Whilst I agree with you that it should Just Work, without faffing around setting up WINS/DHCP/DNS servers, I can attest to the fact that my workgroup Windows network speeded up and actually started Just Working as soon as I added a Linux box onto it running WINS (a WIndows Server box would do just as well, but if you have that, go Domain).
The situation is better now than it used to be - when I held LAN parties in the late 90s, at least 2 hours would be spent each time yelling "My computer can see yours, can you see me?" and "Which protocols do we need enabled again?". I also remember the DOS days, where we had boot disks to run NetBIOS and IPX/SPX. I don't miss THOSE days at all.
People here have missed an important point: IE7 finally supports such basic CSS properties as position: fixed, min/max-width and fixes a few of the more annoying bugs; it also now supports PNG alpha transparency.
Once IE7 becomes widely adopted, we can finally start USING some of these features without worrying about them not being compatible with IE. We need to encourage people to upgrade, and if they won't upgrade to Firefox or Opera, then at least they can upgrade to IE7 and give us an easier time developing web pages.
What you forgot to mention is that you're in for a world of hurt when users start saying things like "but in the old system I used to do it like THIS and now it won't?? What do you mean, I can't open the tables anymore? But I'm used to scrolling through all the data, I don't like using forms!". I don't envy anyone jobs like this.
We run all our staff accounts as limited users at work. We have two pieces of software that don't like running under regular accounts, and in both cases the solution is to give users modify access on that app's folder in %program files%. Also, I'm puzzled by WMP 10 not working - works fine for our staff, and my girlfriend's account on my PC, and the guest account I set up for a friend once.
The main culprit is almost always always programs trying to store data in their installation folder rather than the user's appdata directory.
Most of those can be controlled by Group Policy if you have it - in our place, I've locked it down so it only uses the classic shell and has only the very basic features required for playing media, and all the updates and license-checking are disabled.
This sounds so much like my boss. I've had similar emails when his browser was slow loading CSS ("WHO GAVE YOU PERMISSION TO CHANGE THE WEBSITE TO THIS AMATEURISH DESIGN?!?!?!!!!! I AM THE ONLY ONE WHO MAKES THESE DECISIONS!!!!!") and showed him an unstyled page for a few seconds.
Removing the exclamation-mark key from executive keyboards would halve employee stress at a stroke...
We had a contractor like that in my place when I originally joined. Despite a history of incompetance, he was retained until, asked to deliver a web app for $bigretailchain he refused to show me any code until the week before the project deadline, when he downloaded a beta of VS2005 and mashed up a complete pile of shite in a weekend. He was shown the door, and I now have a good in-house team who understand the company's requirements and produce results. We've been skittish of contractors ever since.
Why is everyone suddenly so keen to get Office 2007? Are there glaring bugs in 2003 that you want fixed? Wasn't the previous prevailing wisdom that IT managers hated frequent, pointless updates?
If it ain't broke, don't fix it; Office 2003 is good software and works well, so I'd rather wait until the upgrade is really worth it.
If it wasn't for Lucas' lazy writing, we wouldn't HAVE to be explaining this! You shouldn't have to force yourself into mental convolutions to explain the continuity. Why have R2 and 3PO in the prequels? No reason except to cover up for the dearth of interesting new characters. By simply not including them, we'd never have had to have this debate, and the prequels would have suffered not at all.
It's called a Public Folder - it's share-able, and can accept any type of Outlook items. Where people are hopping from one PC to another constantly, how do you propose we store their mails? POP3 requires that they re-download their mails every time, the alternatives (IMAP and webmail) require - wait for it - that you store the mails on a central server. You can export data from Outlook into CSV, XML, SQL or Excel files amongst others - what else would you like to do with it? Personally I like not carting a multi-GB mailbox folder around with me all the time.
Alternatively, ban all personal use of email services and let people sort their own GMail accounts out.
We started off with ridiculously high limits (10 GB), and we've been creeping them down since then (they're now down to 1 GB). We're on Small Business Server though, which limits storage to 16 GB. We've also got mailbox management policies to clean down deleted items and very large, old sent items.
Outlook 2003 does indeed have spam filtering capabilities, which (in my highly subjective experience) are around as good as Thunderbird's (possibly Thunderbird pips it slightly but I've got no figures to back that up).
It's actually interesting to compare Newspeak with l33tspeak; apart from sharing the -speak suffix, and a tendency to blend words together ('doubleplus', 'ungood', etc), they are about as different as it's possible to be. The purpose of Newspeak was to reduce vocabulary, removing un-desirable word-concepts and all shades of meaning, making it theoretically impossible for a native Newspeaker to voice (and, hopefully, think) un-desirable thoughts.
L33tspeak, on the other hand, is an anarchic, ad-hoc dialect, developing at random on the whims and trends of its practitioners. It is not controlled, and can express anything that a speaker wishes it to express, assuming they can make this meaning known to their audience. One might venture to say that it is the antithesis of Newspeak.
Everyone remembers the surveillance and Thought Police from Nineteen Eighty-Four, but fewer people remember the real message of the book, which concerned power, and the ability of the ruling Party to remain in power perpetually:
"There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always--do not forget this, Winston--always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face--for ever."
In a spirit of nit-picking, I'd like to point out that Orwell wrote about newspeak and doublethink. Newspeak was projected to become the defacto replacement for Oldspeak (English) by 2050.
Yeah, you'll still have to ring them and re-activate (after >3 hardware changes, I think). The only versions un-afflicted by product activation are the corporate volume-licensed versions, or copies used under relevant MSDN licenses. So unless you're a business or a developer, you'll have to re-active.
The thing is, most people just don't upgrade, except by the 'buy-a-new-one' method. The only people who do regularly upgrade are us geeks (who have the know-how to run Linux anyway), and hardcore gamers (who, in my experience, tend to have pirated volume-licensed versions of XP).
Yeah, we're in more-or-less that position - a former contractor upsized a lot of old access databases into one SQL database. I've tried the approach you mention, but the amount of work involved in validating the inputs (not to mention avoiding SQL injection) means you might as well write an app or web-app instead.
The REAL reason I hate the adp is that the original database contractor decided to store images directly into the database - as OLE objects. Which means that, not only does each machine have to have PaintShop Pro installed to see the images, each 30-40Kb image takes up 90 Mb and is unreadable to anything except Access. Extracting all of these images into proper JPEG files is pretty much my entire task for this spring...
Ah, it's not THAT bad. Better than using Access/JET as a storage engine anyway...
...well, OK, it IS pretty f*cking bad (yeah, how do I tie an Access form to a Stored Procedure? Oh, I can't - I have to give all users read/write access to TABLES).
We in IT have a saying at work, ridiculing the uses to which innocent Office apps are put: "Excel databases, Access spreadsheets, Word presentations and Publisher documents." I think that sums it up...
I can wholeheartedly sympathise with this. We deal with construction health & safety and project management, and the company compiles project documentation - including CAD drawings - into CD-ROMs for clients. Architects always send us drawings in DWG format, which means we have to license VoloView (since no-one appears to be using whatever AutoDesk's format-of-the-week is these days).
...on my 'data centre'. The current one would break to a moderately-forceful kick, and the partition walls are so thin you could probably push a finger through one of them anyway. Ah, the joys of working in the small business sector...
Lucky you... the last vacancy we advertised received 11 applicants, all but one of whom was rubbish (and the one we eventually hired was an overseas student and needed to get a work permit sorted out). Admittedly the pathetically low salary may have been a factor here...
By default, Windows gives users read/write to root drives, admins full control, and specific users full control over their profile folders. In XP Home, the permissions system is simplified (although still based on the same NTFS permissions), and there's a simple checkbox for making your home directory 'private'. How much more simple do you want?
AMEN. We use this kludge for our branch offices and it causes no end of problems (it's on the list of things to fix), especially when someone has 600MB worth of email and they decide to swap computers, taking them most of a day to download. We're replacing it with webmail as an interim solution until we can get a decent VPN set up.
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Whilst I agree with you that it should Just Work, without faffing around setting up WINS/DHCP/DNS servers, I can attest to the fact that my workgroup Windows network speeded up and actually started Just Working as soon as I added a Linux box onto it running WINS (a WIndows Server box would do just as well, but if you have that, go Domain).
The situation is better now than it used to be - when I held LAN parties in the late 90s, at least 2 hours would be spent each time yelling "My computer can see yours, can you see me?" and "Which protocols do we need enabled again?". I also remember the DOS days, where we had boot disks to run NetBIOS and IPX/SPX. I don't miss THOSE days at all.
People here have missed an important point: IE7 finally supports such basic CSS properties as position: fixed, min/max-width and fixes a few of the more annoying bugs; it also now supports PNG alpha transparency.
Once IE7 becomes widely adopted, we can finally start USING some of these features without worrying about them not being compatible with IE. We need to encourage people to upgrade, and if they won't upgrade to Firefox or Opera, then at least they can upgrade to IE7 and give us an easier time developing web pages.
What you forgot to mention is that you're in for a world of hurt when users start saying things like "but in the old system I used to do it like THIS and now it won't?? What do you mean, I can't open the tables anymore? But I'm used to scrolling through all the data, I don't like using forms!". I don't envy anyone jobs like this.
We run all our staff accounts as limited users at work. We have two pieces of software that don't like running under regular accounts, and in both cases the solution is to give users modify access on that app's folder in %program files%. Also, I'm puzzled by WMP 10 not working - works fine for our staff, and my girlfriend's account on my PC, and the guest account I set up for a friend once.
The main culprit is almost always always programs trying to store data in their installation folder rather than the user's appdata directory.
Most of those can be controlled by Group Policy if you have it - in our place, I've locked it down so it only uses the classic shell and has only the very basic features required for playing media, and all the updates and license-checking are disabled.
This sounds so much like my boss. I've had similar emails when his browser was slow loading CSS ("WHO GAVE YOU PERMISSION TO CHANGE THE WEBSITE TO THIS AMATEURISH DESIGN?!?!?!!!!! I AM THE ONLY ONE WHO MAKES THESE DECISIONS!!!!!") and showed him an unstyled page for a few seconds.
Removing the exclamation-mark key from executive keyboards would halve employee stress at a stroke...
We had a contractor like that in my place when I originally joined. Despite a history of incompetance, he was retained until, asked to deliver a web app for $bigretailchain he refused to show me any code until the week before the project deadline, when he downloaded a beta of VS2005 and mashed up a complete pile of shite in a weekend. He was shown the door, and I now have a good in-house team who understand the company's requirements and produce results. We've been skittish of contractors ever since.
Why is everyone suddenly so keen to get Office 2007? Are there glaring bugs in 2003 that you want fixed? Wasn't the previous prevailing wisdom that IT managers hated frequent, pointless updates?
If it ain't broke, don't fix it; Office 2003 is good software and works well, so I'd rather wait until the upgrade is really worth it.
If it wasn't for Lucas' lazy writing, we wouldn't HAVE to be explaining this! You shouldn't have to force yourself into mental convolutions to explain the continuity. Why have R2 and 3PO in the prequels? No reason except to cover up for the dearth of interesting new characters. By simply not including them, we'd never have had to have this debate, and the prequels would have suffered not at all.
Amen. My Director's out for a meeting today and I'm getting far more work done.
It's called a Public Folder - it's share-able, and can accept any type of Outlook items. Where people are hopping from one PC to another constantly, how do you propose we store their mails? POP3 requires that they re-download their mails every time, the alternatives (IMAP and webmail) require - wait for it - that you store the mails on a central server. You can export data from Outlook into CSV, XML, SQL or Excel files amongst others - what else would you like to do with it? Personally I like not carting a multi-GB mailbox folder around with me all the time.
Alternatively, ban all personal use of email services and let people sort their own GMail accounts out. We started off with ridiculously high limits (10 GB), and we've been creeping them down since then (they're now down to 1 GB). We're on Small Business Server though, which limits storage to 16 GB. We've also got mailbox management policies to clean down deleted items and very large, old sent items.
Outlook 2003 does indeed have spam filtering capabilities, which (in my highly subjective experience) are around as good as Thunderbird's (possibly Thunderbird pips it slightly but I've got no figures to back that up).
L33tspeak, on the other hand, is an anarchic, ad-hoc dialect, developing at random on the whims and trends of its practitioners. It is not controlled, and can express anything that a speaker wishes it to express, assuming they can make this meaning known to their audience. One might venture to say that it is the antithesis of Newspeak.
Everyone remembers the surveillance and Thought Police from Nineteen Eighty-Four, but fewer people remember the real message of the book, which concerned power, and the ability of the ruling Party to remain in power perpetually:
In a spirit of nit-picking, I'd like to point out that Orwell wrote about newspeak and doublethink. Newspeak was projected to become the defacto replacement for Oldspeak (English) by 2050.
Yeah, you'll still have to ring them and re-activate (after >3 hardware changes, I think). The only versions un-afflicted by product activation are the corporate volume-licensed versions, or copies used under relevant MSDN licenses. So unless you're a business or a developer, you'll have to re-active.
The thing is, most people just don't upgrade, except by the 'buy-a-new-one' method. The only people who do regularly upgrade are us geeks (who have the know-how to run Linux anyway), and hardcore gamers (who, in my experience, tend to have pirated volume-licensed versions of XP).
That only applies to OEM copies of Windows, not boxed. Still sucks, I know.
Yeah, we're in more-or-less that position - a former contractor upsized a lot of old access databases into one SQL database. I've tried the approach you mention, but the amount of work involved in validating the inputs (not to mention avoiding SQL injection) means you might as well write an app or web-app instead.
The REAL reason I hate the adp is that the original database contractor decided to store images directly into the database - as OLE objects. Which means that, not only does each machine have to have PaintShop Pro installed to see the images, each 30-40Kb image takes up 90 Mb and is unreadable to anything except Access. Extracting all of these images into proper JPEG files is pretty much my entire task for this spring...
Ah, it's not THAT bad. Better than using Access/JET as a storage engine anyway...
...well, OK, it IS pretty f*cking bad (yeah, how do I tie an Access form to a Stored Procedure? Oh, I can't - I have to give all users read/write access to TABLES).
We in IT have a saying at work, ridiculing the uses to which innocent Office apps are put: "Excel databases, Access spreadsheets, Word presentations and Publisher documents." I think that sums it up...
I can wholeheartedly sympathise with this. We deal with construction health & safety and project management, and the company compiles project documentation - including CAD drawings - into CD-ROMs for clients. Architects always send us drawings in DWG format, which means we have to license VoloView (since no-one appears to be using whatever AutoDesk's format-of-the-week is these days).
...on my 'data centre'. The current one would break to a moderately-forceful kick, and the partition walls are so thin you could probably push a finger through one of them anyway. Ah, the joys of working in the small business sector...
Lucky you... the last vacancy we advertised received 11 applicants, all but one of whom was rubbish (and the one we eventually hired was an overseas student and needed to get a work permit sorted out). Admittedly the pathetically low salary may have been a factor here...
By default, Windows gives users read/write to root drives, admins full control, and specific users full control over their profile folders. In XP Home, the permissions system is simplified (although still based on the same NTFS permissions), and there's a simple checkbox for making your home directory 'private'. How much more simple do you want?
Makes me think of the Guild of Musicians in Terry Pratchett's Soul Music.
AMEN. We use this kludge for our branch offices and it causes no end of problems (it's on the list of things to fix), especially when someone has 600MB worth of email and they decide to swap computers, taking them most of a day to download. We're replacing it with webmail as an interim solution until we can get a decent VPN set up.