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Admin
I really hope stuff like this is done for with those fancy HTML5 apps nowdays. I guess these will work with browsers of the future too. Although every bigger company on this planet still seems to have an ActiveX control lurking somewhere which can't be replaced :(
Admin
Because of these kinds of issues, Windows 7 comes with a virtual Windows XP machine called XP Mode. So what's the problem?
Admin
Miguel should've arranged for his laptop to have a fatal accident.
Admin
I Hear that next week Miguel is scheduled to get an update to Windows 8.
Admin
And, as obvious as it possibly can be, the saddest part is that the cost of hiring a specialist for those two weeks is far, far, far greater than the cost of laptop.
Such thinking also leads to, surprisingly common, "Yeah, let's make the 100$/h programmer do testing, because the company can't afford a 25$/h tester!"
Admin
Oh, please. Just get it right.
Admin
Isn't life too short for hell like this?
Admin
Why do i get the strangest feeling that Miguel hails from Portugal (and no, I am not going about it by his name...)
Admin
That mess is pretty much how any government functions (or disfunctions, as it were)
Admin
For some reason this does not sound like a DailyWTF. Just the Daily normal order of business here!
Admin
I work for one of the largest multinational companies. At New Year Corporate IT pushed out a new update of Windows to the PC's. It trashed my hard disk. It took me the rest of the week to install all my tools and start working again. Over the weekend the push happened again and again trashed my hard disk. I removed everything I do do without for a few days and tried again. The next weekend no crash. Eventually I found out that the driver for a device I had been using for over a year now had a compatibility problem that was causing the crash. I'm now in my 4th month of waiting for IT to decide on a card that will work with their New Year update! Corporate IT will not accept responsibility and everytime the case gets escalated to them, they reassign it to first tier support!
Admin
I had the same thought initially. But the issue would not be the version of Windows, it would the version of IE - Win7 has IE8 as the base, so I assume the ActiveX control was IE6/IE7.
XP Mode would not work
Admin
This all sounds far too familiar... In my previous job I worked as a contractor at MegaCorp inc. Periodically, my Windows/LDAP account would expire because someone at management level x had failed to extend me properly in The Systems (plural). It would then take up to 8 (eight!) days to restore it. During which time I could not access mail etc. Luckily I could still access the dev unix system.
Admin
I was just going to write "WOW." here and make a joke that was both an exclamation on how ridiculous this was and also a reference to Windows On Windows, but Akismet claimed that my attempt to be clever was, in fact, spam.
Brevity is the soul of wit. Akismet, clearly, is soulless.
Admin
I would love to get paid a hefty contractor rate for weeks and just sit around bullshitting or playing games on my phone. It would be boring as all hell, true, but there wouldn't be any actual work involved!
Admin
Try getting that VM joined to the domain. I know at my regular day job, that's far easier said than done.
Admin
Having had several hats in IT at various times, I have seen this from a number of sides and I don't have a good answer.
You have different groups with what often amount to competing agendas.
Security wants everything patched; this may break some older LOB apps.
Operations wants everything or a recent ideally uniform client; so the can patch, deploy, and tell helpdesk how to support.
Engineering support does not want to upgrade anything ever; Their 'customers' want to keep their costs down and continue using their 25 year old lab equipment and control systems along with their DOS based software components into the next decade.
Management wants Systems development to deploy BI tool version latest to all branch managers; helpdesk gets tired of walking them through installing Java 6u32 to use the tool and reinstalling u27 to access ($Customer|$Vendor)'s terrible website.
helpdesk/support is okay with whatever as long as it still conforms to the script they created five years ago. They wrote it and proudly call themselves analysts now; If you change anything that results in them having to read or think they cry.
Its not an easy problem for a largish organization to solve; at least not cheaply. You absolutely have to have a CIO with enough sense to see which way the wind is blowing. Usually the only answer for getting anything 'done' in IT is some group has to suck it up and find an alternative to whatever is getting broken. You have to have that one benevolent dictator to decide who, why, and when but hope to hell they don't monkey to much with the how.
Admin
i work for a bank owned by the government. bureaucracy is my bread and butter.
so we have all workstations (10000+) with the same image. and before deploying anything new, months of testing.
there you have it. no harm done.
Admin
I too work for a government agency that performs months of testing the image before deployment - about 18 months...
Admin
Admin
It doesn't sound that surprising, really... working somewhere that most of the developers are on 32-bit Windows XP, with machines crashing fairly regularly because of resource shortages. I mean, some of us have taken the initiative - moving away from using Visual Studio except where essential, and instead using command line-based building of projects and VIM. It's the past and the future, all rolled into one!
Admin
The best BigCorp places I've worked at treated their devs as another special group. We got the machines, the tools, and pretty much made most of the upgrades to our machines. We also had to extensively test our code before rollout to whatever configurations the corporate desktops had, as well.
The worst places were like the story - I had some project stall at QA because the security was so tight they wouldn't tell us how the machine was configured, or whether it was even close to our dev servers.
Admin
Also for security reasons, the laptop was not allowed to leave his desk. It was locked in place with a security chain too short to throw the laptop out the window.
Admin
Why can't "it's" stand for both "it is" and "it, his", just like "laptop's" can stand for "laptop is" and "laptop, his": "The laptop, his RAM was maxed out" is a valid, albeit archaic, English sentence, since it is supposedly the long form for "The laptop's RAM was maxed out".
Oh wait, it's because that would be introducing consistency to English. A language that has remained so consistent and unchanging since at least the time of Chaucer.
Admin
The realwtf is a laptop chained to a desk.
Admin
Admin
What is the deal with the unicorns when you click 2014 in the third paragraph?
Admin
its is correct when referring to non-people. :P
Admin
I'd gotten a Win 7 system dropped on my desk with the (lack of) instructions to migrate my old laptop apps myself. I had no rights at all on the new laptop. <sigh> So I open tickets, they get closed with no action. I escalate to management and someone finally stops by and says they'll be back in a few minutes. Never returns. A month goes by. So now my old/current laptop has it's domain rights revoked. I escalate to damagement again and I get grief on how I dared to do this when I could have opened a ticket. I let them have it.
So...
It takes 5 days to get admin rights to the new craptop even though everyone but me in my group (admins) already has it.
So I get everything migrated and installed on my own time (overnight)and disk. So now they want my old laptop back right now after telling me I had up to a month to verify. I handed it back minus the disk.
That went over well.
Welcome to the Fortune 500.
Admin
So that no one who reads comments on TDWTF for education gets confused, I have to be a pedantic^W^W^Wnote that Wikipedia says differently: For singulars, the modern possessive or genitive inflection is a survival from certain genitive inflections in Old English, and the apostrophe originally marked the loss of the old e (for example, lambes became lamb’s). "His" was used very briefly for the long form, but isn't, really.
Admin
I figured this was trolling, but indeed WTF is up with the unicorns? They multiply when you click on them too!
Admin
I have my wife's car.
Admin
So true!
MS is trying to fight this by dropping XP in .NET 4.5. I'll be curious to see whether they succeed...
Admin
Oh, I can top that. Let's have the dev team clean the kitchen on Fridays, because we can't afford to bring in a cleaner 1 day a week.
Seriously. Nevermind that they bring their own chemicals, and actually know how to clean things. The price difference alone should be enough.
Admin
Dumb question, I know, but Miguel was sitting on his rump for 2 weeks straight, and did not even get curious about what was in the bug tracker? An application (from the description in the article) that does not depend on Visual Studio of any sort. Just a website, and he never tries it out?
Admin
That means it's stable. Upgrade!
Admin
You must be new here. It's a Remy Porter article. They all have a Cornify link somewhere.
Admin
Biggest TRWTF... ActiveX, IE, Windows itself? Hard to decide...
Admin
Admin
Admin
Microsoft left the "compatible" out of "backwards compatible".
Admin
When I worked for "the city." I had to build a machine with parts I found. I had to install all the software. I had to figure out their network to get on it. There was no help-desk. I had to find my own work. And that's where it ended. Apparently showing up under the mayor's desk working on his computer when he was out of office was a bad thing. How I got into his office? I walked in. I was let go on good terms though, because I had done quite a bit. Just not enough to end up on Minesweeper for half the time. The other guy that hired on with me got to keep his job, because he was good with wires???
That was my stint in IT. After that, I went for a BS in Computer Science, got a minor in math (2 classes short of a second BS). 1 class short of a minor in art (for the hell of it). And enough logic, workflow, languages, etc. classes that most CS majors never get to see that our school was accredited by the Ivy Leagues and even that wasn't enough for how good the major was.
Too bad no one's heard of McNeese State U. For the longest time I couldn't understand why people thought CS majors weren't capable programmers.
Admin
If you have Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise, or Ultimate, go here:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=8002
Admin
That's quite the stretch - a laptop that supports up to 2GB of ram isn't really old enough for archaeologists to care about (after all, it's new enough that with the upgrades it can actually run Win 7).
Admin
Admin
Admin
Wait, they prohibited other machines, but let him bring in his phone? Nobody better tell them that smartphones are more sophisticated computers than some of the ones their developers are probably using.
Maybe phone-computers are just too new for them to be aware of... newer than gay marriage, or something.
Admin
Admin
Thanks for the info, however I am familiar with this setup already. I was hoping there was a more WoW integrated method... All [read: most] of the win32 libraries are already included in the WoW32_64 instalation, so I wouldn't think this should be as hard as it has been made to be.
Admin
English is the real WTF.