Nyanko's Basket

But making a decision governed by a code of ethics? That would be a challenge. IT is objective – either a program works, or it doesn’t; either you can ping the network, or you can’t. Ambiguity is antithetical. You can’t assign a value to “special care.” There’s no network protocol that supports it, and no function call that returns it.

So start with the basics: Don’t call users idiots. I don’t know if that qualifies as “special care,” but it is common courtesy. That’s a good start.

You have people who are forced into using IT because everyone needs to use it for their job nowadays, only some people don't want to so they purposely make moan and make out the situation is worse than it is just to satisfy their own technophobic paranoia - people like this are extremely frustrating to work with.

Then there are people who treat IT workers as their own personal slaves, requests such as "change my printer cartridge too" - things that frankly, even a monkey could be trained to do, this type of thing is completely demoralising. If you had a mechanic out to look at your car, what do you think their reaction would be if you turned round and say "Oh go and fill it up with gas for me too".

There's the people who simply ask too much, most IT departments are staffed okay for looking after the business but there are those that seem to feel that the IT staff should deal with the home too... There's plenty more reasons, but it seems more generally that IT has an identity crisis - users aren't entirely sure what we actually do, where the line is drawn as to what a user issue is and what an IT worker issue is.

This is the biggest bunch of nonsense that I've heard in a long time. Virtually every time I try to get help from my helpdesk on anything beyond pulling a cable or rebooting a server, I'm told that they can't help me, even when what I'm trying to do is required by policies that the IT people have put into place in the first place. My favorite reason for not helping is that I don't have a "supported configuration", even though I'm running name-brand hardware and software. My feeling about my IT people is that they're really great at running the network and server farms, but beyond that they don't care about their customers.

  8    93 ms    96 ms    91 ms  p16-0-2-0.r21.tokyjp01.jp.bb.gin.ntt.net [129.250.12.241]
  9   202 ms   202 ms   201 ms  p64-2-1-0.r21.sttlwa01.us.bb.gin.ntt.net [129.250.4.185]
 10   200 ms   202 ms   197 ms  if-1-0.core1.SEP-Seattle.Teleglobe.net [207.45.196.33]
 11   202 ms   210 ms   199 ms  if-7-0.core2.SEP-Seattle.Teleglobe.net [207.45.196.37]
 12   209 ms   207 ms   213 ms  66.110.64.6
 13   257 ms   256 ms   255 ms  if-7-0.core1.CT8-Chicago.teleglobe.net [66.110.27.5]
 14   495 ms   436 ms     *     ix-8-1.core1.CT8-Chicago.teleglobe.net [66.110.27.26]
 15   405 ms   406 ms     *     66.249.95.249
 16   442 ms     *        *     66.249.94.127
 17   429 ms   422 ms   423 ms  216.239.43.118
 18   417 ms   435 ms   430 ms  nz-in-f111.google.com [64.233.163.111]

 8   107 ms    94 ms    94 ms  p16-0-2-0.r21.tokyjp01.jp.bb.gin.ntt.net [129.250.12.241]
 9   203 ms   208 ms   208 ms  p64-2-1-0.r21.sttlwa01.us.bb.gin.ntt.net [129.250.4.185]
10   198 ms   197 ms   200 ms  if-1-0.core1.SEP-Seattle.Teleglobe.net [207.45.196.33]
11   204 ms   204 ms   206 ms  if-12-0.core1.SQN-SanJose.teleglobe.net [66.198.97.21]
12   207 ms   203 ms   205 ms  Vlan3.msfc1.SQN-SanJose.Teleglobe.net [64.86.82.194]
13   442 ms     *      378 ms  Vlan154.msfc1.SQN-SanJose.teleglobe.net [209.58.3.6]
14     *      380 ms     *     66.249.94.2
15     *      378 ms   367 ms  66.249.94.226
16   386 ms   371 ms   376 ms  216.239.49.2
17   381 ms   367 ms     *     cw-in-f83.google.com [216.239.57.83]
18   376 ms   365 ms   379 ms  cw-in-f83.google.com [216.239.57.83]

C:\Windows>sc config ubhelper start= disabled
[SC] ChangeServiceConfig SUCCESS

itsacz

wao

The myth of open source rests on two improbable assumptions. The first is that a significant proportion of users can fix bugs. That is true at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where the concept of free software was first formalised in the 1980s by Richard Stallman and others, and it is true in some of the geekier corners of the internet. But on programs intended for use by the non-programming public, it's a very different story.

This is important because of the second crucial false assumption: that even if not all users can fix a bug, they can help find them. They can't. Most users just think: "The computer isn't doing what I want."

But that doesn't mean open source is somehow infallible. Sometimes the comments here read like a devout Catholic thinking I've started a smear campaign against the immaculate conception. Keep in mind that it's just software and that it can always get better. Things get better as we find their bugs and improve them.