currently in a position where I give a certain relative money each month for groceries, as she seems (so far) incapable of earning an income, and because of circumstances I won't go into, she doesn't qualify for food stamps.
There was unquestionable evidence that she was using the money for other things, including entertaining friends. Now fine, everyone needs friends, and I don't begrudge her spending money she has *earned* on anything she wants to. But the money I *gave her* was earmarked for a specific purpose to which she agreed, and she broke that trust.
So I stopped doing it for awhile, but when she went into hospital for malnutrition, (true story) I had to rethink that. I talked with her and her advocate, and agreed to resume funds, but only as a weekly gift card for a grocery store, not cash. She provides receipts to her advocate, who acted as oversight.
So yeah, sorry but, if it's my money, I get to say what she uses the money for. If that's forcing my own solution on her, then I can live with that.
On the other hand, if it's *your* money, you can do anything you personally want to do with it, including giving it to bums as cash.
A little bit of research shows that this is true. Google "Mercedes Benz beggar" (in San Diego) and "woman panhandler outed in new york". (This will get you several hits, which seem to be different people.)
I have heard about individual professional homeless people, but haven't seen evidence with my own eyes. What I have seen is, well, interesting. In Portland, Oregon, at particular street corners and offramps, there is always someone there with a cardboard sign, and if that's part of your commute, you learn to recognize faces. And then you realize that there is one face in the morning, and one other face in the afternoon. Two such intersections are 23rd Ave and Vaughn street, and the V just south of Multnomah Street and Wheeler avenue.
Now, if you take your lunch at a certain time and drive by these intersections (approx 11:45 at Wheeler, 1:15 at Vaughn as of November 2015) you'll see a white van pull up, open the side door, and the Afternoon Bum will step out with his cardboard sign and backpack, and the Morning Bum will get into the van.
Having worked in that area for many years, I've seen this happen often. Once I saw a late model black luxury car park in a red zone, and the driver got out of the car, walked over and talked to the Wheeler bum. They got into a heated argument, and the bum finally went back and talked animatedly with someone in the back seat of the car. Eventually he stood out of the way as the front passenger side opened, a new bum with a backpack and a cardboard sign got out, and the previous bum got in the car. The new bum took the previous bum's place on the corner. I would guess that I just saw a bum being fired.
I'm told in Portland that the police are forbidden to interfere with panhandlers if they're not "aggressive" or violent. I'm not a detective, don't even play one on tv, but it looks to me that at least some of the panhandlers here are organized, and if so, I strongly suspect that whomever is on the top of the organization is realizing a comfortable tax-free living.
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> What exactly does telling the level zero answering machines what the problem is have to do with corporate management understanding the MAINTENANCE does NOT mean RUN IT 'TILL IT BREAKS.
I'm having trouble parsing that. I'm going to assume the third "the" is supposed to be "that". Ok, now it scans.
Ok NOW, I'm having trouble relating what you wrote to what I wrote.
> You sir are NOT an IT support person.
I, um, sir, have been an IT support person since 1984, the date of my first post to net.news.newsite, until late last year. (How old did you say you were, again?) I have for years made a side living as a photographer, and haven't decided at this point whether I want to continue doing that full time or get back into IT.
But I'm going to assume that this was all a misunderstanding, and I'd like to invite you to make your case using more words.
You are right, for processes that can be described in a small enough number of steps. You definitely don't want to take up the time of a big brain with lots of experience doing the same operation over and over. But I would submit that a modern Enterprise installation is just too big and too varied to expect any practical set of procedures to cover, say, 80% of issues. The fall back in my experience is typically to (a) apply patches, and (b) hope the problem goes away.
I think this is why, when a company decides they've had enough and insource their IT, they leave the helpdesk offshore. Because that really *is* a set of procedures that are easy enough to document. Communication issues are another matter, but that's not germane to this discussion.
I think that's true in some cases, but I've met people who couldn't apply the scientific method to a problem to save their lives. (Form a theory, devise a test, perform test, collect results, revise theory.) There are apparently people who don't understand this at a fundamental level, and even learned as a procedure, are at a loss as to how to apply. System administration is a skill that not everyone has, and one that can't be taught to just anyone. You get outsourced IT on scratchy phone lines who when presented with a problem, call the vendor, who's outsourced tech support advise patching firmware or OS or drivers to latest level, (because that's all they know) which not only does not fix the original issue, but often creates new ones (up to and including bricking the server). That is not problem solving. It's a ghastly parody of same.
Similarly, I have met people who can't dig procedural languages, at all. Otherwise smart people who will never in their career get beyond simple batch files with hard coded arguments.
Bravo. Let's hope this starts a movement.
I'm a photographer, and I sell my work through a web service. They bring together the finishing providers (prints, calendars, t-shirts, etc) and take care of payment, and all I have to do is provide content and manage sales. When I finish post-processing on a new photo, the tool I use (Adobe Lightroom) automatically uploads to the web service in the album I select. I cover events, so there's often a massive number (600 or so) of photos to upload.
Yesterday I was getting sporadic "service not available" messages from the service. After doing some triage to verify the problem was not at my end, I contacted customer support. Mind you, this was 10:30 PM PST. But that's the way it is with photographers -- we often take photos during the day and process them at night, which is somewhat the opposite of a standard use case. (And should be borne in mind when said services schedule maintenance. Just sayin'.)
Browsing the service's forum, I saw others were seeing the same error message, and people were starting to get excited. (This is our livelihood, after all.)
I got an answer to my service ticket in less than 30 minutes, that they were struggling with with network problems with one of their service providers (probably a cloud service). I got a followup shortly after that they thought the service was up now but they were still testing. And I got another followup at 6:30 AM that the problem had been resolved and they had put steps in place to insure it would not happen again. They also implemented a "status page" that we could consult in the future (which should have already existed, but live and learn).
Now, *that's* the way to handle an incident like this. Very commendable. But it does point up the problems a business sometimes has when they rely too much on external services. Just my opinion, but the main difference I can see between in-house and outsourced is one of motivation. If you're providing an online service, your employees realize in their heart of hearts that outages can easily result in business failure and loss of jobs. But if you're renting all the pieces of your service from outside vendors, you soon find that those vendors may be concerned about their contract with you, and the money they make off you, which isn't at the same level in the hierarchy of needs as the live-or-die situation you are in.
True, to a certain point, and also to a certain point, it's true that the more IT goes offshore, the worse this is going to get. Fortunately, it looks like some companies are waking up, and realizing that contrary to what the IT service provider is telling them, IT isn't "just following procedures, which anyone could do".
The problem with cutting Warner a break is that no lessons were learned.
Too late. I already switched to t-mobile, which still had unlimited plans, and now it's too much trouble to switch back to Verizon. Tough luck.
I don't use optical disks for backup. They're too slow and there's too much data. I use hot swappable hard drives for backup now, and I suspect I'll be using solid state drives for this purpose in the near future. There just isn't anything fast enough or dense enough to be practical. The most recent backup drives are on-site, and the previous backups are offsite.
I'm trying to wean them off CDs and onto thumb drives (which you can buy in quantity amazingly cheap these days) and maybe, who knows, they'll start buying online in the future.
The point being, it's about comfort zone, and it's bad karma to argue with a customer who's trying to give you money.
> "Just sitting there it shouldn't take up that much in resources."
I was trying to remember an old pithy saying, and finally dug it up.
"Make sure your code does nothing gracefully."
I had the adblock plugin installed, but not noscript. Experimenting with that now.
90 pixels is (lessee, carry the one...) ten percent of a screen that's 900 pixels tall. (Common screen resolution in laptops.) That's pretty significant.
Ok, hang on, take a breath. For years, probably decades, it's been possible to turn browser headings on and off in most non-M$ browsers. It's as simple as a check box for most heading add-ons (which I never use, but it's still a good example).
So a reasonable solution would be to make it optional to turn all that junk on or off. I'm *not*, repeat *not* suggesting that Mozilla pull a Windows Eight and force-remove valuable and heavily used gui features. But what I have in the back of my mind is to make optional a different way to access those features. There are all these buttons on the mouse -- for power users on smaller (I'm thinking tablet and netbook, not phone) devices. Maybe we should make use of them?
For example, a few months ago I resurrected an older laptop with a solid state drive, max memory, and a new battery, running Linux Mint. It runs like blazes, it's light and easy to carry around, and it has significantly longer battery life than it did as a conventional Winders laptop. The screen doesn't have much real-estate, but that's *usually* ok. The noted exception being, the browser. So yeah, not talking about phones.
> If you leave a website open that is busy and does busy things, how is the browser supposed to know that you did not, in fact, want it to do those things?
Ok, good point, but an answer that occurs to me is "any time that page is not being displayed".
As far as "look", I want to see the non-content part take up less vertical space. It's fine on a 1920X1200 screen, but on smaller screens I have to rock the page up and down to use it effectively. Find a way to offer browser features without taking up space at the top of the frame.
As far as function, I'd like the browser to not consume the entire four cores, please. When I'm doing something else (example, Lightroom) and the response is extremely sluggish, Task Manager will show Firefox consuming most of my memory and nearly pegging all CPUs, reminding me yet again that I forgot to dismiss Firefox before doing, well, pretty much anything else. It's just a browser, for chrissake. Just sitting there it shouldn't take up that much in resources.
I wish him the best of luck. Nokia got the royal shaft during their "partnership" with Microsoft, and it would be really nice to see them succeed again.
I was being a little facetious, but I genuinely wanted to know. You answered the question handily. Thanks.
You might consider outing him. Surreptitiously film him getting in and out of his luxury car in his work clothes, and upload to youtube. You might even get the local news to run a story. It's happened before.
They didn't say *manned* mission. There exists a possibility of an unmanned probe. It could take its time getting there and back. The people who launched it wouldn't live to see it return, but there would be all kinds of cool data to be had from it while it went. Like Voyager today.
Careful, you're showing your age. :-)
I watched the first run of LiS in glorious black in white. I was, um, pretty young, but remembered loving the first season, and disliking the show more and more as it descended into camp. (Although I didn't know what "camp" meant at the time. I just found the later episodes awkward and frivolous). When the SciFi channel first started, they ran reruns of LiS, Voyage, and Time Tunnel back to back for awhile, and I was able to confirm my earlier impressions.
I used the movie trailer because I thought more of the people here would remember it. We all loved the movie, despite the fact it falls apart about 2/3 of the way through. Incidentally, right at the time when Allen's material ran out, and Akiva Goldsman was on his own.
But the point is, in all incarnations of LiS (including comic book) their destination was the Centauri system.
On a completely unrelated note, how is it that we're just *now* discovering that the nearest star to us save the sun has a possibly habitable planet? Shouldn't we have been checking there, like, first?
I saw that movie.
I appreciate the part about travel to a city where relatives or friends may help. A bus ticket during a dark period in my life admittedly turned things around for me, and I probably wouldn't be where I am now without it.
That said, you ask who are we to force our own solution on people? Well, not to put too fine a point on it, we are the people with the money to give. We would be irresponsible if we just threw it in the air and hoped for the best.
I can't give details (don't ask) but I'm currently in a position where I give a certain relative money each month for groceries, as she seems (so far) incapable of earning an income, and because of circumstances I won't go into, she doesn't qualify for food stamps.
There was unquestionable evidence that she was using the money for other things, including entertaining friends. Now fine, everyone needs friends, and I don't begrudge her spending money she has *earned* on anything she wants to. But the money I *gave her* was earmarked for a specific purpose to which she agreed, and she broke that trust.
So I stopped doing it for awhile, but when she went into hospital for malnutrition, (true story) I had to rethink that. I talked with her and her advocate, and agreed to resume funds, but only as a weekly gift card for a grocery store, not cash. She provides receipts to her advocate, who acted as oversight.
So yeah, sorry but, if it's my money, I get to say what she uses the money for. If that's forcing my own solution on her, then I can live with that.
On the other hand, if it's *your* money, you can do anything you personally want to do with it, including giving it to bums as cash.
A little bit of research shows that this is true. Google "Mercedes Benz beggar" (in San Diego) and "woman panhandler outed in new york". (This will get you several hits, which seem to be different people.)
I have heard about individual professional homeless people, but haven't seen evidence with my own eyes. What I have seen is, well, interesting. In Portland, Oregon, at particular street corners and offramps, there is always someone there with a cardboard sign, and if that's part of your commute, you learn to recognize faces. And then you realize that there is one face in the morning, and one other face in the afternoon. Two such intersections are 23rd Ave and Vaughn street, and the V just south of Multnomah Street and Wheeler avenue.
Now, if you take your lunch at a certain time and drive by these intersections (approx 11:45 at Wheeler, 1:15 at Vaughn as of November 2015) you'll see a white van pull up, open the side door, and the Afternoon Bum will step out with his cardboard sign and backpack, and the Morning Bum will get into the van.
Having worked in that area for many years, I've seen this happen often. Once I saw a late model black luxury car park in a red zone, and the driver got out of the car, walked over and talked to the Wheeler bum. They got into a heated argument, and the bum finally went back and talked animatedly with someone in the back seat of the car. Eventually he stood out of the way as the front passenger side opened, a new bum with a backpack and a cardboard sign got out, and the previous bum got in the car. The new bum took the previous bum's place on the corner. I would guess that I just saw a bum being fired.
I'm told in Portland that the police are forbidden to interfere with panhandlers if they're not "aggressive" or violent. I'm not a detective, don't even play one on tv, but it looks to me that at least some of the panhandlers here are organized, and if so, I strongly suspect that whomever is on the top of the organization is realizing a comfortable tax-free living.