I don't know, it seems like their Mirrorless cameras are all the rage right now, and I personally have preferred the Playstation to the competitors since sega folded as a hardware concern.
Yes, you're so perceptive you missed most of my points.
I pointed out there are what I consider IT adjacent jobs like Room AV system operator. We have some of those where I work - I don't know the history or long term plan, but they aren't there for every room that has an AV system.
I also think that if you use something every day for work, yet you actually need someone else to use it for you - you're not that great at your job. You totally skipped over my car / driver analogy.
I'm not a cost center - I enable where I work to do things they couldn't otherwise do. None of that has anything to do with running someone's meeting for them. I'll also point out that for some reason in IT, and maybe in other fields - the people people are good at interacting with people. They can make users feel great about having someone sit there and hold their hand, and commiserate with them about their pain. Then there are the less people people who just fix the problem, but the users don't like them.
Hey, if users prefer talking about the problem rather than having it fixed, that's OK with me. I just tell them to talk to the front line people who are good and making the users feel good, and have those people let me know when they want a problem fixed. I think it's partially that people are good at different things.
This article was a troll, that's true. However, your point reads like the reason IT hasn't solved the problem is because they're blaming someone else. It feels like that's like blaming Doctors because people get Cancer.
Then you say "I don't know what you should do, but you should still take responsibility for solving this problem".
I'm not blaming anyone - I'm point to who *might* have the ability to solve the problem, and it isn't IT. It's Management who could insist on buying secure systems and insist on training and standards for the Users security posture. It's Users who could learn how to be more secure. It's developers who could write better and more secure software.
All IT can do is suggest better software, and suggest configurations that are as secure as possible. But we're not the decision makers in many cases.
Am I supposed to just stop doing my job till we "solve this problem" that's ill defined? What do you even mean that moving on is bad? Do you sit there for hours waiting for building care to wax the floor, offering to do the waxing for them? Or do you tell management that waxing the floor is handled by building care, submit a ticket with them, and move on with your life?
I'm not sure what you're suggesting here though? IT isn't developers. We can't custom program everything to be done "right". Heck, we often don't even get to choose the programs.
Other than saying the tech company needs to fix the issue, what are we supposed to be doing?
Yea, you're not actual IT. You're a computer concierge. Which is fine, if that's the job you want, and the people actually want to pay for it. Some do, and get that. Some don't. IT is generally a lot of different things, and our jobs may not all be to do the computing part of someone else's job.
That's the issue. To me, it's the difference between being a mechanic and being someone's driver. They're different things, but many users conflate the two. I'm not their IT assistant. I have projects to do, and actual problems to solve.
Management might pay for employees to be people's IT driver, but then you're basically paying for a lot of unnecessary employees vs hiring people who don't also need a specialist driver.
Even the janitors are not called to operate the toilet for users.
The login screen? That's your complaint? That's the hell you picked to die on?
Ctrl-alt-del, type username, tab, type password. Enter.
Have you ever seen or worked with a user? None of them know any keyboard shortcuts. So they're sitting there wondering how they change the user, or what they click on to log in.
The Start Menu looks different. That's the issue for the users. They have a bitmap in their head of what they click on, if a single pixel changes, they freeze up. I've seen it. I don't get it either, but that's how they work. Like, a shortcut moved on the desktop, and they can't use the computer.
So you think that only cultural encouragement lends people to committing acts of terror? There's no other reason someone might engage in asymmetric warfare? More to the point, did the IRAs culture encourage them to carry out bombings? There have been terrorists at different times, including organized groups, that to my limited knowledge are not muslim, and don't have any "tenets of faith [that] death while killing infidels will bring them paradise".
The US isn't really a melting pot, it's a bunch of groups sort of working together. There are issues - but they're not regularly committing terrorism against other countries either. They're not recruiting people in other countries to come and fight here. They're not even often attacking others inside their communities in the way ISIS / Taliban / etc have.
I'll take the US level of getting along, as low as it is, over the Middle East level of exporting terrorism.
The longer I work, the more "new technologies" seem retarded, or warmed over retreads of bad ideas that didn't work last time. Many "new technologies" seem pointless, or at least solving a problem I've never had. They often seem to make less and less of a case as to what anyone would do with them beyond "they're new!"
That's not to say I think all new technologies are retarded - just less of them per year as I get experience.
So if I'm flying a drone myself up to, say, 400 feet, do I then own up to 400 ft, or would I need permanent overflights or a physical structure to that height to be "using" the airspace?
I always thought you owned up to the floor for airplanes - sounds like I'm wrong.
(Nevertheless, taking "clear images" from 300m away from a shaky drone is pretty tricky; image stabilization is not that good.)
Have you tried any of the ones with a gimbal? I don't know about using a zoom lens, I don't have one, but I have used OOTB DJI Phantom Vision II v3 and it's pretty amazingly stable in the pictures or video. As stable as I can get holding a camera anyway.
I thought about it, then realized it was a pretty stupid idea, at least with current law and even somewhat affordable drones (DJI phantoms).
Then again, it's more curiosity like what's behind their house etc. And probably crosses some line, but I'm not about to set up some sort regular overflights. I mostly fly over my own property, or places where I've gotten permission by the property owner. I also stay below 400ft by settings in the software. I don't want to impinge on any manned aircraft.
Isn't that what EverNote's (and all the evernote compatible clients) are for? Then again, I can't figure out what to do with any of these note-taking programs, so . . . I'm not really in a position to judge.
Honestly, for the little I do, LibreOffice is fine. No one seems to notice that I used it to generate docx or, more frequently xlsx. That said, they're also used to dealing with docs from Mac MS Office, which seems to foobar formating about as often as LibreOffice or other versions of MS Office... so where I work, unless it's a PDF, no one expects it to look the same between computers anyway.
I do have Crossover and Office 2010, which... kind of works well enough, and I'd rather do that rather than a full VM myself. That said, most docs we work on are on our FOSwiki so it doesn't matter what OS you're using.
This is why you need something like the old Freenet, except of course it's almost unworkable for normal users because of the crap that ends up on such a system, and the fact that it is only internal, so not much use for obscuring you connecting to internet sites, oh and it's slow as hell.
I don't know. Internal IT often is not there to be an internal "Geek Squad" but to manage the entire companies technology stack. They are charged to do what's best for the whole company, not what's best for each individual user.
Plenty of people hate accounting and PO processes, but that doesn't mean that most people are thinking of just handing each employee a corporate credit card with a 200k limit and letting them do what they want.
Have you ever worked with outside collaborators? Even where you are allowed to be your own IT, it gets pretty crazy fast - one person insists on Skype, the next Vydio, the next SIP, the next WebEx. Now you have how many different clients installed and trying to keep up to date, not to mention potential licensing or service fees? Now think about document exchange - one group might be Wiki, next EverNote shared notebooks, next OneNote shared notebooks, next Word docs you e-mail around, next PDF, and the last LaTeX.
And what do you as a user, or even as IT do when suddenly the LaTeX people running Ubuntu need to work on a project with the OneNote on Windows 8.1 people? Good luck with actually getting them to do more than maybe mail around PDFs.
This is why internal IT tries to standardize and becomes a 'preventer' - because you can't all use the random software on the random platform you found that you liked today. Not if the Company wants to have work output they can refer back to after you leave, or want you to work with anyone else on a project...
I honestly think this AWS has to be an artifact of our accounting system where OpEx is better than CapEx, and you want to minimize CapEx in IT. Otherwise, I never see how it pans out - if you can't lower headcount, and you can't use less hardware (assuming you didn't massively overbuild every time you do an infrastructure refresh) then logic for me would say adding a profit in there will always make AWS more expensive than owning your own. It sort of has to be?
It seems to me like many people are going P2V as well as to the cloud, and mistaking the benefits of virtualization as benefits of the cloud...
Or... I'm missing something major.
Where I work we have moved lots of things to the cloud. It pretty much always got worse. We couldn't escalate a ticket like you can in house. You can't flexibly set SLAs. You make scads more work for your legal dept doing contracts for the cloud providers - which don't actually help uptime. You make scads more work for your security dept doing vendor analysis in addition to the existing application security checks they still have to do, etc.
The interesting thing for me is we have a compute cluster running OpenGrid Engine (SGE). It seems like one of the best fits for cloud computing at first blush. Much of the time it's idle, so "in the cloud" it costs "0" when not using it. (there's always an OS image storage cost or something so keeping it ready to go isn't truly $0 but closeish)
The problem is data access. We have tens of GB of data and a 30Mbit pipe at best to the cloud. The compute is worthless if they can't access the data, and local 1Gbit has too much latency for network operations - it can cause orders of magnitude slowdowns in waiting for the NFS transactions to occur. For certain data sizes, you can locally RSYNC the data in for processing and then RSYNC out your results. But if it takes 4 days to upload the dataset - even if you could use 10x as many nodes, you're still done sooner on site because the data transfer is 1Gbit instead of 30Mbit at best. And on site you can limit to where the transfer is 10Gbit (some nodes support it).
Latency, difficulty of accessing local environment, accounts, network storage, throughput limits all ON TOP OF constant billing which is usually not any cheaper TCO compared to lower maintenance costs on owned hardware and depreciation.
Heck, even for a simple tiny multi core process, we tried cloud and it went no where. We could get a 16 core machine for $2 / hour. The problem was we either had to pay for the whole month, or there was a variable 10min-1hr startup time before you could then log in to the machine because shutting down the VM didn't stop billing - you had to decommission it, and recommission it each time, which meant waiting for the whole OS to load over the SAN at the cloud vendor.
Our users found it cheaper to buy a 8 core machine than pay for 3 months of the cloud service. And they refused to wait that long each time they wanted to use the software - they'd get distracted and never run the calculation with that lag to starting.
Even e-mail is crappy in O365 for us. We went from broadly supported IMAP standard e-mail, to whatever MS thinks is IMAP, OWA and Outlook. All of which end up worse for most of our users, but especially vexing for the Mac and Linux users.
Do you really get out of support contracts, software licensing, and qualified staff with the Cloud? Because as far as I can tell, if you need Windows licenses, it's an extra fee per cpu hour on the cloud. If you need the Cloud vendor to maintain the OS, it's a massive extra fee per server (well, compared to just running the OS, it's orders of magnitude more expensive). I shudder to think what the fee is to manage the application on top of the cloud stack for you. And all of that is basically a support contract with the vendor.
Unless you're talking SaaS, in which case the per user cost can be eye opening, and you still get that "great support" from the vendor where you wait on hold for someone in India to run you through a script... if you even get a phone number to call. Plus, forget about just staying with a version that works for you for a while with SaaS. You can't choose to go off maintenance and re-buy when you actually need an upgrade and have budgeted for it.
I have no idea what the SaaS to SaaS migration path / idea is either.
I don't know if this is common, but at least some people do get promoted for noticeable raises (maybe because they did have another job offer at the time) at the same place, and so stay for a long time. I list the title changes as different jobs on my resume, and it seems to work for me in getting interviews and job offers if I need to.
That said, as many other people are pointing out, money isn't everything. Or people figure their effective hourly rate. I've turned down jobs that "pay more" because even though the salary is $30k higher, the monthly rent is 2x in that location, you're expected to work 15hrs more per week and the retirement match is 1/5 as much. The salary sounds better but you end up with less money and less time to do stuff outside of work.
So I wouldn't hop just to hop. I'm pretty confident that if I were laid off, I could get another job easily enough except for this one thing, I've worked in the same place for 9 years.
I'd suggest just having an image or deepfreeze or snapshot if a VM, save files somewhere else, and turn off all updates. Run a Firewall and HIPS, and reset to the initial image or system state every day or week or month to clean out any badness...
I mean, if you're only using it occasionally, treat it like a liveOS you boot up for the hour or two you need it, and then turn it off again and discard any changes. Don't allow it direct access to any real datastores and who cares if you get a virus for a couple minutes that you then wipe away?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know, it seems like their Mirrorless cameras are all the rage right now, and I personally have preferred the Playstation to the competitors since sega folded as a hardware concern.
Yes, you're so perceptive you missed most of my points.
I pointed out there are what I consider IT adjacent jobs like Room AV system operator. We have some of those where I work - I don't know the history or long term plan, but they aren't there for every room that has an AV system.
I also think that if you use something every day for work, yet you actually need someone else to use it for you - you're not that great at your job. You totally skipped over my car / driver analogy.
I'm not a cost center - I enable where I work to do things they couldn't otherwise do. None of that has anything to do with running someone's meeting for them. I'll also point out that for some reason in IT, and maybe in other fields - the people people are good at interacting with people. They can make users feel great about having someone sit there and hold their hand, and commiserate with them about their pain. Then there are the less people people who just fix the problem, but the users don't like them.
Hey, if users prefer talking about the problem rather than having it fixed, that's OK with me. I just tell them to talk to the front line people who are good and making the users feel good, and have those people let me know when they want a problem fixed. I think it's partially that people are good at different things.
This article was a troll, that's true. However, your point reads like the reason IT hasn't solved the problem is because they're blaming someone else. It feels like that's like blaming Doctors because people get Cancer.
Then you say "I don't know what you should do, but you should still take responsibility for solving this problem".
I'm not blaming anyone - I'm point to who *might* have the ability to solve the problem, and it isn't IT. It's Management who could insist on buying secure systems and insist on training and standards for the Users security posture. It's Users who could learn how to be more secure. It's developers who could write better and more secure software.
All IT can do is suggest better software, and suggest configurations that are as secure as possible. But we're not the decision makers in many cases.
Am I supposed to just stop doing my job till we "solve this problem" that's ill defined? What do you even mean that moving on is bad? Do you sit there for hours waiting for building care to wax the floor, offering to do the waxing for them? Or do you tell management that waxing the floor is handled by building care, submit a ticket with them, and move on with your life?
I'm testing mooltipass device. Might help.
I'm not sure what you're suggesting here though? IT isn't developers. We can't custom program everything to be done "right". Heck, we often don't even get to choose the programs.
Other than saying the tech company needs to fix the issue, what are we supposed to be doing?
Yea, you're not actual IT. You're a computer concierge. Which is fine, if that's the job you want, and the people actually want to pay for it. Some do, and get that. Some don't. IT is generally a lot of different things, and our jobs may not all be to do the computing part of someone else's job.
That's the issue. To me, it's the difference between being a mechanic and being someone's driver. They're different things, but many users conflate the two. I'm not their IT assistant. I have projects to do, and actual problems to solve.
Management might pay for employees to be people's IT driver, but then you're basically paying for a lot of unnecessary employees vs hiring people who don't also need a specialist driver.
Even the janitors are not called to operate the toilet for users.
The login screen? That's your complaint? That's the hell you picked to die on?
Ctrl-alt-del, type username, tab, type password. Enter.
Have you ever seen or worked with a user? None of them know any keyboard shortcuts. So they're sitting there wondering how they change the user, or what they click on to log in.
The Start Menu looks different. That's the issue for the users. They have a bitmap in their head of what they click on, if a single pixel changes, they freeze up. I've seen it. I don't get it either, but that's how they work. Like, a shortcut moved on the desktop, and they can't use the computer.
So you think that only cultural encouragement lends people to committing acts of terror? There's no other reason someone might engage in asymmetric warfare? More to the point, did the IRAs culture encourage them to carry out bombings? There have been terrorists at different times, including organized groups, that to my limited knowledge are not muslim, and don't have any "tenets of faith [that] death while killing infidels will bring them paradise".
The US isn't really a melting pot, it's a bunch of groups sort of working together. There are issues - but they're not regularly committing terrorism against other countries either. They're not recruiting people in other countries to come and fight here. They're not even often attacking others inside their communities in the way ISIS / Taliban / etc have.
I'll take the US level of getting along, as low as it is, over the Middle East level of exporting terrorism.
The longer I work, the more "new technologies" seem retarded, or warmed over retreads of bad ideas that didn't work last time. Many "new technologies" seem pointless, or at least solving a problem I've never had. They often seem to make less and less of a case as to what anyone would do with them beyond "they're new!"
That's not to say I think all new technologies are retarded - just less of them per year as I get experience.
So if I'm flying a drone myself up to, say, 400 feet, do I then own up to 400 ft, or would I need permanent overflights or a physical structure to that height to be "using" the airspace?
I always thought you owned up to the floor for airplanes - sounds like I'm wrong.
(Nevertheless, taking "clear images" from 300m away from a shaky drone is pretty tricky; image stabilization is not that good.)
Have you tried any of the ones with a gimbal? I don't know about using a zoom lens, I don't have one, but I have used OOTB DJI Phantom Vision II v3 and it's pretty amazingly stable in the pictures or video. As stable as I can get holding a camera anyway.
I thought about it, then realized it was a pretty stupid idea, at least with current law and even somewhat affordable drones (DJI phantoms).
Then again, it's more curiosity like what's behind their house etc. And probably crosses some line, but I'm not about to set up some sort regular overflights. I mostly fly over my own property, or places where I've gotten permission by the property owner. I also stay below 400ft by settings in the software. I don't want to impinge on any manned aircraft.
Isn't that what EverNote's (and all the evernote compatible clients) are for? Then again, I can't figure out what to do with any of these note-taking programs, so . . . I'm not really in a position to judge.
Not my experience. They either take plain text in a webform, a la Slashdot comments, or take PDFs, I've never had anyone ask for a docx file...
Honestly, for the little I do, LibreOffice is fine. No one seems to notice that I used it to generate docx or, more frequently xlsx. That said, they're also used to dealing with docs from Mac MS Office, which seems to foobar formating about as often as LibreOffice or other versions of MS Office... so where I work, unless it's a PDF, no one expects it to look the same between computers anyway.
I do have Crossover and Office 2010, which... kind of works well enough, and I'd rather do that rather than a full VM myself. That said, most docs we work on are on our FOSwiki so it doesn't matter what OS you're using.
This is why you need something like the old Freenet, except of course it's almost unworkable for normal users because of the crap that ends up on such a system, and the fact that it is only internal, so not much use for obscuring you connecting to internet sites, oh and it's slow as hell.
I don't know. Internal IT often is not there to be an internal "Geek Squad" but to manage the entire companies technology stack. They are charged to do what's best for the whole company, not what's best for each individual user.
Plenty of people hate accounting and PO processes, but that doesn't mean that most people are thinking of just handing each employee a corporate credit card with a 200k limit and letting them do what they want.
Have you ever worked with outside collaborators? Even where you are allowed to be your own IT, it gets pretty crazy fast - one person insists on Skype, the next Vydio, the next SIP, the next WebEx. Now you have how many different clients installed and trying to keep up to date, not to mention potential licensing or service fees? Now think about document exchange - one group might be Wiki, next EverNote shared notebooks, next OneNote shared notebooks, next Word docs you e-mail around, next PDF, and the last LaTeX.
And what do you as a user, or even as IT do when suddenly the LaTeX people running Ubuntu need to work on a project with the OneNote on Windows 8.1 people? Good luck with actually getting them to do more than maybe mail around PDFs.
This is why internal IT tries to standardize and becomes a 'preventer' - because you can't all use the random software on the random platform you found that you liked today. Not if the Company wants to have work output they can refer back to after you leave, or want you to work with anyone else on a project...
I honestly think this AWS has to be an artifact of our accounting system where OpEx is better than CapEx, and you want to minimize CapEx in IT. Otherwise, I never see how it pans out - if you can't lower headcount, and you can't use less hardware (assuming you didn't massively overbuild every time you do an infrastructure refresh) then logic for me would say adding a profit in there will always make AWS more expensive than owning your own. It sort of has to be?
It seems to me like many people are going P2V as well as to the cloud, and mistaking the benefits of virtualization as benefits of the cloud...
Or... I'm missing something major.
Where I work we have moved lots of things to the cloud. It pretty much always got worse. We couldn't escalate a ticket like you can in house. You can't flexibly set SLAs. You make scads more work for your legal dept doing contracts for the cloud providers - which don't actually help uptime. You make scads more work for your security dept doing vendor analysis in addition to the existing application security checks they still have to do, etc.
See, because I'm a geek and the closest I've ever gotten to that is watching Top Gear - I thought it was called "subaruing"...
This is why I just pre-download everything bulk transfer...
The interesting thing for me is we have a compute cluster running OpenGrid Engine (SGE). It seems like one of the best fits for cloud computing at first blush. Much of the time it's idle, so "in the cloud" it costs "0" when not using it. (there's always an OS image storage cost or something so keeping it ready to go isn't truly $0 but closeish)
The problem is data access. We have tens of GB of data and a 30Mbit pipe at best to the cloud. The compute is worthless if they can't access the data, and local 1Gbit has too much latency for network operations - it can cause orders of magnitude slowdowns in waiting for the NFS transactions to occur. For certain data sizes, you can locally RSYNC the data in for processing and then RSYNC out your results. But if it takes 4 days to upload the dataset - even if you could use 10x as many nodes, you're still done sooner on site because the data transfer is 1Gbit instead of 30Mbit at best. And on site you can limit to where the transfer is 10Gbit (some nodes support it).
Latency, difficulty of accessing local environment, accounts, network storage, throughput limits all ON TOP OF constant billing which is usually not any cheaper TCO compared to lower maintenance costs on owned hardware and depreciation.
Heck, even for a simple tiny multi core process, we tried cloud and it went no where. We could get a 16 core machine for $2 / hour. The problem was we either had to pay for the whole month, or there was a variable 10min-1hr startup time before you could then log in to the machine because shutting down the VM didn't stop billing - you had to decommission it, and recommission it each time, which meant waiting for the whole OS to load over the SAN at the cloud vendor.
Our users found it cheaper to buy a 8 core machine than pay for 3 months of the cloud service. And they refused to wait that long each time they wanted to use the software - they'd get distracted and never run the calculation with that lag to starting.
Even e-mail is crappy in O365 for us. We went from broadly supported IMAP standard e-mail, to whatever MS thinks is IMAP, OWA and Outlook. All of which end up worse for most of our users, but especially vexing for the Mac and Linux users.
Do you really get out of support contracts, software licensing, and qualified staff with the Cloud? Because as far as I can tell, if you need Windows licenses, it's an extra fee per cpu hour on the cloud. If you need the Cloud vendor to maintain the OS, it's a massive extra fee per server (well, compared to just running the OS, it's orders of magnitude more expensive). I shudder to think what the fee is to manage the application on top of the cloud stack for you. And all of that is basically a support contract with the vendor.
Unless you're talking SaaS, in which case the per user cost can be eye opening, and you still get that "great support" from the vendor where you wait on hold for someone in India to run you through a script... if you even get a phone number to call. Plus, forget about just staying with a version that works for you for a while with SaaS. You can't choose to go off maintenance and re-buy when you actually need an upgrade and have budgeted for it.
I have no idea what the SaaS to SaaS migration path / idea is either.
I don't know if this is common, but at least some people do get promoted for noticeable raises (maybe because they did have another job offer at the time) at the same place, and so stay for a long time. I list the title changes as different jobs on my resume, and it seems to work for me in getting interviews and job offers if I need to.
That said, as many other people are pointing out, money isn't everything. Or people figure their effective hourly rate. I've turned down jobs that "pay more" because even though the salary is $30k higher, the monthly rent is 2x in that location, you're expected to work 15hrs more per week and the retirement match is 1/5 as much. The salary sounds better but you end up with less money and less time to do stuff outside of work.
So I wouldn't hop just to hop. I'm pretty confident that if I were laid off, I could get another job easily enough except for this one thing, I've worked in the same place for 9 years.
I'd suggest just having an image or deepfreeze or snapshot if a VM, save files somewhere else, and turn off all updates. Run a Firewall and HIPS, and reset to the initial image or system state every day or week or month to clean out any badness...
I mean, if you're only using it occasionally, treat it like a liveOS you boot up for the hour or two you need it, and then turn it off again and discard any changes. Don't allow it direct access to any real datastores and who cares if you get a virus for a couple minutes that you then wipe away?