Do you know what I miss?
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Newguy: I'm going to one-up you with this post.
Do you know what I miss? Those guys that come around and install software on your PCs. It's just not necessary anymore. Everything can be network deployed...or is available via the internet. I miss having conversations with the PC installer guys. And I always loved to watch them "hard at work" installing the latest program:
"This one is a real pain..." (Mouse click, next, mouse click, next...)
You envied the ease of their work, yet you knew they were only making $7.00 an hour.
Strange how they're all extinct now.
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eh??? Don't you have any work to do???
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What are you talking about CPound? Universities and businesses still have people that do this kind of work. When applications are written badly, or have DRM where the application calls back home to the mothership, you often ahve to do installs without using network deployment.
Not to mention, there is software that is a pain to install, but it is usually the very high end stuff that has dongle protection, network license protection, or other rot.
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He might be talking about remote deployment of Windows and antivirus updates like my company does. It worries me but there's nothing I can do about it. One of these days they're going to push out an update that makes the machine puke all over the place and I'll be stuck twiddling my thumbs while they have to fix it. Even if that never happens, it's REALLY creepy when you computer suddenly installs something that you didn't tell it to. And annoying as all get out when it decides to reboot for no apparent reason. Sure, they generally give us 30 minutes to save our work, but it still pisses me off.
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I am that guy... for my own machine. And the guy next to me is also that guy... for his own machine.
The IT department got so fed up with the engineering department (install X, install Y) that they all gave us administrator rights. Saves them work, saves us work. Both happy.
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It's not strange at all.
1) We now (commonly) have office networks faster than the transfer rate of CD or DVD drives.
2) Most employees have laptops. So it's possible to get them to come to you instead of the other way around.
3) Active Directory and SMS (Windows-specific phenom ... not an issue on Unix boxes historically)
You can always spill coffee on your keyboard and then call the helpdesk if you want someone to chat to.
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@kirchhoff said:
1) We now (commonly) have office networks faster than the transfer rate of CD or DVD drives.
Common office networks are faster than everything else in the office. Notably, they're faster than that hard drive you've got in your desktop (by about a factor of 3, usually) - few people seem to realise this, because Windows servers have given them the impression that networks are slow.
High-end networks are faster than SDRAM, which makes the design of some processing clusters quite strange.
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@asuffield said:
@kirchhoff said:
1) We now (commonly) have office networks faster than the transfer rate of CD or DVD drives.
Common office networks are faster than everything else in the office. Notably, they're faster than that hard drive you've got in your desktop (by about a factor of 3, usually) - few people seem to realise this, because Windows servers have given them the impression that networks are slow.
High-end networks are faster than SDRAM, which makes the design of some processing clusters quite strange.
Blaming it on Windows sounds like gratuitous MS-bashing to me. As soon as a subnet has more than a single data transfer going over it, it becomes slower than a hard drive. And of course only gigabit or higher networks can theoretically exceed hard drive speed; many small companies are still on 100 megabit networks.EDIT: Errr sorry for the bump. I had forgotten that I was reading an ancient thread.
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@seaturnip said:
@asuffield said:
@kirchhoff said:
1) We now (commonly) have office networks faster than the transfer rate of CD or DVD drives.
Common office networks are faster than everything else in the office. Notably, they're faster than that hard drive you've got in your desktop (by about a factor of 3, usually) - few people seem to realise this, because Windows servers have given them the impression that networks are slow.
High-end networks are faster than SDRAM, which makes the design of some processing clusters quite strange.
Blaming it on Windows sounds like gratuitous MS-bashing to me.Empirical fact: Windows CIFS servers are bloody slow compared to NFS.
As soon as a subnet has more than a single data transfer going over it, it becomes slower than a hard drive.
Only if you're still using a hub. That's 1990s technology. Modern networks are point to point.
And of course only gigabit or higher networks can theoretically exceed hard drive speed; many small companies are still on 100 megabit networks.
Only if they're using the latest generations of hard drives, and even then only barely - the one I have in my desktop has a sustained write speed of around 200Mbit/sec on my benchmarks. Drives from three or four years ago are slower than 100Mbit network cards. Any company still on old network cards is probably also still on old drives. Also, laptop hard drives are much slower.
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@asuffield said:
Only if you're still using a hub. That's 1990s technology. Modern networks are point to point.
'course, you can still exceed the switch's capacity. Most places aren't going to go out and buy a Cisco or Juniper behemoth so the lusers firing .doc/.xls files at the server can get back to Minesweeper and Solitaire 5 seconds sooner.
I'm still waiting for a switch that implements various BOFH things, like remote electrocution of the truly stupid. ("There's a screen on my window and it won't go away! Click ok... Wow, it's gone!")
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@MarcB said:
@asuffield said:
Only if you're still using a hub. That's 1990s technology. Modern networks are point to point.
'course, you can still exceed the switch's capacity. Most places aren't going to go out and buy a Cisco or Juniper behemoth so the lusers firing .doc/.xls files at the server can get back to Minesweeper and Solitaire 5 seconds sooner.
Most desktop-level switches run at around 50% capacity - that is, their backplane can support about half of the total bandwidth of all their ports - and desktop loads are highly unlikely to ever hit that limit. You don't need a monster switch just to get full capacity, most major manufacturers build some models that way. An 8-port 1Gbit/s switch at full capacity typically costs around £600.
In the case of garden-variety Windows lusers, the limiting factor is the single crappy network card in the overpriced server that was bought by an MCSE, not the switch.
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@jetcitywoman said:
He might be talking about remote deployment of Windows and antivirus updates like my company does. It worries me but there's nothing I can do about it. One of these days they're going to push out an update that makes the machine puke all over the place and I'll be stuck twiddling my thumbs while they have to fix it. Even if that never happens, it's REALLY creepy when you computer suddenly installs something that you didn't tell it to. And annoying as all get out when it decides to reboot for no apparent reason. Sure, they generally give us 30 minutes to save our work, but it still pisses me off.
I had one instance where I was trying to use my computer while the IT department was trying to do an update. Because it wasn't responding the way they felt it should (probably because I was doing the unthinkable and completing my work) they opened up a remote session. It wasn't even separate from mine so while I am trying to work my pointer keeps getting jerked across the screen and I am getting rather irritated, especially since I had no idea what was going on. Soon thereafter I recieved a phone call demanding that I stop interfering with their use of my desktop.
Surely there is a better way to do updates to a computer.
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@Nakushita said:
Surely there is a better way to do updates to a computer.
Overnight application of a disk image supplied from the server. Update the image and everybody has it the next day. Simple, effective, and I do in an hour what they do in a week.
Most IT departments are staffed with complete idiots.
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@asuffield said:
Most IT departments are staffed with complete idiots.
I must say I have found that to be true as well. When the IT department starts calling me (and I do not claim guru or even knowledgeable status on anything) to inquire about how to do this or that, there is a problem.
Oh well... at least it keeps life entertaining or so I try to tell myself.
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@Nakushita said:
I had one instance where I was trying to use my computer while the IT department was trying to do an update. Because it wasn't responding the way they felt it should (probably because I was doing the unthinkable and completing my work) they opened up a remote session. It wasn't even separate from mine so while I am trying to work my pointer keeps getting jerked across the screen and I am getting rather irritated, especially since I had no idea what was going on. Soon thereafter I recieved a phone call demanding that I stop interfering with their use of my desktop.
Surely there is a better way to do updates to a computer.
And I thought my IT department were the only ones who do that. A lady in my office had that happen to her and her programs began closing "by themselves". She called me over and when I saw someone remote controlling her desktop I thought it must be a trojan so I yanked her network cable. A minute later she got a nasty call from an angry IT guy asking what she did to kill his remote session and threatening her about disrupting important IT business. What a buffoon!It's the same guy who tried to have me fired for using Linux at work (I am a Linux programmer).
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Yep, my company has that capability also but fortunately for me they haven't done that to me. It would really send me over the deep end. I consider myself a responsible, experienced IT person who tries to maintain proper security on my computers even though I'm not in the group who maintains the machines. So it freaks me out that they silently install gawd knows what on my laptop every week. It creeps me out when I see the Carbon Copy icon on my taskbar *sometimes* but most of the time it's not running. And I SWEAR that the machine's performance is degrading because of all the updates, patches and who-knows-what-else they've installed on it over the last year.
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@jetcitywoman said:
Yep, my company has that capability also but fortunately for me they haven't done that to me. It would really send me over the deep end. I consider myself a responsible, experienced IT person who tries to maintain proper security on my computers even though I'm not in the group who maintains the machines. So it freaks me out that they silently install gawd knows what on my laptop every week. It creeps me out when I see the Carbon Copy icon on my taskbar sometimes but most of the time it's not running. And I SWEAR that the machine's performance is degrading because of all the updates, patches and who-knows-what-else they've installed on it over the last year.
The really freaky thing is that although the IT department has not been outsourced yet, all of those updates, patches and who-knows-what-else are installed from a server located in Russia.
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@jetcitywoman said:
And I SWEAR that the machine's performance is degrading because of all the updates, patches and who-knows-what-else they've installed on it over the last year.
Just a year ago I was employed at a government department to help upgrade all the computers to SP2, along with an upgrade from Zenworks 4 to 7. The upgrade actually killed at least three computers I knew of personally. The work of upgrading caused the hard drives to crash! Dozens more computers needed to be reimaged as the upgrade sometimes made it unbootable.
It was pretty breezy since most of the updates were pushed over the network. The SP2 upgrade took between 30 minutes and 2 hours to complete so it was made "optional" for a few weeks. Updates would occur at logon so doing it before it was mandatory allowed the upgrade to happen when it was conveinient to the user.
Reimaging a machine was fun. Linux boot CD, takes image off Netware server, boots Windows 98 image which converts the FAT32 to NTFS, reboots into Windows XP, sets up all the drivers etc. Login once, reboot and it's good to go. Whole process was fairly quick and no interaction between selecting image until login stage. With thousands of computers to go through anything less would just be horrible.
Edit: and I was making a LOT more than $7/hour :)
