Posts by Terry 6 5611 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Jul 2009
There may well be offices where staff arriving and leaving have access to sufficient storage for all the stuff they use and adequate desk space for while they're using it, and a method for transferring stuff to and fro.e.g Piles of current paper files and handwritten case notes that are all required in various sequences for short amounts of time. But I've visited a few and have never, yet, seen one.
I guess that paperless office I've been hearing about for decades could make it workable. if ever..
They're bean counters. Which means that;
a) They have few or no social skills and don't like people much or see why other people might
b) see staff as just work units with a cash value/cost
c) have no concept of team working, collaboration, sharing, cross fertilisation of ideas or (horrid word) synergy.
5) are idiots
Have I understood this right? In the USA citizens who wish to do their legal and moral duty and pay money to their government have to use a third party commercial company to do so. And unless they are poorly paid have to pay these companies for the privilege. So, isn't that a kind of private tax? Or robbery?
It's kind of worrying if these companies don't have source code air gapped. In my naive innocent mind I'd always, if I'd thought about it at all, imagined that the key coding and design work would be in a top security location with absolutely no contact to the public (or any external) network whatsoever.
Now we'll probably find out that they work from their local branch of Costa using a mate's laptop.
And, if you have a device ( or software version, Mr. I have-the-latest-version-of-Word) that isn't going to be readily available to use in as close to 100% of locations as is humanly possible then you may well be a total idiot.
And yes, I too have had to find a way of getting some bought-in trainers, VIP advisors and so forth up and running on our whiteboard, through our speakers using our internet. The latter tied down by corporate IT who need three months notice and an ID check even to get them to answer the phone.
Since you say "dollars" I'll assume USA, as no country mentioned.
In the UK a few years ago school funding that was controlled by the authorities was "delegated" to schools as "local management". This meant that a) in many places the local authority IT support was lost, and schools had to source their own (or fail to) and b) some school bosses got very hoity toity with the IT support that was provided/sold under LSA and would run a parallel process, picking and choosing what advice to follow.
Either way it had lead to massive waste. Schools investing in I-thingies for kids to use, (because it made good PR in snobbier schools) but not having appropriate software. Or buying laptops that weren't nearly robust enough or buying at insanely high prices from a salesman. And so on. In telecoms, btw, it was even worse. With schools being conned into buying expensive and complex phone systems.
I came across this once or twice or so in my youth (late 70s) in various places I'd been working. The staff discount was often derisory and was based on the largely fictitious ( because no one paid it in the real world) price.
A similar thing were the "special deals" that my union (NUT) offered a few years later, for all sorts of things, including, travel, loans and insurance, that were far more expensive than buying the stuff retail. I guess that's what they meant by special.
Regular does not = frequent.
But they are frequently confused.
When people moan that some of us are too aggressive about their misuse of words it's examples like this that should pull us back.
A promise that something is regular could mean that it gets done once a decade, on the third Thursday in July.
But frequent should mean it gets done often. How often is a whole different kettle of ball games.
In either case it means very little unless quantified.
If it'll go into a cheap laptop, since the main issue is just the storage, a simple external HDD and an automated backup routine would probably be all they need. Same as a SOHO user would do. If it doesn't have to backup fast, or retrieve data in real time, that's more than enough, surely.
This rings a distant bell. Big thick cassettes or something like that. I think I was peripherally connected to some work, or a network or something that backed up to one of these drives.
And someone had to nursemaid it in some obscure way. And the word slow pops into my head, alongside unreliable. Don't know why.
And then there was the LS120.
A perfect demonstration in crap management/bean counter decision making.
They really, really waned their device adopted. And they were really a great improvement on the floppy discs. But they came out when zipdrives were already well known and with a price tag that put them up there with jewellery and rare art works.
"Stiffy" Really.
Back in the good old days, when new machines with these new fangled discs arrived we just carried on calling 'em floppies. Everyone did. The people who introduced them made a great play on how much tougher the new floppy discs were. And that was it.
Nothing to see here. Just move on.
My favourite version of this is that, a few years back local authorities would negotiate contracts for gas that relied on a certain minimum consumption. Below that threshold prices rocketed. So schools would have to keep the heating on, whatever the weather, to make sure they reached the right level of consumption. i.e. It was much cheaper to waste energy.
So they'd have heating on and windows open for a good few weeks every year.
My own guess- from having come across things of this sort (much smaller scale)- is that the decisions and what passed for planning were all done at a level far away from day-to-day service or IT provision by a management that just looked at predicted cost figures and failed to think about what they needed to put in place alongside, or do a sensible risk assessment of the project.
This makes sense.Should Hertz (for want of a better example) have business expertise on how to clean offices?
This highlights the falsity of this argument. The client company needs staff who can actually monitor the bought in work.
A company's staff can mostly identify whether the offices are being cleaned according to contract ( as long as the contract makes sense). As an educational manager I checked the premises and held the contractors to account. But even there I met limits. I couldn't check everything always and some contracts were negotiated well above my pay grade, usually by people who had no idea of how we used the spaces. (As in a padded secure room for kids with serious behaviour issues tends to need a bit more time for cleaning than an ordinary classroom- and yes we did have that argument with the bean counters!). Even with cleaning there are technicalities that need expertise from the client to ensure the job is done correctly.
Outsourcing the capacity to monitor and understand the service that's been outsourced means that you are leaving yourself open to be ripped apart. A big IT project needs to be monitored by staff who understand what's going on. Sadly the accountants that promote outsourcing seem to base their calculations on the entire role and skill set being taken off the payroll when in reality you need to retain a percentage simply to write the initial contract and then keep control of the process.
I have a little Lenovo convertible. Not much built in storage but a pretty decent SD card.
So If I do have enough space to run the updates the SDCard is going to block it anyway. And since that SD card is my main storage location I'll be buggered if I'm going to remove it.
The fundamental point is that (whether you like these or not*) drive letters are fundamental to Microsoft OSs.
And that makes writing a version that forgets that some drive letters are going to be for external or removable drives fundamentally stupid.
Particularly since an external USB connected HDD is the basis of many a SOHO backup system. Windows already handles that pretty poorly - every time I swap my backup HDD over I find that it has assigned a new drive letter, which I have to then reassign, because my b/u software is going to be writing to H:\folder
And every single f***ing time I have to spend a couple of minutes remembering how (where) to do that because it's almost, but not quite obvious.
*I do, for brevity. Saying "Drive H" is so simple compared to a path name.
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