There are so many examples of single-point-of-failure scenarios that we already have a solution for it - heartbeat monitoring (PINGs). The alarm/security company sends out heartbeat checks every 2-5 seconds, the device at the customer's home responds. If it doesn't, an alert pops up. It's clean, simple, and is done probably millions of times a day already.
Is this article serious that people are legitimately worried that no one will know when a line goes down?
And, for someone else who mentioned it - have a cellular backup... if the pings fail, try to get to it through a secondary (cellular) network. If that doesn't work, an alert pops up and a call goes to the homeowner asking if their house hasn't exploded, taking the security equipment with it or something.
So, no people for the most part say they want everything but time again have proven through actions that they will only buy for the most part on price.
Bullshit.
I'm glad we have a poster who actually works for an airline because I want to tell him exactly why people "only buy for the most part on price". The reason? Because they can't see what's included in the price. Airline travel isn't simple - there are different places you can sit which give more leg room. There are meals, pillows, headsets, baggage "priority", and a dozen other quirks. Be like McDonald's. PACKAGE IT.
I'm serious - when I go to united.com, orbitz, travelocity, etc... I'm seeing only one thing... this is your price from A to B and it's non refundable unless you bend over and grab your ankles. Oh and that airport tax and fuck-you-osama tax is included.
Back to the point - I want a list. If I see a set of rows offering price, I want to see columns for what's included. Do I get a meal for example? What's my leg room look like?
How about:
OPTION A
Includes Economy seating in rear half of plane.
Includes cold snack food.
Includes ability to use toilet.
OPTION B
Upgrades Option A by adding:
Pillow
Blanket
Warm towel for your face
Hot Meal
OPTION C
Upgrades Options A & B by adding:
"Economy Plus" - 2.3106 inches of extra leg room!
Free coffee, soft drinks and up to 2 alcoholic beverages.
OPTION D
Business class (list perks here).
OPTION E
First Class - we'll make your socks roll up and down.
I think if consumers had choices like these, 1. They'd know exactly what they'd be getting and not getting and 2. The $5 "loss of demand" goes away because now people are making an informed decision on something they can SEE - benefits/features/upgrades and not just price.
This is simple. Require your users to operate online for any data that needs to be shared. Internet access is literally everywhere, and accessible via wireless phones (as a modem), WiFi, hard-wired, internet cafes, etc. If your users are working for your company, setup an RDP or Citrix server and make it a business rule that requires them to operate online. Or, use Sharepoint (which is web accessible from anywhere)
Benefits aren't limited to erasing sysadmin headaches, they also include absolutely no conflicts, no synchronization traffic, instant availability of changed data, instant on-line backups, the speed of SQL (for example) on a real server instead of 2005 Express on someone's laptop with a 5400 RPM drive. You also have all kinds of better security for the data as well compared to someone's laptop getting stolen.
I think notebooks should be used for files you and you alone are going to be working with. If it's ever going to be shared or have the possibility of conflict, and especially with databases, make remote access to it mandatory.
Actually, I believe you're missing my point. Yes, of course everyone knows you can email multi-megabyte attachments. However, those attachments get triplicated every time their emailed. Original location (C:, network drive), Sent Items folder on sender's PC then Inbox/Deleted items on recipients' PC. Multiply this by a few large attachments per day times hundreds or thousands of users and you have a problem.
That was indeed the spirit of my post - formatted media. I use a notebook too, so I need to eject the tray, snap the CD into place, push the track back in (can someone fix slot-load CDs anytime soon?). Floppy disks, in, write, light goes off, out, done.
I think most people miss the point of floppy disks, which was a really cheap way to give someone a file and never need the floppy disk back. Now, it seems to be true that, to transfer a file, we've got a couple choices:
1. email it if it's reasonably small -or-
2. burn it to CD / copy it to a flash drive if it's not
I say these are the only two options because let's face it - how many end-users even know what an FTP site is, let alone where one is or how to use it? The problem with no floppies is that:
1. Burning a CD takes longer than copying a file to a floppy disk and most Word/Excel/etc. docs are still smaller than 1.44 MB.
2. Emailing sucks. I'm sick of having some yahoo (in the same company with a shared drive no less) email messages with 1 MB attachments to everyone, instantly creating 3 copies (assuming only 1 recipient): -The original, -In their Sent items, -In the receipients' inbox then deleted items folder. After a while, tripling the data usage for a single file is a pain, especially when users' PST files are 1-2 GB.
3. I'm not giving you my flash drive. Yes, you can borrow it, after I review it for a lack of my Quickbooks file that I just transferred to my accountant, but you're not keeping it. This means that I have to plug it in, review the contents, remove some of them if needed, transfer your file, click on the little "eject safely" button, let you borrow it and you have to remember to return it. No thanks. Just let me whip out a blank floppy and throw the file on there and give it to you.
4. I agree with the very first post. Over the weekend, I installed a Dell PE2950 that failed 95% through dell's installation assistant CD, while using the OS CD, using 3 different OS CDs. Using the same CD, I booted, pressed F6 to load the SAS drivers, and found out there wasn't a floppy disk in sight. Finally found one, but I don't see Microsoft's setup saying "insert floppy or USB key to browse for the drivers".
Anyway, just all MHO.
As a member of IT departments in the past and a current (6 year) consultant, I say leave us the fuck alone. It's not up to you, as the user, to maverick it and plant your measly pathetic flag in whatever ground you think is right and then try to change the IT department to your stupid assumptions as to what you think it should be.
Your company has 500+ IT people right? Somewhere in there I assume there's a few managers. Be a proper worker and follow the fucking CHAIN OF COMMAND. If you want something different, notify your manager, who will notify their manager, who will notify the CIO.
"As a knowledgable user"... in who's opinion? You think you know enough about IT? Then, why aren't you in the IT department putting your money where your mouth is? Any monkey can tell if a server is out of space or isn't being backed up. That doesn't make you knowledgable.
Seriously, IT people have degrees, certifications and a lot of work to do. We couldn't care less what some wanna-be motherfucking loser like you wants different. If we hear it from our (good) management team, we'll change.
Then, you have the world of IT consulting. Not a corporate environment where the technician is "a fellow employee" but truly a world of on-demand service calls and sometimes even outright hostility. Over the past 5 years for me, consulting has shrunk from "cool, here's our IT guy to help us" to "why are you here again?". Once, in the past few months, I even had a client who refused to pay 20% of their bill because their SBC DSL router died, which caused "downtime" until it was fixed, which was "my fault". We now live in a place where we get charged, literally, by the hour for downtime instead of being thanked for locating the problem, calling SBC and getting the replacement router out.
I'm personally frustrated to the point where I'll take last year's $175k revenue and shit-can it in favor of a $70k cube because customers have become *that* unreasonably demanding. To top it off, they demand you work yourself out of a job ("show up, hook us up and it better run forever without you for the next 10 years"). So, respect? Far declining. I wish I would have sold-short respect in 2000.
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There are so many examples of single-point-of-failure scenarios that we already have a solution for it - heartbeat monitoring (PINGs). The alarm/security company sends out heartbeat checks every 2-5 seconds, the device at the customer's home responds. If it doesn't, an alert pops up. It's clean, simple, and is done probably millions of times a day already. Is this article serious that people are legitimately worried that no one will know when a line goes down? And, for someone else who mentioned it - have a cellular backup... if the pings fail, try to get to it through a secondary (cellular) network. If that doesn't work, an alert pops up and a call goes to the homeowner asking if their house hasn't exploded, taking the security equipment with it or something.
So, no people for the most part say they want everything but time again have proven through actions that they will only buy for the most part on price.
Bullshit.
I'm glad we have a poster who actually works for an airline because I want to tell him exactly why people "only buy for the most part on price". The reason? Because they can't see what's included in the price. Airline travel isn't simple - there are different places you can sit which give more leg room. There are meals, pillows, headsets, baggage "priority", and a dozen other quirks. Be like McDonald's. PACKAGE IT.
I'm serious - when I go to united.com, orbitz, travelocity, etc... I'm seeing only one thing... this is your price from A to B and it's non refundable unless you bend over and grab your ankles. Oh and that airport tax and fuck-you-osama tax is included.
Back to the point - I want a list. If I see a set of rows offering price, I want to see columns for what's included. Do I get a meal for example? What's my leg room look like?
How about:
OPTION A
Includes Economy seating in rear half of plane.
Includes cold snack food.
Includes ability to use toilet.
OPTION B
Upgrades Option A by adding:
Pillow
Blanket
Warm towel for your face
Hot Meal
OPTION C
Upgrades Options A & B by adding:
"Economy Plus" - 2.3106 inches of extra leg room!
Free coffee, soft drinks and up to 2 alcoholic beverages.
OPTION D
Business class (list perks here).
OPTION E
First Class - we'll make your socks roll up and down.
I think if consumers had choices like these, 1. They'd know exactly what they'd be getting and not getting and 2. The $5 "loss of demand" goes away because now people are making an informed decision on something they can SEE - benefits/features/upgrades and not just price.
Just my $0.02.
This is simple. Require your users to operate online for any data that needs to be shared. Internet access is literally everywhere, and accessible via wireless phones (as a modem), WiFi, hard-wired, internet cafes, etc. If your users are working for your company, setup an RDP or Citrix server and make it a business rule that requires them to operate online. Or, use Sharepoint (which is web accessible from anywhere)
Benefits aren't limited to erasing sysadmin headaches, they also include absolutely no conflicts, no synchronization traffic, instant availability of changed data, instant on-line backups, the speed of SQL (for example) on a real server instead of 2005 Express on someone's laptop with a 5400 RPM drive. You also have all kinds of better security for the data as well compared to someone's laptop getting stolen.
I think notebooks should be used for files you and you alone are going to be working with. If it's ever going to be shared or have the possibility of conflict, and especially with databases, make remote access to it mandatory.
Actually, I believe you're missing my point. Yes, of course everyone knows you can email multi-megabyte attachments. However, those attachments get triplicated every time their emailed. Original location (C:, network drive), Sent Items folder on sender's PC then Inbox/Deleted items on recipients' PC. Multiply this by a few large attachments per day times hundreds or thousands of users and you have a problem.
That was indeed the spirit of my post - formatted media. I use a notebook too, so I need to eject the tray, snap the CD into place, push the track back in (can someone fix slot-load CDs anytime soon?). Floppy disks, in, write, light goes off, out, done.
I think most people miss the point of floppy disks, which was a really cheap way to give someone a file and never need the floppy disk back. Now, it seems to be true that, to transfer a file, we've got a couple choices: 1. email it if it's reasonably small -or- 2. burn it to CD / copy it to a flash drive if it's not I say these are the only two options because let's face it - how many end-users even know what an FTP site is, let alone where one is or how to use it? The problem with no floppies is that: 1. Burning a CD takes longer than copying a file to a floppy disk and most Word/Excel/etc. docs are still smaller than 1.44 MB. 2. Emailing sucks. I'm sick of having some yahoo (in the same company with a shared drive no less) email messages with 1 MB attachments to everyone, instantly creating 3 copies (assuming only 1 recipient): -The original, -In their Sent items, -In the receipients' inbox then deleted items folder. After a while, tripling the data usage for a single file is a pain, especially when users' PST files are 1-2 GB. 3. I'm not giving you my flash drive. Yes, you can borrow it, after I review it for a lack of my Quickbooks file that I just transferred to my accountant, but you're not keeping it. This means that I have to plug it in, review the contents, remove some of them if needed, transfer your file, click on the little "eject safely" button, let you borrow it and you have to remember to return it. No thanks. Just let me whip out a blank floppy and throw the file on there and give it to you. 4. I agree with the very first post. Over the weekend, I installed a Dell PE2950 that failed 95% through dell's installation assistant CD, while using the OS CD, using 3 different OS CDs. Using the same CD, I booted, pressed F6 to load the SAS drivers, and found out there wasn't a floppy disk in sight. Finally found one, but I don't see Microsoft's setup saying "insert floppy or USB key to browse for the drivers". Anyway, just all MHO.
As a member of IT departments in the past and a current (6 year) consultant, I say leave us the fuck alone. It's not up to you, as the user, to maverick it and plant your measly pathetic flag in whatever ground you think is right and then try to change the IT department to your stupid assumptions as to what you think it should be.
Your company has 500+ IT people right? Somewhere in there I assume there's a few managers. Be a proper worker and follow the fucking CHAIN OF COMMAND. If you want something different, notify your manager, who will notify their manager, who will notify the CIO.
"As a knowledgable user"... in who's opinion? You think you know enough about IT? Then, why aren't you in the IT department putting your money where your mouth is? Any monkey can tell if a server is out of space or isn't being backed up. That doesn't make you knowledgable.
Seriously, IT people have degrees, certifications and a lot of work to do. We couldn't care less what some wanna-be motherfucking loser like you wants different. If we hear it from our (good) management team, we'll change.
Follow the chain of command.
Then, you have the world of IT consulting. Not a corporate environment where the technician is "a fellow employee" but truly a world of on-demand service calls and sometimes even outright hostility. Over the past 5 years for me, consulting has shrunk from "cool, here's our IT guy to help us" to "why are you here again?". Once, in the past few months, I even had a client who refused to pay 20% of their bill because their SBC DSL router died, which caused "downtime" until it was fixed, which was "my fault". We now live in a place where we get charged, literally, by the hour for downtime instead of being thanked for locating the problem, calling SBC and getting the replacement router out. I'm personally frustrated to the point where I'll take last year's $175k revenue and shit-can it in favor of a $70k cube because customers have become *that* unreasonably demanding. To top it off, they demand you work yourself out of a job ("show up, hook us up and it better run forever without you for the next 10 years"). So, respect? Far declining. I wish I would have sold-short respect in 2000.