Two of the five year old computers in the lab have “died” and had to be replaced with P4 machines with XP. Hindsight is 20/20 and my optimal solution would have been to just buy the equivalent replacement motherboard at now discounted prices due to something call RoHS. Rip every connector off it and painstakingly reconnect each one. This however presented a purchasing policy nightmare given the time constraints of “need it yesterday”.
These are of course non-networked engineering machines operated without the internet but performed flawlessly the control of process machines in the lab. The painful part is that a hardware “upgrade” comes with the burden of the software “upgrade”, which I did not desire, need or want after having certified all of the essential timing of IO signals with an oscilloscope.
Well the new faster “upgraded” machine crashes repeatedly due to the bloated XP operating system plus insufficient memory. It fails to run the programs which ran perfectly on the older “inferior” machine plus has the added annoyance of continuously asking to be net connected. Plus the other things it just does, but why know not yet why.
The “firewall” blocks/delays/barfs out a needed firewire camera. The “obsolete” driver could only be obtained from the manufacturer after the certification of my valid license and hours on the phone.
I am also not totally convinced that the frequent changes of hardware cards and configurations required by the nature of what our lab does will forever be a total pain in the ass and require that illegible incoherent phone call to India to “reactivate my ass-ets”.
It is after all only a toy. A thing to zap aliens from Zog on but we as Americans take it far too seriously, even putting our most valuable and trusted information on it. My trust in these things is about at it’s end. It is a money making, self perpetuating deal of meaningless “upgrades” simply to enhance profit margins.
I could of course farm all of this out to our people deficient,unknowledgeable outsourced IT department but when I did that in the past a premier high visibilty project was two months behind schedule. They supplied me with a PC with the newer half size PC expansion cards and when my programming mistake surfaced an easy solution presented itself. I had a fully size workable PC card in my hand I could not use. The purchasing process takes weeks.
The Satan inspired business practices of Microsoft became the IT industry standard, leading to the decline of “western civilization” in the early 21st century.
Just another day in the life of an engineer.
But it seems more than this to be the problem. There are hundreds of ways to mitigate your architecture. Speaking as a past System Analyst, I know of what you speak. There has always been a wall between the User, and the IT Department, especially engineer types and the IT. Back in the freewheeling days, engineers were given permissions to use their PCs as they saw fit, it was a footloose and fancy free environment, which led to more creativity by the engineers IMHO. But with each new cycle of computer enhancements, comes a new round of security, and architecture to accompany those changes. That’s a big damper to the creative process.
XP isn’t half as bad as Vista, so consider yourself lucky. And I would be remiss, if I didn’t put a plug in for Linux. Half the time a linux machine is installed by an engineer, the IT dept. isn’t even aware of it. They’re not looking for them…hint.
heh…was just about to suggest the same thing horseman…
“L” is for
clik
lTMF’sA
A friend of mine showed me an article a few years ago written by a guy in an IT department about “Hubert.” Hubert was a machine on their network. No one knew where it lived, or really anything about it. They just new it was hooked to their printer, sent and received their mail, handled some of their files, and it Just Worked.
He finally tracked Hubert down one day in a corner of the IT lab somewhere and found it to be an ancient machine running some long-abandoned version of the Linux kernel (maybe even before Version 2 — I’m not sure). It hadn’t been rebooted in something like three years. He just dusted it off and let it sit in its corner, quietly humming away.
I’ve been using Linux for over 10 years now and even though I make my living schlepping Windows code around, Linux is still my love. (After my wife and kids, of course.)