Editorial -in the fifth part-
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A reminder: What does it all mean?
Poking fun at PC's gives me great joy because it is so easy, on the other hand a Mac user or owner will tell you they are treated by their machine with respect. Respect in one example such as when you pop a disk into a drive the contents will present itself on the desktop, PC users will agree you must hunt down the contents of a disk (if you have prior knowledge of where to look) and pray that it will be there. Networked drives are a whole story to themselves. I've been writing about this since 1997 and to this day nothing has improved generally in the PC world. At the office, countless upgrades and hardware updates have entertained me for years. Sad that we cannot fix the trouble ourselves (network related password protected, yadda, yadda) because I would rather be doing something else beside listening to "Your call is important to us, please remain holding for the next available....." The desktop support staff are tired of listening to our whining and complaining, mind you they have done exactly nothing to fix our complaints. They show up and poke around saying all is well and leave. We have been duped again. |
010330 - Today's Rant
It's been about one and a half years since I last had a rant, partly because I have become complacent and fighting the battle has become a lost cause. Don't think for a minute that I have given up hope, it is the state of DOS propelled networking that will never show any sign of improvement that has me resigned to "it looks like it is not changing any time soon." By any time soon I am trying to say the generations following me will only know that networked and stand alone DOS boxes simply stated "just work that way." Sad I must say for our human state of mind to become so comfortable with this insult to our intelligence that the company of Bill has the DOS believers of the planet convinced this is the way it should be. Lemmings are smarter.
Last week after a frustrating few days of trying to get the network and DOS box to spit out some goods I gave my head a shake and came to the conclusion, nobody is going to fix things unless I do it myself. This alone is not a divine revelation in itself but it is a step that no one to date has taken. That makes it a profound step indeed. Consider the result of "announcements" from 11 years past that all will be approaching nirvana when DOS boxes reach the hands of common folk, propaganda floats.
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One or two rums later I had a pseudo business case put together to obtain a laptop DOS box waffle iron. Think about it, how can I control the state of care and feeding and at the same time know when and how the thing will behave the next time it is used? One of two ways (there is a third, but they won't buy me one) the first being to lock it a room but trouble here is you must decide where that room is going to be, if available. Second method would be to take the machine with me.
Thinking may do the most damage at this point, goals for computing bliss with demands made for computational horsepower and flexibility are as we speak falling on deaf ears. I am not privy to the secret handshake required when purchasing such waffle iron devices so I simply stated the obvious. We need this and that, nothing more. Well as it stands we may get something else.
The whole problem of the DOS office environment that has caused us grief for MANY years could be partly solved by some innovative thinking and wise purchases at the onset. Time and money saved will be immediate for an extra few dollars spent at the start. As sure as I am sitting here, this will not happen and it is my fear we are taking a step backward at light speed. The Dilbert method of survival must be applied liberally each day.
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So now what? The rub is this, right from the start I am asking for a waffle iron that we know will be stable and can transfer files of notable size between my small group of co-workers, period. To bring this point home and to keep the door open for the future (let's say next week) stating some examples of minimum requirements were made as a guideline and I left it in their hands to choose. Preliminary reports of the purchase are sadly minimal. The machine will be poorly equiped for stability and NO method of transfering files of larger size, within reasonable time frames. The transfer of files via ethernet is possible but field use does not always make available a connection to ethernet, some may understand this but it seems the majority do not.
Silly me, saying what we need I thought is good enough. Let me offer an example, We need to publish for the group a collection of files in a large quantity daily. This group of information may or may not be used by everyone but it must be made available to all. Each day it is put together and currently distributed by paper. Hundreds of pages each day for all members to see and use. Tell me if I am off the point, would it not seem reasonable to put this on a disk or transmit it via IR or wireless LAN to fellow users? The mail system will not allow large files as most do not (this is common knowledge) and we are fully aware we need another solution. I stated many solutions and all were ignored. So what do we do now? Do you feel a future rant coming about how well we will be able to network these new waffle irons? As above I asked for waffle irons stating our needs and wishes. Being in the employ of a large corporation I know full well you must make a good case for what you fundamentally require for fear it will be shot down or reduced. The need is genuine and well over due. However I may have over stated the demands knowing they would be reduced to a more reasonable level. Something I did not expect to happen was the unrecognizable results and total blind view of our needs. I shouldn't be so negative, we will after all get a very nice $5000 bag to put things like our lunch in when we leave the near useless waffle iron back at the office. Research is underway to pry a reasonable amount of information on how to get one step closer to what we really could use. To me it looks like the model and how it is equiped is not negotiable for whatever the situation demands. The currently equiped state of the machine is unknown at this moment (in transport) but stay tuned for results as they are revealed.
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"Is that seat saved? No, but we're praying for it!"
D2M © 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 MacMcLellan A graduate of Curmudgeon Emeritus.