Depending on what else they did, that might be a good response. A proper IT service desk should do two things in a situation like this:
1. It should find a quick workaround for the incident at hand, which is to recomend all customers to not put an audio CD in the drive of a server running notes.
2. The should perform root cause analysis to determine the underlying problem and remove it permanently.
If the Service desk isn't doing both these things, it's not doing its job properly.
I think the Norwegian taxes are based on engine volume. That's why a clean and fuel efficient BMW costs twice as much as a gas guzzling crappy car with a small engine volume, even though the former is much more environment friendly. Not sure how electric cars are taxed.
My guess would be that it's mostly caused by Microsofts relative hardware inexperience. Sony and Nintendo have spent decades building consoles and similar home electronics, but Microsofts prior hardware experience consists of building a bunch of mice and keyboards and using common off the shelf components to build a small computer that they called the X-box, and sold as a console. They grossly underestimated the difficulty and cost of building cutting edge, high quality hardware from scratch, and they keep paying the price for it.
I strongly disagree. The high cost and abysmal quality of IT services put a wet blanket on innovation and creativity. Without open source software, the cost of starting up an IT company would be significantly higher; without open source Google, Slashdot, reddit, digg and a thousand other companies would likely not have existed.
I'm excited to see what cool innovations people will come up with if IT costs are further reduced to nearly nothing.
The math co-processor wasn't made obsolete. It became so vital to system performance that Intel and friends started including it in on the CPU proper. These days, they call it an FPU.
The company I work for does support for any Linux distribution, custom compiled packages, whatever. If the customer uses non-standard packages and oddball solutions, it often takes more time to solve their problems, but since we work by the hours, that's their problem.
I find it hard to believe that businesses such as ours are unusual.
My main storage is a 3 TB NAS (4 x 1 TB RAID5), and no laptop comes even close to that amount of storage. So I have to accept that I can only bring a tiny bit of my data set with me on the road no matter what. I can fit in all I need in about 10 GB, going up to 100 GB wouldn't make a lot of difference. So I'd happily go down to 10 or 16 GB of laptop storage if it meant longer battery life, silent operation and higher speeds.
Actually, no. During the creation of the THX certification, huge amounts of surveys where filled out. People watching a movie in a THX theater did not rate the image quality or the sound quality higher. They did, however, think that the actual movie was significantly better when watching it in a THX theater.
So the conclusion is that boxy audio, small blurry screens and lifeless colors distract pulls people out from the suspension of disbelief and makes the movie seem less real, and thus less entertaining. But people don't notice that this is caused by the imperfections in the presentation, they usually attribute it to the movie.
Read the original post, he states exactly what his problems are, though I have other issues. My problems with LaTeX include:
Multi-page tables (Using longtables) is buggy. If a specific table cell is higher than the others, it can overflow into the document footer instead of getting moved to the next page.
Inconsistent rendering issues. When setting the background color of table cells, they sometimes change size. Float positioning is usually very good, but when it bugs out and does something stupid, it's nearly impossible to fix.
If you're using BibTex, making lots of references, etc, you need to run TeX four or five times, making it bog slow.
Any non-trivial coding is a pain. I was writing a custom document style, and it had to check if the number of figures was larger than a given number, and if so, insert a list of figures. Shouldn't be so hard, right? Wrong. You need to specify a piece of code to be evaluated at a later time, turns out that doing so is a gargantuan pain in the butt.
Another example: I wanted to write a simple function that took a piece of TeX code and displayed it verbatim, and showed the rendered result as well, side by side. No can do, because TeX has all sorts of weird issues with verbatim environemnts.
There are lots of character set issues. I have still not figured out how to use non-ascii characters in the pdf summary fields for PDFTeX and get them to consistently work.
The language for creating new BibTex styles is so retarded it's not even funny. Basically, you can't do it.
He was quoting from Uncyclopedia, not Wikipedia. And given that Uncyclopedia is, you know, a humor site, I think there is a fair chance that he may have been pulling your leg.
Because Apple are better at selling than LG and Asus? Seriously, Apple usually have nice solid products, but they're usually not that revolutionary, not in the last 15 years. Was the iPod that revolutionary? Was the iMac? iTunes? None of them offered anything which hadn't been largely done before, and neither does the Air, but all of them seem to be solid products with a winning combination of market focus and style.
The gist of the second half of your post seems to be that the main problem with the Air is that it doesn't fix every single problem and complaint that people of today has with laptops. It doesn't have to. There is a market for different laptops with different tradeoffs. Personally, I value small and light very highly, so I'd definitely consider buying an Air if I hadn't bought a pretty sweet computer 6 months ago. But I may very well beuy an Air 2.0 in a year or two.
BTW, we have 5 X61s at work, and with the oversized battery they get more like 7 hours. Not that much more than the claimed 5 hours from the air, and the oversized battery is OMG HUEG!1!!
Not for profit does not imply charging money for the downloads, it refers to not turning the Gentoo foundation into a for profit company, like Mozilla, Red Hat and Ubuntu have all done (or rather, have always been). All those project still ship their software free of charge (and are even willing to pay the shipping costs to send you a CD in the case of Ubuntu), but they all have some form plan to turn a profit, like providing for-pay support or living of add revenues.
Last time I heard, there where no OOXML implementations. The actual format implemented in Microsoft Office is different enough from what is described in the standard to cause huge headaches, and last time I heard all non-Microsoft imlementations only delat with a very small subset of the standard.
Only a fool tries to change the world; a wise man knows that the world can not be changed, and changes himself instead. Therefore, all progress is made by fools.
If everyone was as worried about 'speaking out of turn' as you would like them to be, nothing would ever get any better. The world is full of people who see that that something is wrong with the world, but instead of doing something about it, they sit in their basements wishing someone else would do something. But if anyone ever does try to fix things, they get called presumptuous, arrogant or condescending.
People have been making up bullshit like what you are saying for the last few thousand years. When you compare what kids are doing these days to the things you did when you where a kid, you compare the worst of what you hear happens today with a filtered and watered down version of what you and you well behaved friends did at the same age.
You don't think Linux improves the 1970 original Unix in any way?
Linux includes support for TCP/IP networking, it supports GUIs like X, it has various useful IPC mechanisms that the original Unix. Unlike Unix 1.0, Linux is mostly written in C, not assembler, meaning it is much more portable. There are quite a few other differences between Linux and the first version of Unix from 1970. Taken together, they are, in my opinion, pretty significant.
I know that the above features have also been retrofitted to Unix, but you keep claiming that Linux is a reimplementation of an ancient OS, when it is actually a reimplementation of a contemporary OS which has evolved from its humble beginnings 37 years ago.
This kind of 'Linux reimplements Unix which i old and hence bad/boring/whatever is for some reason much more common than the equally useless statement that Windows Vista is just a reimplementation of VMS and hence bad/boring/whatever. Don't know why.
My experience with unicode and C is that it is painless when done right.
You only need two things.
1) Remember to call setlocale. 2) Use wide character wrappers around all system functions that don't already have one, e.g. wopen, wrealpath, etc.. Never ever directly use narrow character strings for anything.
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Depending on what else they did, that might be a good response. A proper IT service desk should do two things in a situation like this:
1. It should find a quick workaround for the incident at hand, which is to recomend all customers to not put an audio CD in the drive of a server running notes.
2. The should perform root cause analysis to determine the underlying problem and remove it permanently.
If the Service desk isn't doing both these things, it's not doing its job properly.
I think the Norwegian taxes are based on engine volume. That's why a clean and fuel efficient BMW costs twice as much as a gas guzzling crappy car with a small engine volume, even though the former is much more environment friendly. Not sure how electric cars are taxed.
My guess would be that it's mostly caused by Microsofts relative hardware inexperience. Sony and Nintendo have spent decades building consoles and similar home electronics, but Microsofts prior hardware experience consists of building a bunch of mice and keyboards and using common off the shelf components to build a small computer that they called the X-box, and sold as a console. They grossly underestimated the difficulty and cost of building cutting edge, high quality hardware from scratch, and they keep paying the price for it.
"I quit that as fast as I can like any other respectable person."
Sorry, no respectable person would do the things you describe.
I strongly disagree. The high cost and abysmal quality of IT services put a wet blanket on innovation and creativity. Without open source software, the cost of starting up an IT company would be significantly higher; without open source Google, Slashdot, reddit, digg and a thousand other companies would likely not have existed.
I'm excited to see what cool innovations people will come up with if IT costs are further reduced to nearly nothing.
The math co-processor wasn't made obsolete. It became so vital to system performance that Intel and friends started including it in on the CPU proper. These days, they call it an FPU.
Since perl is open source, so open source zealotry still applies.
The company I work for does support for any Linux distribution, custom compiled packages, whatever. If the customer uses non-standard packages and oddball solutions, it often takes more time to solve their problems, but since we work by the hours, that's their problem.
I find it hard to believe that businesses such as ours are unusual.
My main storage is a 3 TB NAS (4 x 1 TB RAID5), and no laptop comes even close to that amount of storage. So I have to accept that I can only bring a tiny bit of my data set with me on the road no matter what. I can fit in all I need in about 10 GB, going up to 100 GB wouldn't make a lot of difference. So I'd happily go down to 10 or 16 GB of laptop storage if it meant longer battery life, silent operation and higher speeds.
Actually, no.
During the creation of the THX certification, huge amounts of surveys where filled out. People watching a movie in a THX theater did not rate the image quality or the sound quality higher. They did, however, think that the actual movie was significantly better when watching it in a THX theater.
So the conclusion is that boxy audio, small blurry screens and lifeless colors distract pulls people out from the suspension of disbelief and makes the movie seem less real, and thus less entertaining. But people don't notice that this is caused by the imperfections in the presentation, they usually attribute it to the movie.
Read the original post, he states exactly what his problems are, though I have other issues. My problems with LaTeX include:
Multi-page tables (Using longtables) is buggy. If a specific table cell is higher than the others, it can overflow into the document footer instead of getting moved to the next page.
Inconsistent rendering issues. When setting the background color of table cells, they sometimes change size. Float positioning is usually very good, but when it bugs out and does something stupid, it's nearly impossible to fix.
If you're using BibTex, making lots of references, etc, you need to run TeX four or five times, making it bog slow.
Any non-trivial coding is a pain. I was writing a custom document style, and it had to check if the number of figures was larger than a given number, and if so, insert a list of figures. Shouldn't be so hard, right? Wrong. You need to specify a piece of code to be evaluated at a later time, turns out that doing so is a gargantuan pain in the butt.
Another example: I wanted to write a simple function that took a piece of TeX code and displayed it verbatim, and showed the rendered result as well, side by side. No can do, because TeX has all sorts of weird issues with verbatim environemnts.
There are lots of character set issues. I have still not figured out how to use non-ascii characters in the pdf summary fields for PDFTeX and get them to consistently work.
The language for creating new BibTex styles is so retarded it's not even funny. Basically, you can't do it.
Specifying non-standard fonts is a pain.
IcedTea is based on OpenJDK, released by Sun.
No, "Enterprise ready" means they didn't have to deal with that shit on Star Trek.
I'm guessing you mean algebraist, not alchemist.
He was quoting from Uncyclopedia, not Wikipedia. And given that Uncyclopedia is, you know, a humor site, I think there is a fair chance that he may have been pulling your leg.
Because Apple are better at selling than LG and Asus? Seriously, Apple usually have nice solid products, but they're usually not that revolutionary, not in the last 15 years. Was the iPod that revolutionary? Was the iMac? iTunes? None of them offered anything which hadn't been largely done before, and neither does the Air, but all of them seem to be solid products with a winning combination of market focus and style.
The gist of the second half of your post seems to be that the main problem with the Air is that it doesn't fix every single problem and complaint that people of today has with laptops. It doesn't have to. There is a market for different laptops with different tradeoffs. Personally, I value small and light very highly, so I'd definitely consider buying an Air if I hadn't bought a pretty sweet computer 6 months ago. But I may very well beuy an Air 2.0 in a year or two.
BTW, we have 5 X61s at work, and with the oversized battery they get more like 7 hours. Not that much more than the claimed 5 hours from the air, and the oversized battery is OMG HUEG!1!!
Not for profit does not imply charging money for the downloads, it refers to not turning the Gentoo foundation into a for profit company, like Mozilla, Red Hat and Ubuntu have all done (or rather, have always been). All those project still ship their software free of charge (and are even willing to pay the shipping costs to send you a CD in the case of Ubuntu), but they all have some form plan to turn a profit, like providing for-pay support or living of add revenues.
Last time I heard, there where no OOXML implementations. The actual format implemented in Microsoft Office is different enough from what is described in the standard to cause huge headaches, and last time I heard all non-Microsoft imlementations only delat with a very small subset of the standard.
Only a fool tries to change the world; a wise man knows that the world can not be changed, and changes himself instead. Therefore, all progress is made by fools.
If everyone was as worried about 'speaking out of turn' as you would like them to be, nothing would ever get any better. The world is full of people who see that that something is wrong with the world, but instead of doing something about it, they sit in their basements wishing someone else would do something. But if anyone ever does try to fix things, they get called presumptuous, arrogant or condescending.
I just bought a 8 GB Nano today. And in less than a week, it's going to be vintage. Yes!
People have been making up bullshit like what you are saying for the last few thousand years. When you compare what kids are doing these days to the things you did when you where a kid, you compare the worst of what you hear happens today with a filtered and watered down version of what you and you well behaved friends did at the same age.
So someone made a mistake. Give them a couple of weeks and they'll fix it.
You don't think Linux improves the 1970 original Unix in any way?
Linux includes support for TCP/IP networking, it supports GUIs like X, it has various useful IPC mechanisms that the original Unix. Unlike Unix 1.0, Linux is mostly written in C, not assembler, meaning it is much more portable. There are quite a few other differences between Linux and the first version of Unix from 1970. Taken together, they are, in my opinion, pretty significant.
I know that the above features have also been retrofitted to Unix, but you keep claiming that Linux is a reimplementation of an ancient OS, when it is actually a reimplementation of a contemporary OS which has evolved from its humble beginnings 37 years ago.
This kind of 'Linux reimplements Unix which i old and hence bad/boring/whatever is for some reason much more common than the equally useless statement that Windows Vista is just a reimplementation of VMS and hence bad/boring/whatever. Don't know why.
My experience with unicode and C is that it is painless when done right.
You only need two things.
1) Remember to call setlocale.
2) Use wide character wrappers around all system functions that don't already have one, e.g. wopen, wrealpath, etc.. Never ever directly use narrow character strings for anything.