From: mjinks Date: 20:58 on 30 Sep 2003 Subject: does this count? I'm skipping a meeting right now, which some of my colleagues were roped into, because I cannot bear to sit through another 1.5 hour tour of a vendor's web-based application. I know how to use a web browser. I even, believe it or not, know how to fill out forms in a web browser and hit "submit". And I'm bothered by the apparent contradiction between "Oh, we'll make it Easy and Intuitive! We'll put it on the Web!" vis-a-vis "Please come to yet another meeting in which one of our salesdroids will show you PowerPoint [HATE] slides of screenshots of our intuitive, easy-to-use web application so you, idiot, will be able to use the damn thing." And the vendor? Sun Microsystems! Sun "why should Unix provide any usability tools at all?" Microsystems! Sun "we'd really like it if everybody had to pass through US$10,000 worth of LCD training classes before laying a finger on any of our products" Microsystems! Sun "all our employees run our main competitor's OS on their laptops because our own OS is just too damn tough to get any real use out of" Microsystems! Sun "we clearly have no idea how anybody manages to make their way around one of our machines without our help" Microsystems! And the application? An abomination which (Sun thinks) is going to sit on all our machines and send them constant updates on their status, like which particular DSIMM is going to go tits up and cause their half-million-dollar sooper-dooper fault-tolerant megabox to do a hard reset next Saturday night. Automagic! Easy to use! Huge time saver! Huge reliability increaser! Yeah. I'd rather spend my time venting at the hates-software list, thanks anyway. I hates software, and I hates the spawning grounds in which it breeds. Colleague, now on his way in to the meeting I'm boycotting: "They must know better by now."
From: blair christensen Date: 21:10 on 30 Sep 2003 Subject: Re: does this count? On 2003.09.30 14:58, Michael Jinks wrote: > I'm skipping a meeting right now, which some of my colleagues were roped > into, because I cannot bear to sit through another 1.5 hour tour of a > vendor's web-based application. Thankfully skipping the same meeting. The thought of spending over an hour staring blankly at a powerpoint presentation while someone cheerfully instructs me on how to fill out a web form and click submit could only lead to me inflicting great physical harm upon one or more of those bastards. > And the application? An abomination which (Sun thinks) is going to sit > on all our machines and send them constant updates on their status, like > which particular DSIMM is going to go tits up and cause their > half-million-dollar sooper-dooper fault-tolerant megabox to do a hard > reset next Saturday night. Automagic! Easy to use! Huge time saver! > Huge reliability increaser! Not that this would *ever* happen on a half-milliion-dollar sooper-dooper fault-tolerant megabox. Oh no! It could *not* happen. Well, maybe not more than once every week or two. For months on end. Thank you Sun Microsystems for making my life worth living, blair.
From: mjinks Date: 21:38 on 30 Sep 2003 Subject: Re: does this count? On Tue, Sep 30, 2003 at 03:10:57PM -0500, blair christensen wrote: > Thankfully skipping the same meeting. The thought of spending over an > hour staring blankly at a powerpoint presentation while someone > cheerfully instructs me on how to fill out a web form and click submit > could only lead to me inflicting great physical harm upon one or more > of those bastards. In that case, get ye in there posthaste! Hup, hup! It's not too late! > > half-million-dollar sooper-dooper fault-tolerant megabox to do a hard > > reset next Saturday night. Automagic! Easy to use! Huge time saver! > > Huge reliability increaser! > > Not that this would *ever* happen on a half-milliion-dollar > sooper-dooper fault-tolerant megabox. Oh no! It could *not* happen. > Well, maybe not more than once every week or two. For months on end. "But this will fix that! Honest! Trust us! All you have to do is give our happy automatic webified home-phoner root access on all your systems! See? Simple! Now sit back and let the magic work." > Thank you Sun Microsystems for making my life worth living, "We are the Dot in DotBomb!"
From: sabrina downard Date: 19:51 on 02 Oct 2003 Subject: Re: does this count? : The thought of spending over an : hour staring blankly at a powerpoint presentation while someone : cheerfully instructs me on how to fill out a web form and click submit : could only lead to me inflicting great physical harm upon one or more : of those bastards. Oh, no, it was much better than that. Drop an app on every machine, and it will magically talk to Sun, who will process and archive the performance and hardware information it collects, and then make pretty pictures for us to look at over the Web. No web-forms experience necessary. And it's all FREE! (well, for now. And except for the almost-sounds- useful bits.) Can we download the actual numbers, instead of pretty pictures? No. Can we have the information that it uploads? No. Well, maybe. There's an RFE in for that. When it detects a hardware problem, does it open a ticket for us? No. What happens if your hostid changes? Hostids don't change! Sure they do. Oh, well, in that case you have to reregister the host, losing all of the historical information. Does the monitoring utility keep track of time and page again if no one clears the first error? Oh, no. You only get one page ever. What dependences does it have? Oh, SunCheckup, Explorer, Sun StorADE, maybe T3 Extractor, a little of this, a dash of that. How do you keep them all up to date? Um, heh, heh, next question please! All this extra stuff won't impact your performance more than 0.5%! We *promise*! What happens if the network is broken? Well, the network better not break. Or you can buy our optional frame-relay service upgrade! And how about security? Well, it's all SSL from you to us. No, we can't tell you exactly what's on the backend. Trust us! How is Sun NetConnect 3.0 different from, oh, say, any one of the ten thousand other monitoring and graphing tools out there, which run on more than one platform, and several of which we're already using? Well, the web page comes with a pretty Sun logo on it! Logos will save the world.
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