Dear Users... (A thread for Sysadmin, Technical Support, and Help Desk people)

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We are waiting to move into our new office and it is being wired and put together right now. I called in yesterday and saw that someone had been wrapping coloured tape around the likes of power cables, monitor cables, it really clashed with the decor so I had to spend nearly two hours picking it off all the cables!

Looks much better but really going to have to speak to the contractor we can see cables!
 
Just tell people they can convert their technology to wireless with a simple pair of scissors.

Remind them it won't work unless everything's plugged in and turned on when they do it.
 
Talking of time machines, I have often said the only way to fix our core batch process is to travel back in time and punch anyone going with writing it in xxxxxx*

*if you were to google the name of the language, the only recent mention of it is folk from our place asking on mainframe forums if anyone else has ever seen it. They have not
 
"Why aren't the test results in the field for numeric values?"
"Because the results are a string reading 'greater than 12'".
"That's numeric!"
 
TragicMonkey said:
"Why aren't the test results in the field for numeric values?"
"Because the results are a string reading 'greater than 12'".
"That's numeric!"
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If it was a user saying that, I wouldn't be surprised. But the conversation says "string," so I'm assuming this was either two developers talking or QA and a developer. And if the developer didn't know the difference between a string and a numeric variable, he/she should go back to school. Certainly should not be writing software for production use.
 
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Even I know the difference between a string and a numeric variable and my knowledge of programming never got past

10 cls
20 Print "Hello World"
30 goto 20
 
Computers get deactivated in AD if they are not used for more than three weeks. This is standard security policy and always has been.

Client: "Is that written down anywhere?"

Uh, where would you like to see it written down? Would you have read it if it were? Do you read every policy document the department has?
 
Blue Mountain said:
If it was a user saying that, I wouldn't be surprised. But the conversation says "string," so I'm assuming this was either two developers talking or QA and a developer. And if the developer didn't know the difference between a string and a numeric variable, he/she should go back to school. Certainly should not be writing software for production use.
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Unfortunately the client side of the project doesn't involve their technical side in anything at all until it's time to test. They think their managers are adequate to write specs and determine everything. That...is not so much the case.
 
Norman Alexander said:
Do it the Microsoft way: Try it out on customers, and then fix what they complain about. This is WAY cheaper than "real" testing.
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To be fair MS really got behind testing long before nearly everyone else in the "personal computer software" space. I remember being shown one of their testing suites something like 25 years ago and being gobsmacked at how organised, how through it was - at the time my company's "testing suite" was the two lads from technical support who we got to use the pre-release software*!

And today MS is in a very difficult space, there is simply no way they can duplicate all the real-world interactions of users, software and hardware so there has to be "public" beta programmes if you want to do any real breadth of testing before a full release.

Apple is now in a similar space with its various OSs and they have had to adopt the MS model.



Filippo Lippi said:
and so, so easy to cut and make the spread sheet look more appealing to your boss
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Yep. I mean what profit does it make!




ETA: * Which may be the reason we released a spreadsheet that couldn't add up correctly.... Seriously we kept having rounding errors. took a long time to find the problem after release - it was a bug in Commodore's C libraries that we used.
 
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Yeah, but in my case it's not software being built. It's just pulling data from a database and sending it on. The testing is just "did you get what you need?" but the people running the show on the receiving side have no idea what they need and keep asking for the wrong things in the wrong way.

And their foolishness isn't confined to the merely technical, they're equally clueless on the medical side. At one point I had to explain why we don't do vision tests on people who've had both their eyes removed. Call me crazy but I'm comfortable assuming a patient with a double enucleation is not going to get even the topmost line on the chart.
 
TragicMonkey said:
"Why aren't the test results in the field for numeric values?"
"Because the results are a string reading 'greater than 12'".
"That's numeric!"
Click to expand...

As a statistician I would regard ">12" as numeric, albeit censored <wikipedia - Censoring_(statistics)>. There are techniques for handling censored numeric data which are not appropriate to text data. Data analysis tools may (should?) allow for censored numeric data.
 
KAJ said:
As a statistician I would regard ">12" as numeric, albeit censored <wikipedia - Censoring_(statistics)>. There are techniques for handling censored numeric data which are not appropriate to text data. Data analysis tools may (should?) allow for censored numeric data.
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In which case they can do that on their side. I'm providing raw data, not doing analysis for them. I'm putting properly numeric data into that field, and dumping the rest into a "miscellaneous" field. If they want to parse through all the possible combinations of garbage text users enter in there to figure out if they can math something, they'll have to do it themselves.

And I think you missed where the entry wasn't ">12" it was the words "greater than" 12.
 
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