Dear Users… (A thread for Sysadmin, Technical Support, and Help Desk people) Part 10 - Page 46

Norman Alexander · 30th January 2023, 05:44 PM

Originally Posted by arthwollipot

Sure. That's very much not the usual situation, though. The vast majority of clients of Microsoft's cloud solutions are not like that.

This particular outage occurred just as I was finishing my last day before a 4-day weekend, so I never found out how long it lasted. I'd be pretty surprised if it was more than an hour. During a non-peak time when almost nobody was using it. That amount of sloppiness is more than acceptable when as I say the downtime is exceptionally rare compared to the old system.

I do understand. I have worked and contracted to businesses where even a couple of hours outage was inconvenient but acceptable.

Our situation is we have a government mandate that we MUST move all our operations to cloud-based in order to "save money". Not even counting the serious issues of having our now-cloud-based patient scheduling systems offline, affecting patient admissions, discharges, movements, consults, surgeries, etc., it simply is not cheaper than when we did it in-house. Seriously not, and we knew that going in because we can count.

The conservative bean-counters in the state government office block are trying to treat hospitals like they were Amazon warehouses - shifting a patient hither and yon is exactly the same as shifting a carton about, in their eyes. No it ain't, especially if it involves sick children, which our hospital does. They don't seem to see that even a short system outage means days of rescheduling problems, delayed procedures and postponed surgeries. Great for the best treatment for sick kids!

Our old in-house systems were not only cheaper, although they were getting clanky they did not stop working 24x7x365.

Sorry to harp on this, but it is a real bugbear here just now. We don't have a problem with cloud for non-clinical purposes. But when it comes to patient care, it isn't reliable enough yet.

arthwollipot · 30th January 2023, 06:15 PM

I've got to say - I'm rather sick of people phoning the followup line just to ensure that we're doing our jobs.

a_unique_person · 30th January 2023, 10:11 PM

People who send a screenshot of a list of serial numbers that have to be checked out. That should be a crime.

arthwollipot · 30th January 2023, 10:33 PM

Originally Posted by a_unique_person

People who send a screenshot of a list of serial numbers that have to be checked out. That should be a crime.

Or user IDs. Or email addresses.

novaphile · 30th January 2023, 10:58 PM

OMG. I really don't miss the ridiculous numbers of people, including 'IT People' and 'IT HELPDESK people' who couldn't work out how to cut and paste on a computer.

Same deal, instead of sending me the text of an error message, they'd send me a screenshot of the first few lines of an error message.

Seriously people!

Click on the text of the error, Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V into the email you're going to send, or into a text file.

That key combination was probably invented in the 1950's!!!

Wudang · 31st January 2023, 02:27 AM

OneNote used to be installed on PCs at <Big bank> and way back then it had a pretty decent OCR function if you pasted a screenshot into it. With each new version though almost every part of OneNote seemed to get worse.

zooterkin · 31st January 2023, 02:37 AM

Originally Posted by novaphile

OMG. I really don't miss the ridiculous numbers of people, including 'IT People' and 'IT HELPDESK people' who couldn't work out how to cut and paste on a computer.

Same deal, instead of sending me the text of an error message, they'd send me a screenshot of the first few lines of an error message.

Seriously people!

Click on the text of the error, Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V into the email you're going to send, or into a text file.

That key combination was probably invented in the 1950's!!!

One level worse, a screen shot pasted into a Word document. So now you have to open Word, and then hope that the image has enough resolution so that when you export it from Word that you can actually read the text in the screenshot.

Wudang · 31st January 2023, 02:44 AM

ob xkcd.

zooterkin · 31st January 2023, 03:04 AM

Originally Posted by Wudang

ob xkcd.

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/norm_no...ile_format.png

Exactly! (Very late acknowledgment of the issue by Randall Munroe, though.

That's from 2019, and I retired in 2018, and had been having the problem years before that.)

Wudang · 31st January 2023, 03:35 AM

Originally Posted by zooterkin

Exactly! (Very late acknowledgment of the issue by Randall Munroe, though.

That's from 2019, and I retired in 2018, and had been having the problem years before that.)

Oh yes I got a lot in 2000-16 and almost entirely from IT staff.

Darat · 31st January 2023, 03:39 AM

Originally Posted by Norman Alexander

I do understand. I have worked and contracted to businesses where even a couple of hours outage was inconvenient but acceptable.

Our situation is we have a government mandate that we MUST move all our operations to cloud-based in order to "save money". Not even counting the serious issues of having our now-cloud-based patient scheduling systems offline, affecting patient admissions, discharges, movements, consults, surgeries, etc., it simply is not cheaper than when we did it in-house. Seriously not, and we knew that going in because we can count.

The conservative bean-counters in the state government office block are trying to treat hospitals like they were Amazon warehouses - shifting a patient hither and yon is exactly the same as shifting a carton about, in their eyes. No it ain't, especially if it involves sick children, which our hospital does. They don't seem to see that even a short system outage means days of rescheduling problems, delayed procedures and postponed surgeries. Great for the best treatment for sick kids!

Our old in-house systems were not only cheaper, although they were getting clanky they did not stop working 24x7x365.

Sorry to harp on this, but it is a real bugbear here just now. We don't have a problem with cloud for non-clinical purposes. But when it comes to patient care, it isn't reliable enough yet.

Modern accountancy for you.

Norman Alexander · 31st January 2023, 04:00 AM

Originally Posted by Darat

Modern accountancy for you.

Average govt. IT manager: How many beans make five?

Typical govt. bean counter: Three. Two if you ask again. Pity you aren't a bean counter. Then it would be five.

Wudang · 31st January 2023, 04:02 AM

I read a worked example of how one guy was swapping back from AWS to his own servers but I can't find it yet (retweeted by a guy I follow who tweets a lot) but maybe I'll find it. This was a recent post (so recent AWS experience, it changed a lot in the time I used it) and who'd been carefully monitoring usage, costs etc and just couldn't keep it cheap. Priced some Dell servers with redundancy etc and it was significantly cheaper.
I've read a few articles where people worked out that AWS is great value on the small scale as you can (as we did) fire up and stop servers easily to meet demand. But as you scale up the prices get steeper.

Darat · 31st January 2023, 04:14 AM

"cheaper" is not actually a term many financial departments like outside a few irrelevances - like going to 60gsm paper rather than 80gsm paper to save 50p per ream, ignoring all the times documents had to be re-printed because the cheaper paper jammed print heads and paper feeds, couldn't use it for duplex printing and it was blamed for one laser printer setting on fire. Sorry got carried away about a real case I know about.

But seriously too many execs like being able to move IT to a "service" charge, that means they don't have balance sheets with all this horrible hardware that they have to write off from time to time, they don't need the employees to run it - headcount is toxic, don't need the premises.

Yes in any rational system a true cost comparison would be carried out, but that would involve execs being bothered about the state of the company in 10 years' time....

Norman Alexander · 31st January 2023, 04:40 AM

Originally Posted by Darat

"cheaper" is not actually a term many financial departments like outside a few irrelevances - like going to 60gsm paper rather than 80gsm paper to save 50p per ream, ignoring all the times documents had to be re-printed because the cheaper paper jammed print heads and paper feeds, couldn't use it for duplex printing and it was blamed for one laser printer setting on fire. Sorry got carried away about a real case I know about.

But seriously too many execs like being able to move IT to a "service" charge, that means they don't have balance sheets with all this horrible hardware that they have to write off from time to time, they don't need the employees to run it - headcount is toxic, don't need the premises.

Yes in any rational system a true cost comparison would be carried out, but that would involve execs being bothered about the state of the company in 10 years' time....

This is developing into a derail, but a potential solution is to lease the equipment on-site. The leasing company "owns" the kit and does all the upgrades, etc., but it lives on your premises. So you get the benefits of on-prem kit with the benefit of being "service charged" for it. That the total outlay over the equipment lifetime is way higher than making it a capital purchase is neither here nor there. The money comes from "a different bucket"

Mashuna · 31st January 2023, 08:53 AM

Originally Posted by Norman Alexander

This is developing into a derail, but a potential solution is to lease the equipment on-site. The leasing company "owns" the kit and does all the upgrades, etc., but it lives on your premises. So you get the benefits of on-prem kit with the benefit of being "service charged" for it. That the total outlay over the equipment lifetime is way higher than making it a capital purchase is neither here nor there. The money comes from "a different bucket"

This was clamped down on a number of years ago in the UK. If you're effectively taking out a finance lease so you own all the risks / costs of the equipment, you have to account for it as if you own it.

It's been a while since I last worked in that sector, so the details may be off slightly, but it's something like that.

Filippo Lippi · 31st January 2023, 01:42 PM

365 weeks a year? Which planet is this hospital on?

Norman Alexander · 31st January 2023, 03:35 PM

Originally Posted by Filippo Lippi

365 weeks a year? Which planet is this hospital on?

LOL.

arthwollipot · 31st January 2023, 07:01 PM

Originally Posted by Wudang

With each new version though almost every part of OneNote seemed to get worse.

Ugh, OneNote. I hate OneNote. If only it saved files as actual files like any normal application.

Norman Alexander · 31st January 2023, 11:12 PM

Originally Posted by arthwollipot

Ugh, OneNote. I hate OneNote. If only it saved files as actual files like any normal application.

I have never found a need to use OneNote.

arthwollipot · 31st January 2023, 11:33 PM

Originally Posted by Norman Alexander

I have never found a need to use OneNote.

I've got a bunch of stuff in OneNote, mainly boilerplates to copy and paste from, but at least I'm not dumb enough to try and share it with other users.

Filippo Lippi · 1st February 2023, 01:17 AM

Quote:

Ensure control frameworks are implemented in line with risk appetite and provide effective assurance and resilience of our IT services???????

Copied from a job ad. Always good to see "attention to detail" only runs so far in some organisations

Norman Alexander · 1st February 2023, 01:39 AM

Originally Posted by Filippo Lippi

Copied from a job ad. Always good to see "attention to detail" only runs so far in some organisations

Don't forget to actualise the conceptuals.

Wudang · 1st February 2023, 02:22 AM

Originally Posted by Norman Alexander

I have never found a need to use OneNote.

As I said it's got worse over the years but as an example, a few years back my team of 4 Devs built a really useful team tool with it. It held snippets of code, references to specs and other doc.
Top tabs were by project and within that side tabs were ADRs, implementation details, feedback from stakeholders etc.
Worked fat better for us than SharePoint which was run by knobheads.

eta: I'll need to check my wife or daughter's laptops for a recent Office. My laptop is Linux and my desktop has LibreOffice. I have vague memories of looking at a more recent OneNote and wondering WTF they'd done to it. In my view MS have never appreciated or understood what OneNote can do.

gnome · 1st February 2023, 07:07 AM

Originally Posted by Wudang

OneNote used to be installed on PCs at <Big bank> and way back then it had a pretty decent OCR function if you pasted a screenshot into it. With each new version though almost every part of OneNote seemed to get worse.

I found that a useful feature, I wonder why they didn't keep it.

catsmate · 1st February 2023, 12:43 PM

Originally Posted by Norman Alexander

This is developing into a derail, but a potential solution is to lease the equipment on-site. The leasing company "owns" the kit and does all the upgrades, etc., but it lives on your premises. So you get the benefits of on-prem kit with the benefit of being "service charged" for it. That the total outlay over the equipment lifetime is way higher than making it a capital purchase is neither here nor there. The money comes from "a different bucket"

That is a very profitable model for the leasing company.

BowlOfRed · 1st February 2023, 01:41 PM

Originally Posted by Wudang

I've read a few articles where people worked out that AWS is great value on the small scale as you can (as we did) fire up and stop servers easily to meet demand. But as you scale up the prices get steeper.

You'd sort of hope that is the case.

As you get bigger, more and more of what you pay for is the actual hardware and DC costs and (hopefully) the management overhead doesn't scale as quickly. So you're paying for the same machines, plus all the provider's costs.

Only place I'd really plan for such a provider is when your usage patterns aren't huge, stable, or non-decreasing. If you have spiky usage and can scale quickly enough, there's no way that holding that capital on your own for the entire year should make sense. Paying a provider for only the spike would be great.

My last 3 companies have been huge and had more stable (and forecastable) demand. Moving services to a cloud provider would have been very expensive and involved more complex problems because of trying to interface two separate IT departments....

gnome · 1st February 2023, 01:57 PM

Originally Posted by Mashuna

This was clamped down on a number of years ago in the UK. If you're effectively taking out a finance lease so you own all the risks / costs of the equipment, you have to account for it as if you own it.

It's been a while since I last worked in that sector, so the details may be off slightly, but it's something like that.

Oh no! That means they can't lease the machine that goes "ping" back from the company they sold it to, so that it comes under the monthly current budget and not the capital account?

novaphile · 1st February 2023, 02:52 PM

Originally Posted by Norman Alexander

Don't forget to actualise the conceptuals.

and leverage the knowledge paradigm.

novaphile · 1st February 2023, 02:54 PM

Originally Posted by Wudang

As I said it's got worse over the years but as an example, a few years back my team of 4 Devs built a really useful team tool with it. It held snippets of code, references to specs and other doc.
Top tabs were by project and within that side tabs were ADRs, implementation details, feedback from stakeholders etc.
Worked fat better for us than SharePoint which was run by knobheads.

eta: I'll need to check my wife or daughter's laptops for a recent Office. My laptop is Linux and my desktop has LibreOffice. I have vague memories of looking at a more recent OneNote and wondering WTF they'd done to it. In my view MS have never appreciated or understood what OneNote can do.

<shudder>

Sharepoint is the elephants graveyard. Everyone has heard of it, no one knows where it is. It should have the tagline:

"Sharepoint: Where information goes to die."

Wudang · 1st February 2023, 03:10 PM

Originally Posted by novaphile

<shudder>

Sharepoint is the elephants graveyard. Everyone has heard of it, no one knows where it is. It should have the tagline:

"Sharepoint: Where information goes to die."

Sharepoint can be OK. Not great but OK. We tried running our own and it was ok. Then management knobs took over who had no idea what our working practices were or anything really. One of their first decisions was disabling direct links that allowed docs etc to be moved from one place to another and still be found. So link rot all over. That and other decisions made it unusable.

arthwollipot · 1st February 2023, 05:19 PM

Originally Posted by Wudang

Sharepoint can be OK. Not great but OK. We tried running our own and it was ok. Then management knobs took over who had no idea what our working practices were or anything really. One of their first decisions was disabling direct links that allowed docs etc to be moved from one place to another and still be found. So link rot all over. That and other decisions made it unusable.

Sharepoint very much depends on how it's set up. It can be set up so that it works excellently, if the engineers setting it up know what they're doing. If they don't, it can be a pile of dog's breakfast after it's come out of the dog's other end.

arthwollipot · 1st February 2023, 05:20 PM

Originally Posted by Filippo Lippi

Copied from a job ad. Always good to see "attention to detail" only runs so far in some organisations

It's a source of worry to me that I actually understand what they're asking for. Apart from the question marks at the end, of course.

I might need help.

TragicMonkey · 1st February 2023, 08:52 PM

Dearest User: I am not a snob. I do not drop the names of important people just to seem impressive myself. However, sometimes, on the rarest of occasions, situations present themselves in which one must --no matter how democratic they are in spirit-- pay a teensy bit of attention to a hierarchy. One such situation might be, oh, I don't know, today when you demanded I "drop everything" to do a Very Trivial Thing for you. User, my dear, I want you to navigate yourself (if you can) to the company org chart. Open it. Find your name. Look three levels above you. See that name? Now look two more levels above them. See that name? The work I'm doing is for their boss. The only thing likely to get dropped here is yourself!

catsmate · 2nd February 2023, 09:08 AM

Originally Posted by novaphile

<shudder>

Sharepoint is the elephants graveyard. Everyone has heard of it, no one knows where it is. It should have the tagline:

"Sharepoint: Where information goes to die."

I did one of the first EU implementations of it.......

CORed · 2nd February 2023, 09:32 AM

Originally Posted by TragicMonkey

Well, this is fun: soon we'll need an authenticator to authenticate the authenticator we currently use. I foresee no possible problems, complications, or absurdity with this.

Well, since this is a "security" measure, nobody in management will care in the slightest if it make it impossible to get any work done at all.

BowlOfRed · 2nd February 2023, 04:17 PM

Originally Posted by TragicMonkey

User, my dear, I want you to navigate yourself (if you can) to the company org chart.

Due to working for a company that is technically owned by another company, the MS Outlook view of my hierarchy was that I was on level 14. Only thirteen steps below the big, big boss.

(It wasn't quite real. Besides the top 3 being real execs at the parent company, at least two of the folks were admins rather than actual managers). But I was a long, long, way down....

TragicMonkey · 2nd February 2023, 04:58 PM

Originally Posted by BowlOfRed

Due to working for a company that is technically owned by another company, the MS Outlook view of my hierarchy was that I was on level 14. Only thirteen steps below the big, big boss.

(It wasn't quite real. Besides the top 3 being real execs at the parent company, at least two of the folks were admins rather than actual managers). But I was a long, long, way down....

Never trust Outlook. According to Outlook my job title is the one I had four years ago, my desk is located on a floor that doesn't exist in the building I worked in five years ago, and my phone number is a landline to the building I worked in ten years ago.

arthwollipot · 2nd February 2023, 05:00 PM

Originally Posted by TragicMonkey

Never trust Outlook. According to Outlook my job title is the one I had four years ago, my desk is located on a floor that doesn't exist in the building I worked in five years ago, and my phone number is a landline to the building I worked in ten years ago.

That's just someone failing to maintain the GAL properly.

TragicMonkey · 2nd February 2023, 05:09 PM

Originally Posted by arthwollipot

That's just someone failing to maintain the GAL properly.

I should hope, in the unlikely event I ever have a gal to maintain, I'd do so properly. See that she ate well, and had a nice comfortable place to sleep. Some nice clothes, a few accessories, access to transportation. And we'd talk, that's the key to a good relationship. It can't just be sex and crossbow hunting wild boar in the forest.

30th January 2023, 05:44 PM	#1801
Norman Alexander Penultimate Amazing Join Date: Nov 2014 Location: Dharug & Gundungurra Posts: 14,992	Originally Posted by arthwollipot Sure. That's very much not the usual situation, though. The vast majority of clients of Microsoft's cloud solutions are not like that. This particular outage occurred just as I was finishing my last day before a 4-day weekend, so I never found out how long it lasted. I'd be pretty surprised if it was more than an hour. During a non-peak time when almost nobody was using it. That amount of sloppiness is more than acceptable when as I say the downtime is exceptionally rare compared to the old system. I do understand. I have worked and contracted to businesses where even a couple of hours outage was inconvenient but acceptable. Our situation is we have a government mandate that we MUST move all our operations to cloud-based in order to "save money". Not even counting the serious issues of having our now-cloud-based patient scheduling systems offline, affecting patient admissions, discharges, movements, consults, surgeries, etc., it simply is not cheaper than when we did it in-house. Seriously not, and we knew that going in because we can count. The conservative bean-counters in the state government office block are trying to treat hospitals like they were Amazon warehouses - shifting a patient hither and yon is exactly the same as shifting a carton about, in their eyes. No it ain't, especially if it involves sick children, which our hospital does. They don't seem to see that even a short system outage means days of rescheduling problems, delayed procedures and postponed surgeries. Great for the best treatment for sick kids! Our old in-house systems were not only cheaper, although they were getting clanky they did not stop working 24x7x365. Sorry to harp on this, but it is a real bugbear here just now. We don't have a problem with cloud for non-clinical purposes. But when it comes to patient care, it isn't reliable enough yet.
	__________________ _{...our governments are just trying to protect us from terror. In the same way that someone banging a hornets’ nest with a stick is trying to protect us from hornets. Frankie Boyle, Guardian, July 2015} Last edited by Norman Alexander; 30th January 2023 at 05:47 PM.

30th January 2023, 06:15 PM	#1802
arthwollipot Observer of Phenomena Pronouns: he/him Join Date: Feb 2005 Location: Ngunnawal Country Posts: 82,132	I've got to say - I'm rather sick of people phoning the followup line just to ensure that we're doing our jobs.
	__________________ Слава Україні! Героям Слава! 20220224 - 20230224

30th January 2023, 10:11 PM	#1803
a_unique_person Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning Join Date: Jul 2002 Location: Waiting for the pod bay door to open. Posts: 45,256	People who send a screenshot of a list of serial numbers that have to be checked out. That should be a crime.
	__________________ *Continually pushing the boundaries of mediocrity.* Everything is possible, but not everything is probable. “Perception is real, but the truth is not.” - Imelda Marcos

30th January 2023, 10:33 PM	#1804
arthwollipot Observer of Phenomena Pronouns: he/him Join Date: Feb 2005 Location: Ngunnawal Country Posts: 82,132	Originally Posted by a_unique_person People who send a screenshot of a list of serial numbers that have to be checked out. That should be a crime. Or user IDs. Or email addresses.
	__________________ Слава Україні! Героям Слава! 20220224 - 20230224

30th January 2023, 10:58 PM	#1805
novaphile Quester of Doglets Join Date: Dec 2009 Location: Sunny South Australia Posts: 4,949	OMG. I really don't miss the ridiculous numbers of people, including 'IT People' and 'IT HELPDESK people' who couldn't work out how to cut and paste on a computer. Same deal, instead of sending me the text of an error message, they'd send me a screenshot of the first few lines of an error message. Seriously people! Click on the text of the error, Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V into the email you're going to send, or into a text file. That key combination was probably invented in the 1950's!!!
	__________________ We would be better, and braver, to engage in enquiry, rather than indulge in the idle fancy, that we already know -- Plato.

31st January 2023, 02:27 AM	#1806
Wudang BOFH Join Date: Jun 2003 Location: People's Republic of South Yorkshire Posts: 15,453	OneNote used to be installed on PCs at <Big bank> and way back then it had a pretty decent OCR function if you pasted a screenshot into it. With each new version though almost every part of OneNote seemed to get worse.
	__________________ "Your deepest pools, like your deepest politicians and philosophers, often turn out more shallow than expected." Walter Scott.

31st January 2023, 02:37 AM	#1807
zooterkin Nitpicking dilettante Administrator Join Date: Mar 2007 Location: Berkshire, mostly Posts: 55,835	Originally Posted by novaphile OMG. I really don't miss the ridiculous numbers of people, including 'IT People' and 'IT HELPDESK people' who couldn't work out how to cut and paste on a computer. Same deal, instead of sending me the text of an error message, they'd send me a screenshot of the first few lines of an error message. Seriously people! Click on the text of the error, Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V into the email you're going to send, or into a text file. That key combination was probably invented in the 1950's!!! One level worse, a screen shot pasted into a Word document. So now you have to open Word, and then hope that the image has enough resolution so that when you export it from Word that you can actually read the text in the screenshot.
	__________________ The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.Bertrand Russell Zooterkin is correct Darat Nerd! Hokulele Join the JREF Folders ! Team 13232 Ezekiel 23:20

31st January 2023, 02:44 AM	#1808
Wudang BOFH Join Date: Jun 2003 Location: People's Republic of South Yorkshire Posts: 15,453	ob xkcd.
	__________________ "Your deepest pools, like your deepest politicians and philosophers, often turn out more shallow than expected." Walter Scott.

31st January 2023, 03:04 AM	#1809
zooterkin Nitpicking dilettante Administrator Join Date: Mar 2007 Location: Berkshire, mostly Posts: 55,835	Originally Posted by Wudang ob xkcd. https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/norm_no...ile_format.png Exactly! (Very late acknowledgment of the issue by Randall Munroe, though. That's from 2019, and I retired in 2018, and had been having the problem years before that.)
	__________________ The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.Bertrand Russell Zooterkin is correct Darat Nerd! Hokulele Join the JREF Folders ! Team 13232 Ezekiel 23:20

31st January 2023, 03:35 AM	#1810
Wudang BOFH Join Date: Jun 2003 Location: People's Republic of South Yorkshire Posts: 15,453	Originally Posted by zooterkin Exactly! (Very late acknowledgment of the issue by Randall Munroe, though. That's from 2019, and I retired in 2018, and had been having the problem years before that.) Oh yes I got a lot in 2000-16 and almost entirely from IT staff.
	__________________ "Your deepest pools, like your deepest politicians and philosophers, often turn out more shallow than expected." Walter Scott.

31st January 2023, 03:39 AM	#1811
Darat Lackey Administrator Join Date: Aug 2001 Location: South East, UK Posts: 109,646	Originally Posted by Norman Alexander I do understand. I have worked and contracted to businesses where even a couple of hours outage was inconvenient but acceptable. Our situation is we have a government mandate that we MUST move all our operations to cloud-based in order to "save money". Not even counting the serious issues of having our now-cloud-based patient scheduling systems offline, affecting patient admissions, discharges, movements, consults, surgeries, etc., it simply is not cheaper than when we did it in-house. Seriously not, and we knew that going in because we can count. The conservative bean-counters in the state government office block are trying to treat hospitals like they were Amazon warehouses - shifting a patient hither and yon is exactly the same as shifting a carton about, in their eyes. No it ain't, especially if it involves sick children, which our hospital does. They don't seem to see that even a short system outage means days of rescheduling problems, delayed procedures and postponed surgeries. Great for the best treatment for sick kids! Our old in-house systems were not only cheaper, although they were getting clanky they did not stop working 24x7x365. Sorry to harp on this, but it is a real bugbear here just now. We don't have a problem with cloud for non-clinical purposes. But when it comes to patient care, it isn't reliable enough yet. Modern accountancy for you.
	__________________ I wish I knew how to quit you

31st January 2023, 04:00 AM	#1812
Norman Alexander Penultimate Amazing Join Date: Nov 2014 Location: Dharug & Gundungurra Posts: 14,992	Originally Posted by Darat Modern accountancy for you. Average govt. IT manager: How many beans make five? Typical govt. bean counter: Three. Two if you ask again. Pity you aren't a bean counter. Then it would be five.
	__________________ _{...our governments are just trying to protect us from terror. In the same way that someone banging a hornets’ nest with a stick is trying to protect us from hornets. Frankie Boyle, Guardian, July 2015}

31st January 2023, 04:02 AM	#1813
Wudang BOFH Join Date: Jun 2003 Location: People's Republic of South Yorkshire Posts: 15,453	I read a worked example of how one guy was swapping back from AWS to his own servers but I can't find it yet (retweeted by a guy I follow who tweets a lot) but maybe I'll find it. This was a recent post (so recent AWS experience, it changed a lot in the time I used it) and who'd been carefully monitoring usage, costs etc and just couldn't keep it cheap. Priced some Dell servers with redundancy etc and it was significantly cheaper. I've read a few articles where people worked out that AWS is great value on the small scale as you can (as we did) fire up and stop servers easily to meet demand. But as you scale up the prices get steeper.
	__________________ "Your deepest pools, like your deepest politicians and philosophers, often turn out more shallow than expected." Walter Scott.

31st January 2023, 04:14 AM	#1814
Darat Lackey Administrator Join Date: Aug 2001 Location: South East, UK Posts: 109,646	"cheaper" is not actually a term many financial departments like outside a few irrelevances - like going to 60gsm paper rather than 80gsm paper to save 50p per ream, ignoring all the times documents had to be re-printed because the cheaper paper jammed print heads and paper feeds, couldn't use it for duplex printing and it was blamed for one laser printer setting on fire. Sorry got carried away about a real case I know about. But seriously too many execs like being able to move IT to a "service" charge, that means they don't have balance sheets with all this horrible hardware that they have to write off from time to time, they don't need the employees to run it - headcount is toxic, don't need the premises. Yes in any rational system a true cost comparison would be carried out, but that would involve execs being bothered about the state of the company in 10 years' time....
	__________________ I wish I knew how to quit you

31st January 2023, 04:40 AM	#1815
Norman Alexander Penultimate Amazing Join Date: Nov 2014 Location: Dharug & Gundungurra Posts: 14,992	Originally Posted by Darat "cheaper" is not actually a term many financial departments like outside a few irrelevances - like going to 60gsm paper rather than 80gsm paper to save 50p per ream, ignoring all the times documents had to be re-printed because the cheaper paper jammed print heads and paper feeds, couldn't use it for duplex printing and it was blamed for one laser printer setting on fire. Sorry got carried away about a real case I know about. But seriously too many execs like being able to move IT to a "service" charge, that means they don't have balance sheets with all this horrible hardware that they have to write off from time to time, they don't need the employees to run it - headcount is toxic, don't need the premises. Yes in any rational system a true cost comparison would be carried out, but that would involve execs being bothered about the state of the company in 10 years' time.... This is developing into a derail, but a potential solution is to lease the equipment on-site. The leasing company "owns" the kit and does all the upgrades, etc., but it lives on your premises. So you get the benefits of on-prem kit with the benefit of being "service charged" for it. That the total outlay over the equipment lifetime is way higher than making it a capital purchase is neither here nor there. The money comes from "a different bucket"
	__________________ _{...our governments are just trying to protect us from terror. In the same way that someone banging a hornets’ nest with a stick is trying to protect us from hornets. Frankie Boyle, Guardian, July 2015}

31st January 2023, 08:53 AM	#1816
Mashuna Ovis ex Machina Join Date: Jan 2006 Location: Sir Ddinbych Posts: 6,963	Originally Posted by Norman Alexander This is developing into a derail, but a potential solution is to lease the equipment on-site. The leasing company "owns" the kit and does all the upgrades, etc., but it lives on your premises. So you get the benefits of on-prem kit with the benefit of being "service charged" for it. That the total outlay over the equipment lifetime is way higher than making it a capital purchase is neither here nor there. The money comes from "a different bucket" This was clamped down on a number of years ago in the UK. If you're effectively taking out a finance lease so you own all the risks / costs of the equipment, you have to account for it as if you own it. It's been a while since I last worked in that sector, so the details may be off slightly, but it's something like that.
	__________________ I’d rather be a rising ape than a falling angel. - Sir Terry Pratchett

31st January 2023, 01:42 PM	#1817
Filippo Lippi Illuminator Join Date: Nov 2002 Posts: 4,377	365 weeks a year? Which planet is this hospital on?
	__________________ You can't defeat fascism through debate because it's not simply an idea, proposal or theory. It's a fundamentally flawed way of looking at the world. It's a distorting prism, emotionally charged and completely logic-proof. You may as well challenge rabies to a game of Boggle. @ViolettaCrisis

31st January 2023, 03:35 PM	#1818
Norman Alexander Penultimate Amazing Join Date: Nov 2014 Location: Dharug & Gundungurra Posts: 14,992	Originally Posted by Filippo Lippi 365 weeks a year? Which planet is this hospital on? LOL.
	__________________ _{...our governments are just trying to protect us from terror. In the same way that someone banging a hornets’ nest with a stick is trying to protect us from hornets. Frankie Boyle, Guardian, July 2015}

31st January 2023, 07:01 PM	#1819
arthwollipot Observer of Phenomena Pronouns: he/him Join Date: Feb 2005 Location: Ngunnawal Country Posts: 82,132	Originally Posted by Wudang With each new version though almost every part of OneNote seemed to get worse. Ugh, OneNote. I hate OneNote. If only it saved files as actual files like any normal application.
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31st January 2023, 11:12 PM	#1820
Norman Alexander Penultimate Amazing Join Date: Nov 2014 Location: Dharug & Gundungurra Posts: 14,992	Originally Posted by arthwollipot Ugh, OneNote. I hate OneNote. If only it saved files as actual files like any normal application. I have never found a need to use OneNote.
	__________________ _{...our governments are just trying to protect us from terror. In the same way that someone banging a hornets’ nest with a stick is trying to protect us from hornets. Frankie Boyle, Guardian, July 2015}

31st January 2023, 11:33 PM	#1821
arthwollipot Observer of Phenomena Pronouns: he/him Join Date: Feb 2005 Location: Ngunnawal Country Posts: 82,132	Originally Posted by Norman Alexander I have never found a need to use OneNote. I've got a bunch of stuff in OneNote, mainly boilerplates to copy and paste from, but at least I'm not dumb enough to try and share it with other users.
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1st February 2023, 01:17 AM	#1822
Filippo Lippi Illuminator Join Date: Nov 2002 Posts: 4,377	Quote: Ensure control frameworks are implemented in line with risk appetite and provide effective assurance and resilience of our IT services??????? Copied from a job ad. Always good to see "attention to detail" only runs so far in some organisations
	__________________ You can't defeat fascism through debate because it's not simply an idea, proposal or theory. It's a fundamentally flawed way of looking at the world. It's a distorting prism, emotionally charged and completely logic-proof. You may as well challenge rabies to a game of Boggle. @ViolettaCrisis

1st February 2023, 01:39 AM	#1823
Norman Alexander Penultimate Amazing Join Date: Nov 2014 Location: Dharug & Gundungurra Posts: 14,992	Originally Posted by Filippo Lippi Copied from a job ad. Always good to see "attention to detail" only runs so far in some organisations Don't forget to actualise the conceptuals.
	__________________ _{...our governments are just trying to protect us from terror. In the same way that someone banging a hornets’ nest with a stick is trying to protect us from hornets. Frankie Boyle, Guardian, July 2015}

1st February 2023, 02:22 AM	#1824
Wudang BOFH Join Date: Jun 2003 Location: People's Republic of South Yorkshire Posts: 15,453	Originally Posted by Norman Alexander I have never found a need to use OneNote. As I said it's got worse over the years but as an example, a few years back my team of 4 Devs built a really useful team tool with it. It held snippets of code, references to specs and other doc. Top tabs were by project and within that side tabs were ADRs, implementation details, feedback from stakeholders etc. Worked fat better for us than SharePoint which was run by knobheads. eta: I'll need to check my wife or daughter's laptops for a recent Office. My laptop is Linux and my desktop has LibreOffice. I have vague memories of looking at a more recent OneNote and wondering WTF they'd done to it. In my view MS have never appreciated or understood what OneNote can do.
	__________________ "Your deepest pools, like your deepest politicians and philosophers, often turn out more shallow than expected." Walter Scott. Last edited by Wudang; 1st February 2023 at 04:00 AM.

1st February 2023, 07:07 AM	#1825
gnome Penultimate Amazing Join Date: Aug 2001 Posts: 13,767	Originally Posted by Wudang OneNote used to be installed on PCs at <Big bank> and way back then it had a pretty decent OCR function if you pasted a screenshot into it. With each new version though almost every part of OneNote seemed to get worse. I found that a useful feature, I wonder why they didn't keep it.
	__________________

1st February 2023, 12:43 PM	#1826
catsmate No longer the 1 Join Date: Apr 2007 Posts: 28,617	Originally Posted by Norman Alexander This is developing into a derail, but a potential solution is to lease the equipment on-site. The leasing company "owns" the kit and does all the upgrades, etc., but it lives on your premises. So you get the benefits of on-prem kit with the benefit of being "service charged" for it. That the total outlay over the equipment lifetime is way higher than making it a capital purchase is neither here nor there. The money comes from "a different bucket" That is a very profitable model for the leasing company.
	__________________ As human right is always something given, it always in reality reduces to the right which men give, "concede," to each other. If the right to existence is conceded to new-born children, then they have the right; if it is not conceded to them, as was the case among the Spartans and ancient Romans, then they do not have it. For only society can give or concede it to them; they themselves cannot take it, or give it to themselves.

1st February 2023, 01:41 PM	#1827
BowlOfRed Master Poster Join Date: Jul 2010 Location: Silicon Valley Posts: 2,343	Originally Posted by Wudang I've read a few articles where people worked out that AWS is great value on the small scale as you can (as we did) fire up and stop servers easily to meet demand. But as you scale up the prices get steeper. You'd sort of hope that is the case. As you get bigger, more and more of what you pay for is the actual hardware and DC costs and (hopefully) the management overhead doesn't scale as quickly. So you're paying for the same machines, plus all the provider's costs. Only place I'd really plan for such a provider is when your usage patterns aren't huge, stable, or non-decreasing. If you have spiky usage and can scale quickly enough, there's no way that holding that capital on your own for the entire year should make sense. Paying a provider for only the spike would be great. My last 3 companies have been huge and had more stable (and forecastable) demand. Moving services to a cloud provider would have been very expensive and involved more complex problems because of trying to interface two separate IT departments....

1st February 2023, 01:57 PM	#1828
gnome Penultimate Amazing Join Date: Aug 2001 Posts: 13,767	Originally Posted by Mashuna This was clamped down on a number of years ago in the UK. If you're effectively taking out a finance lease so you own all the risks / costs of the equipment, you have to account for it as if you own it. It's been a while since I last worked in that sector, so the details may be off slightly, but it's something like that. Oh no! That means they can't lease the machine that goes "ping" back from the company they sold it to, so that it comes under the monthly current budget and not the capital account?
	__________________

1st February 2023, 02:52 PM	#1829
novaphile Quester of Doglets Join Date: Dec 2009 Location: Sunny South Australia Posts: 4,949	Originally Posted by Norman Alexander Don't forget to actualise the conceptuals. and leverage the knowledge paradigm.
	__________________ We would be better, and braver, to engage in enquiry, rather than indulge in the idle fancy, that we already know -- Plato.

1st February 2023, 02:54 PM	#1830
novaphile Quester of Doglets Join Date: Dec 2009 Location: Sunny South Australia Posts: 4,949	Originally Posted by Wudang As I said it's got worse over the years but as an example, a few years back my team of 4 Devs built a really useful team tool with it. It held snippets of code, references to specs and other doc. Top tabs were by project and within that side tabs were ADRs, implementation details, feedback from stakeholders etc. Worked fat better for us than SharePoint which was run by knobheads. eta: I'll need to check my wife or daughter's laptops for a recent Office. My laptop is Linux and my desktop has LibreOffice. I have vague memories of looking at a more recent OneNote and wondering WTF they'd done to it. In my view MS have never appreciated or understood what OneNote can do. <shudder> Sharepoint is the elephants graveyard. Everyone has heard of it, no one knows where it is. It should have the tagline: "Sharepoint: Where information goes to die."
	__________________ We would be better, and braver, to engage in enquiry, rather than indulge in the idle fancy, that we already know -- Plato.

1st February 2023, 03:10 PM	#1831
Wudang BOFH Join Date: Jun 2003 Location: People's Republic of South Yorkshire Posts: 15,453	Originally Posted by novaphile <shudder> Sharepoint is the elephants graveyard. Everyone has heard of it, no one knows where it is. It should have the tagline: "Sharepoint: Where information goes to die." Sharepoint can be OK. Not great but OK. We tried running our own and it was ok. Then management knobs took over who had no idea what our working practices were or anything really. One of their first decisions was disabling direct links that allowed docs etc to be moved from one place to another and still be found. So link rot all over. That and other decisions made it unusable.
	__________________ "Your deepest pools, like your deepest politicians and philosophers, often turn out more shallow than expected." Walter Scott.

1st February 2023, 05:19 PM	#1832
arthwollipot Observer of Phenomena Pronouns: he/him Join Date: Feb 2005 Location: Ngunnawal Country Posts: 82,132	Originally Posted by Wudang Sharepoint can be OK. Not great but OK. We tried running our own and it was ok. Then management knobs took over who had no idea what our working practices were or anything really. One of their first decisions was disabling direct links that allowed docs etc to be moved from one place to another and still be found. So link rot all over. That and other decisions made it unusable. Sharepoint very much depends on how it's set up. It can be set up so that it works excellently, if the engineers setting it up know what they're doing. If they don't, it can be a pile of dog's breakfast after it's come out of the dog's other end.
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1st February 2023, 05:20 PM	#1833
arthwollipot Observer of Phenomena Pronouns: he/him Join Date: Feb 2005 Location: Ngunnawal Country Posts: 82,132	Originally Posted by Filippo Lippi Copied from a job ad. Always good to see "attention to detail" only runs so far in some organisations It's a source of worry to me that I actually understand what they're asking for. Apart from the question marks at the end, of course. I might need help.
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1st February 2023, 08:52 PM	#1834
TragicMonkey Poisoned Waffles Join Date: Jun 2004 Location: Monkey Posts: 66,043	Dearest User: I am not a snob. I do not drop the names of important people just to seem impressive myself. However, sometimes, on the rarest of occasions, situations present themselves in which one must --no matter how democratic they are in spirit-- pay a teensy bit of attention to a hierarchy. One such situation might be, oh, I don't know, today when you demanded I "drop everything" to do a Very Trivial Thing for you. User, my dear, I want you to navigate yourself (if you can) to the company org chart. Open it. Find your name. Look three levels above you. See that name? Now look two more levels above them. See that name? The work I'm doing is for their boss. The only thing likely to get dropped here is yourself!
	__________________ You added nothing to that conversation, Barbara.

2nd February 2023, 09:08 AM	#1835
catsmate No longer the 1 Join Date: Apr 2007 Posts: 28,617	Originally Posted by novaphile <shudder> Sharepoint is the elephants graveyard. Everyone has heard of it, no one knows where it is. It should have the tagline: "Sharepoint: Where information goes to die." I did one of the first EU implementations of it.......
	__________________ As human right is always something given, it always in reality reduces to the right which men give, "concede," to each other. If the right to existence is conceded to new-born children, then they have the right; if it is not conceded to them, as was the case among the Spartans and ancient Romans, then they do not have it. For only society can give or concede it to them; they themselves cannot take it, or give it to themselves.