That's the admins job - essentially to save people from themselves.
It's why so many companies lock down the desktop to a varying degree - Windows (to be fair, any desktop OS) has a whole plethora of ways that the innocent can shoot themselves in the foot. One of the aims of locking down the desktop is to reduce this, and hence reduce helpdesk calls.
Regarding the recycling bin - you heard the (probably apocryphal) one about the secretary who used the paper recycling box on her desk as a "pending" tray? Then one day she forgot to empty it before she left for the night....
I've seen someone treat the Windows recycling bin the exact same way. She came unstuck one day when she deleted some very large files, which caused Windows to actually delete some of the stuff in the recycle bin to clear some space. She was completely unaware that Windows would do that, and really got very shirty - "But I've always done that!".
You can write this off as a single example of a clueless user if you like, but the thing is I guarantee that anyone who's worked on a helpdesk for any length of time has similar stories.
I know that. They're not even terribly glorified desktops, usually - just a tower case and a copy of Windows SBS.
That does not mean that Dell has never sold a single one. Indeed, if Dell had never sold a single one I think we can safely assume the product line wouldn't exist.
The server features made a lot of sense if you were selling to businesses that were big enough that they needed a whole lot of extra hardware in the form of servers.
But 90something% of businesses don't fall into that camp, and those that do probably don't want OS X Server. The server aspects are aimed squarely at the small business with a handful of staff, a slightly smaller handful of computers and neither money, time nor inclination to pay someone to set up SBS - but at the same time need something a bit more sophisticated than just the PCs on their desks.
If "cheaper is always better" were universally true, 2001 would have been the Year of the Linux Desktop.
As it stands, AFAICT Apple's product development works something like this:
Release a product. It may not be an entirely new idea - the iPhone wasn't the first smartphone, for instance - and it may be missing features that will lead to raised eyebrows. But overall, it'll be as slick as a very slick thing and while it won't be cheap, if you compare it to top-of-the-range offerings from their competitors, at the very least they're pretty comparable. Quite often the competitors are left looking rather silly - usually because their product is identical specs-wise but nothing like as neatly executed. And costs about the same.
Essentially sit on the product for 2, maybe 3 years. Release occasional incremental updates of the sort which anyone would have expected from the day the product was first released. Towards the end of this period, the product starts to look somewhat outdated and poor value for money - competitors have products with similar specs on paper but a LOT cheaper. What was top of the range 3 years previously has filtered down to the bottom of the PC market, but Apple are still selling it as a top of the range product. I would say the 13" Macbook Pro is at this stage.
Release an update that is such a big upgrade that you're back to step 1.
Wouldn't normally bother replying to an AC, but there's a glimmer of truth in what you're saying.
Thing is, a LOT of people in IT are basically making a living off smoothing off the rough edges around Windows XP. They don't have the depth of experience to build out an entire network. Yet the emergence of Apple as a force to be reckoned with - and the release of Windows 7 (which while it's a long way from being perfect, has substantially fewer rough edges than XP) - means that there's going to be a lot fewer jobs for people like that over the course of the coming years.
Hi, could I speak to Fred Bloggs please? I'm afraid nobody of that name works here He doesn't work for you? No, sir That is Acme Inc, isn't it? Yes, sir Is it possible he's just left the company? No sir, nobody of that name has ever worked for us. Oh. I must have made a mistake. Sorry to have troubled you.
Do the politicos want to cover IT costs for rolling out patches and maintenance for the whole network? If not, I wish them all a happy life. And death in a lithium fire.
All joking aside, if you're in charge of a network of any significant size and you don't have a nice centralised way of rolling out patches, you either need help, you need to be fired or you need to be shot. Possibly all three.
There's still a few classes of hardware which aren't so easy, though they're getting fewer every year.
Still a problem that I know of - in no particular order:
Cheap inkjet printers. Becoming less of an issue, though IIRC Lexmark and Canon can still be a touch awkward. Epson are well supported, but they tend to turn over their range quite quickly which can mean the printers on the shelf today aren't supported in the Linux distribution you installed last week. They can probably be persuaded to work but the USB IDs will be different so it probably won't JFW.
Scanners. Again, becoming less of an issue.
Multifunction devices. Often only some of the functionality is supported.
Wireless cards. Much less of an issue than it was two years ago but many manufacturers have an annoying habit of changing chipset but keeping the model number the same.
This pervades everything in Linux, which is part of the reason why there is still so much fiddling involved in setting up a bunch of desktops and locking them down so no matter how much or little the end user knows, they can't mess it up.
And by can't mess it up, I mean literally cannot mess it up. Not "can mess it up but you can easily fix it by SSH'ing in as root and typing rm -rf ~user/.profile ; rm -rf ~user/.gnome-profile - or they can log in on a text terminal and do the same", cannot mess it up.
You ask about this on any Linux mailing list, I guarantee you'll be asked "why would you want to?" long before you get any helpful replies.
(For anyone about to ask "why would you want to?" - Simple. A desktop that is so locked down it's practically a dumb terminal is one that can't be messed up and is much less likely to result in calls to the helpdesk as a result. "Boot from a server and centralise the entire desktop setup" (the usual recommended solution) doesn't work very well when you've got people all over the place, some on dog-slow connections and others on laptops that may only appear on the company network once in a blue moon.)
You must be pretty incompetent to think windows has no logging facilities.
As are an awful lot of Windows application writers - I can't count the number of times I've seen things fail with not a sausage written to the event log.
If your time isn't worth much then spending all day fiddling with Linux systems to get things working is OK.
So time spent fiddling with a Windows system is somehow magically free?
No, but you quoted the parent out of context:
In my own experience of getting ordinary people to use computers, Linux computers needed a lot more fiddling then Windows machines. I suspect the German government is finding out the same thing.
Emphasis mine.
I can well believe it. It's not that there's anything intrinsically wrong with any of the major desktop environments - or for that matter much of the underlying software - it's just that there's a whole plethora of tiny little things which work slightly differently to Windows - or indeed don't work at all out of the box. The latter is what you encounter around the time you find yourself saying things like "I thought I told you to buy a scanner made by $COMPANY?"
Most of these things are pretty insignificant, but you add up the time taken to deal with every last one of them over the course of a few months and it's death by a thousand cuts.
FWIW, I find the transition from Windows XP to 7 just as bloody awful - it's superficially similar but as soon as you scratch the surface and dig into things like Control Panel, it's totally different. But Microsoft did get one thing right there - a dirty great context-sensitive search bar in the top right of almost everything in the OS itself. Search in Control Panel, it brings up control panel items that you couldn't otherwise find. Search in Explorer, it looks for files.
IPMI is great if you can get by with a serial console, which obviously is trivial enough to setup under Linux (even if most distros don't do it automatically). Or, for that matter, if the only thing you really need to do remotely is power-cycle it because you know it'll come up OK.
When everyone's running a known desktop image, it's hard to justify putting much effort into troubleshooting a desktop PC when you can reimage it in 20-30 minutes.
That rules out Dell's remote access then. It demands a specific browser version and a specific Java version, and won't fire up the console unless both are present. Dell also have a nasty habit of not updating the browser/Java version detection code that often.
Of course, you only discover/remember this a week after you've updated everything to IE 8|FireFox 3.6|(browser of choice) and patched Java to the latest version.
Mind you, what do you expect from the Ryanair of hardware vendors?
There is the issue that rebooting things frequently doesn't solve anything.
It's a hell of a lot slower than just restarting a single application, and if restarting the application does not fix it but a reboot does, there's something wrong with how you're restarting the application.
Others have already raised the issue that it deletes forensic data - quite correct, if your application has a tendency to write a corrupt file to/tmp, read it back later and crash - and your reboot process clears out/tmp - you'll never know.
Finally, Unix admins as a rule tend to try to resolve the underlying problem rather than just reboot and forget about it. That's why we have log files which can be drilled through very quickly with tools like grep rather than an event log which 60%-80% of developers don't appear to even know exists.
Probably not a big deal. Time just isn't that important.
A huge number of things depend on not only accurate time, but an accurate conversion of UTC to (local timezone).
"Depend" as in "Bad things will happen". I don't mean "bad" as in "planes falling out of the sky", but more mundane things like "top executive blows his top because he wasn't alerted of a meeting he was meant to be in until it had just finished... and suddenly that idea to outsource the IT to India because you'd still be getting lousy service but at least you're not paying Western wages starts to sound more appealing" are not at all unreasonable.
True, but haven't you considered the value of being in the same time zone as our government? Forget tourism, prevention of accidents, energy savings and whatever else, because those are just side benefits, and quite tentative ones, too. The real benefit is that at long last we will be sharing Berlin Time with the rest of Europe. Like the French, we can finally enjoy the incalculable benefits of being in a timezone that bears no relationship to the actual hours of daylight.
That would explain how come the last time I was in France, I noted they seemed to operate to slightly later working hours.
You tried hunting down a 1600x1200 LCD lately? Since the manufacturers moved over to using 16:9 aspect ratio panels almost exclusively, it's quite difficult to find anything other than 1920x1080 unless you're prepared to shell out a lot of cash. There are still a handful around but they're getting rarer by the month almost.
Well and good if you want the horizontal resolution, not so good if you want the vertical resolution.
Re:Possible fix for "I didn't know I was BCC'd"
on
The Death of BCC
·
· Score: 1
That is not correct. Users will see in the "to" field the name of the distribution list, which can in outlook / exchange be expanded to show all recipients.
Two issues with that:
1. Not necessarily. You can set permissions up on distribution lists to prevent this, and AIUI cross-forest permissions lists can't be expanded in this way.
2. The World is not necessarily running 100% Microsoft software. And even if it was, you certainly can't get the list of people in a distribution list working in a totally unrelated organisation.
Slashdot Mirror
That's the admins job - essentially to save people from themselves.
It's why so many companies lock down the desktop to a varying degree - Windows (to be fair, any desktop OS) has a whole plethora of ways that the innocent can shoot themselves in the foot. One of the aims of locking down the desktop is to reduce this, and hence reduce helpdesk calls.
Regarding the recycling bin - you heard the (probably apocryphal) one about the secretary who used the paper recycling box on her desk as a "pending" tray? Then one day she forgot to empty it before she left for the night....
I've seen someone treat the Windows recycling bin the exact same way. She came unstuck one day when she deleted some very large files, which caused Windows to actually delete some of the stuff in the recycle bin to clear some space. She was completely unaware that Windows would do that, and really got very shirty - "But I've always done that!".
You can write this off as a single example of a clueless user if you like, but the thing is I guarantee that anyone who's worked on a helpdesk for any length of time has similar stories.
I know that. They're not even terribly glorified desktops, usually - just a tower case and a copy of Windows SBS.
That does not mean that Dell has never sold a single one. Indeed, if Dell had never sold a single one I think we can safely assume the product line wouldn't exist.
The basic servers offered by Dell for businesses of the size being discussed don't have redundant PSUs either. Frequently, they don't have RAID.
I don't think many people were in the first place. If they were, the XServe wouldn't have been discontinued.
The server features made a lot of sense if you were selling to businesses that were big enough that they needed a whole lot of extra hardware in the form of servers.
But 90something% of businesses don't fall into that camp, and those that do probably don't want OS X Server. The server aspects are aimed squarely at the small business with a handful of staff, a slightly smaller handful of computers and neither money, time nor inclination to pay someone to set up SBS - but at the same time need something a bit more sophisticated than just the PCs on their desks.
If "cheaper is always better" were universally true, 2001 would have been the Year of the Linux Desktop.
As it stands, AFAICT Apple's product development works something like this:
Wouldn't normally bother replying to an AC, but there's a glimmer of truth in what you're saying.
Thing is, a LOT of people in IT are basically making a living off smoothing off the rough edges around Windows XP. They don't have the depth of experience to build out an entire network. Yet the emergence of Apple as a force to be reckoned with - and the release of Windows 7 (which while it's a long way from being perfect, has substantially fewer rough edges than XP) - means that there's going to be a lot fewer jobs for people like that over the course of the coming years.
Hi, could I speak to Fred Bloggs please?
I'm afraid nobody of that name works here
He doesn't work for you?
No, sir
That is Acme Inc, isn't it?
Yes, sir
Is it possible he's just left the company?
No sir, nobody of that name has ever worked for us.
Oh. I must have made a mistake. Sorry to have troubled you.
Do the politicos want to cover IT costs for rolling out patches and maintenance for the whole network? If not, I wish them all a happy life. And death in a lithium fire.
All joking aside, if you're in charge of a network of any significant size and you don't have a nice centralised way of rolling out patches, you either need help, you need to be fired or you need to be shot. Possibly all three.
There's still a few classes of hardware which aren't so easy, though they're getting fewer every year.
Still a problem that I know of - in no particular order:
This pervades everything in Linux, which is part of the reason why there is still so much fiddling involved in setting up a bunch of desktops and locking them down so no matter how much or little the end user knows, they can't mess it up.
And by can't mess it up, I mean literally cannot mess it up. Not "can mess it up but you can easily fix it by SSH'ing in as root and typing rm -rf ~user/.profile ; rm -rf ~user/.gnome-profile - or they can log in on a text terminal and do the same", cannot mess it up.
You ask about this on any Linux mailing list, I guarantee you'll be asked "why would you want to?" long before you get any helpful replies.
(For anyone about to ask "why would you want to?" - Simple. A desktop that is so locked down it's practically a dumb terminal is one that can't be messed up and is much less likely to result in calls to the helpdesk as a result. "Boot from a server and centralise the entire desktop setup" (the usual recommended solution) doesn't work very well when you've got people all over the place, some on dog-slow connections and others on laptops that may only appear on the company network once in a blue moon.)
You must be pretty incompetent to think windows has no logging facilities.
As are an awful lot of Windows application writers - I can't count the number of times I've seen things fail with not a sausage written to the event log.
So time spent fiddling with a Windows system is somehow magically free?
No, but you quoted the parent out of context:
In my own experience of getting ordinary people to use computers, Linux computers needed a lot more fiddling then Windows machines. I suspect the German government is finding out the same thing.
Emphasis mine.
I can well believe it. It's not that there's anything intrinsically wrong with any of the major desktop environments - or for that matter much of the underlying software - it's just that there's a whole plethora of tiny little things which work slightly differently to Windows - or indeed don't work at all out of the box. The latter is what you encounter around the time you find yourself saying things like "I thought I told you to buy a scanner made by $COMPANY?"
Most of these things are pretty insignificant, but you add up the time taken to deal with every last one of them over the course of a few months and it's death by a thousand cuts.
FWIW, I find the transition from Windows XP to 7 just as bloody awful - it's superficially similar but as soon as you scratch the surface and dig into things like Control Panel, it's totally different. But Microsoft did get one thing right there - a dirty great context-sensitive search bar in the top right of almost everything in the OS itself. Search in Control Panel, it brings up control panel items that you couldn't otherwise find. Search in Explorer, it looks for files.
If your ISP is preventing 25 outbound, you don't have an ISP.
TBH, I'm not quite sure what you do have. I've met that sort of thing once before, I would describe them as a Web access provider.
IPMI is great if you can get by with a serial console, which obviously is trivial enough to setup under Linux (even if most distros don't do it automatically). Or, for that matter, if the only thing you really need to do remotely is power-cycle it because you know it'll come up OK.
Not, however, terribly useful for Windows Server.
When everyone's running a known desktop image, it's hard to justify putting much effort into troubleshooting a desktop PC when you can reimage it in 20-30 minutes.
man lsof
That rules out Dell's remote access then. It demands a specific browser version and a specific Java version, and won't fire up the console unless both are present. Dell also have a nasty habit of not updating the browser/Java version detection code that often.
Of course, you only discover/remember this a week after you've updated everything to IE 8|FireFox 3.6|(browser of choice) and patched Java to the latest version.
Mind you, what do you expect from the Ryanair of hardware vendors?
There is the issue that rebooting things frequently doesn't solve anything.
It's a hell of a lot slower than just restarting a single application, and if restarting the application does not fix it but a reboot does, there's something wrong with how you're restarting the application.
Others have already raised the issue that it deletes forensic data - quite correct, if your application has a tendency to write a corrupt file to /tmp, read it back later and crash - and your reboot process clears out /tmp - you'll never know.
Finally, Unix admins as a rule tend to try to resolve the underlying problem rather than just reboot and forget about it. That's why we have log files which can be drilled through very quickly with tools like grep rather than an event log which 60%-80% of developers don't appear to even know exists.
If it's a choice between:
- A £20 adaptor on your desk and the cheapest laptop we could find OR
- A £150 docking station and an expensive laptop that supports docking stations
Guess what you'll be getting.
Or you could plug in a USB hard disk, dd if=/dev/sda of=/mnt//disk-image bs=4M.
Probably not a big deal. Time just isn't that important.
A huge number of things depend on not only accurate time, but an accurate conversion of UTC to (local timezone).
"Depend" as in "Bad things will happen". I don't mean "bad" as in "planes falling out of the sky", but more mundane things like "top executive blows his top because he wasn't alerted of a meeting he was meant to be in until it had just finished... and suddenly that idea to outsource the IT to India because you'd still be getting lousy service but at least you're not paying Western wages starts to sound more appealing" are not at all unreasonable.
True, but haven't you considered the value of being in the same time zone as our government? Forget tourism, prevention of accidents, energy savings and whatever else, because those are just side benefits, and quite tentative ones, too. The real benefit is that at long last we will be sharing Berlin Time with the rest of Europe. Like the French, we can finally enjoy the incalculable benefits of being in a timezone that bears no relationship to the actual hours of daylight.
That would explain how come the last time I was in France, I noted they seemed to operate to slightly later working hours.
You tried hunting down a 1600x1200 LCD lately? Since the manufacturers moved over to using 16:9 aspect ratio panels almost exclusively, it's quite difficult to find anything other than 1920x1080 unless you're prepared to shell out a lot of cash. There are still a handful around but they're getting rarer by the month almost.
Well and good if you want the horizontal resolution, not so good if you want the vertical resolution.
That is not correct. Users will see in the "to" field the name of the distribution list, which can in outlook / exchange be expanded to show all recipients.
Two issues with that:
1. Not necessarily. You can set permissions up on distribution lists to prevent this, and AIUI cross-forest permissions lists can't be expanded in this way.
2. The World is not necessarily running 100% Microsoft software. And even if it was, you certainly can't get the list of people in a distribution list working in a totally unrelated organisation.