What is Digg?107 Comments
- plamoni, on 10/12/2007, -2/+56We shifted up from 500Mhz P3's to 3.2Ghz P4's, and I was excited to go to work again. However, I am a computer person and the extra 768MB of RAM was useful. Most people in the office did nothing but complain about how the mp3s they had stored on their hard drive went away when they got their new computer and were further upset when we told them that we didn't back up their music...
- abenton, on 10/12/2007, -4/+54Tell them its work, not their personal computers, they'll get over it. You have no reason to back up people mp3s, that's ridiculous
- Technopundit, on 10/12/2007, -3/+51First they want music, then they want lunch breaks -- Next thing you know they'll want to take a whole day off on Christmas!
Half rations for the scurvy bastards!! - chaosmachine, on 10/12/2007, -2/+29This report sponsored by Microsoft, makers of Windows Vista. Your Potential. Our Passion. Contact your Microsoft Sales Representative today to find out more about upgrading your office to Vista!
- celticeric, on 10/12/2007, -0/+27I do newspaper layout. At one place I worked, we had to use Win98 on a P3 as the platform for running Photoshop, etc... And this is recently, not 1998. There were days I wanted to kill.
- angelp, on 10/12/2007, -1/+22If a company can't/won't upgrade the equipment that is required for you to perform your job, then they're probably suffering in other areas as well. If there's no money for faster computers, there's probably not money for decent benefits. If you have a cheap CFO/CEO, then they're probably cheaper in other areas as well (vacation time, etc.)
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -6/+26Here's how I see it:
The F-14 uses computers slightly older than I am. The F-22 uses brand new x.xx Ghz computers. The F-14 never had a computer issue. The F-22 has to be re-booted DURING FLIGHT from time to time.
If all you're doing is word processing, you don't need a 4 ghz P4EE and 2 gigs of ram. You need a PII 233mhz with 64 megs of ram running Windows 95. - MioTheGreat, on 10/12/2007, -1/+20Lyph4,
Windows 95 is a bitch to maintain in a network environment in comparison to 2000/XP machines. It makes the IT guys more likely to take sick days. :D.
At least 2000/XP can be locked down so tight that the user can't do anything to hurt it. - chadu, on 10/12/2007, -0/+18I am a multimedia developer and about 2 years ago I got hired at a place with a very small budget... worked on a 400mhz G4 with 256mb ram and a 32 MB video card.
I was expected to author Flash and use Photoshop among other stuff... OSX the whole deal.
I friggin' mutinied and got a upgrade card, more memory, 128 GeForce card and new HD... all said under $1k... my productivity soared and my attitude drastically improved...
big time Digg. - zoombug, on 10/12/2007, -1/+17The article makes the classic logical fallacy: correlation implies cause. The causal relationship could go in the other direction (cranky office workers don't buy new computers), or their could be a common cause (crappy companies make their employees cranky and don't upgrade their computers).
- pabster, on 10/12/2007, -4/+18Sure does sound like propaganda, doesn't it?
"Your office NEEDS dual core processor machines with 32GB of RAM and 10TB of disk space, with quad 7900GTX SLI!" - mzx639, on 10/12/2007, -1/+13And maybe those people should appreciate the technical workers that keep those systems working and as reliable as possible....
- CharlesDarwin, on 10/12/2007, -8/+20I would rather work with old computers than with old women. Come to think of it, I would also rather work with hot chicks than work with new computers.
- MioTheGreat, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10or a faulty network admin..
(This is fun. How many can we name?) - mzx639, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9or faulty software..
- chaosmachine, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9or faulty hardware..
- synaesthesia, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7I work on a Help Desk and there is nothing more frustrating than the 25-30 second wait between the time I double-click and the time the desired result occurs. Its extremely annoying and makes you wish (even more than normal) that you were doing anything else except your current job.
- LabThug, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7I provide informatics support on the General Clinical Research grant in my college. My budget for new computers is non-existent. I just upgraded one of my co-workers from a Gateway Profile 1 (K6-400, 64 MB RAM, 2K) with another surplussed item from another department, a Dell GX150 (P3 700, 256MB RAM, XP). She's like a kid at Christmas right now.
Of course when I told her that she could now be ~2x more productive, she told me to shut up. ;-) - DoubtfulSalmon, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9And this folks, is why the nice customers always seem to get new computers bang-on-time, and the not-so-nice ones are only getting a RAM upgrade and a CD/DVD combo drive. ("Uh, sorry, budget cuts and... yeah, and solar flares. Sorry")
Before you complain about the state of the computer on your desk, ask yourself "Am I good to the IT folks, or am I an arsehole?". (Tip: if the sticker on the box says "Pentium 3 Inside", you're an arsehole!) - MioTheGreat, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8Do that, and you'll probably be getting that old Pentium 2 that the network guy has been using as foot rest.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7this is a reflection on MS windows becoming a slow piece of crap with you don't format and reinstall once a year, not to do with the age of pc's. a very poorly researched study.
if you took a group of employee's that were using terminals not desktops, where the performance never degrades and is geared to help them get their work done as quickly as possible you'd find the terminals could be 10 years old and they wouldn't care. - 9mmCensor, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5People and jobs require multitasking.
Everything I do at work is real simple. Open a basic webpage, open pdf documents, open web based DB, text editing, use IRC (snak) ect.
All tasks that can be done on a crappy old PII, with little RAM. Unfortunately, I have to do it all at once, and that owns my little eMac.
Modern office workers still do simple tasks, but multitasking means they need more than simple computers.
Plus the fact that companies need to keep decent infastructure, having fast computers, fast servers, and a fast internet pipe are nice, but having crappy networking cables and ghastly dlink hubs ruins the experiance. - netnifty, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5For about half a year when I was at school (think it was 2000/2001), we had to use P120s with 16MB RAM on Windows 98 for one lesson a week, due to lack of computing facilities. I swear they took about 20 mins to log in and another 15 just to load MS Word.
They really should have put Windows 95 or 3.11 on them instead, but the school seemed to be desperate to put limitations on student use (and absurd ones too, the software they used for "protection" closed any window with the word "properties" in it for example, even if it was an IE window which displaying a page with properties of a chemical, yet still allowed .reg files to be ran and modify the registry).
It pretty much made that hour per week completely pointless, and unsurprisingly had a large number of people just not bothering to turn up for the lesson. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Heh at my old work the job expecatations were simply impossible to meet with the provided equipment.
I put together my own pc from spare parts and used pcs, had someone in IT certify it and my supervisor sign off on it.
It was another two years before the upgrade came. During that time I built 3 more PCs for coworkers in my department.
Luckily it was a small employer that was cool with it. But that didn't really resolve the problem that this company spent more money on "team building" exercises than they did on essential IT. The old guys in management simply had no handle on technology. - angelp, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Very true.....we make it a point to purchase similar computers for all new employees and make sure we swap out older computers for existing employees. The complaining we heard after a new colleague received a new widescreen laptop was beyond annoying.
- cdhamma, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4As the IT person in charge of most IT purchasing at my company, I have to say that we have a very different environment. Most users won't even say anything to us if their desktop is slow. They don't want to complain. Which is fine ... until I sit down at their desk to diagnose a problem and notice that they're still running on a Compaq "Beige Box" ... which means it is Definitely Time To Upgrade.
If your PC is so slow it's causing you to pull your hair out, there could be two problems: (1) You may be irritated by ANY PC that causes you to wait more than a second to perform a task, or (2) Your PC inhibits you from reaching goals set by your manager or from producing your best work. It's that pesky #2 that the article seems to touch upon. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5when i worked as an admin i gavew people who broke ***** the wrost pc's imaginable
- aaaaabbbbb, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6old decrepit PC's can easily be killed with a spilt coke
- PRESS_00, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3This is especially true when some sections of a company have better computers than another. It creates computer envy and sends a message to the employees about their worth (or worthlesness) to a company.
- CZzyzx41, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3That's pretty much what we've had at work the last few years.
No speakers
No screen savers
No desktop background
No surfing any site that isn't job related
No live streaming audio (no speakers and No headphones allowed took care of that)
After our production dropped by 75% and they fired our sys admins and hired a new group we started getting some of our "luxuries" back.
First came the headphones and streaming allowance, then speakers.
For a long time it was IE only. Now we've been given dual monitors and the ability to use Firefox. Surprisingly our numbers jumped to twice what they were before this whole thing started.
I don't care about what computer I have. So long as I'm able to do my job as proficiently as technology allows, there are definitely perks (like downloading mp3s, screen savers and desktop backgrounds) that I can live without. - acontorer, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Where is the study? Right here.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=12510608&dopt=Abstract - number8888, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3My P4 with 1 gig of RAM is actually a pretty decent system, but the problem is all the extra stuff my company installs on the computer that takes up huge amount of resources and it runs slower than my P3 back home.
- piznut, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4You know what harms office morale more than old computers? ***** bosses...thats what.
Where is the study on that? I have tons of anecdotal evidence to support my claims that the #1 cause of inefficiency in the workplace is a jerk telling you what to do. - cazbar, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Taking this a step farther from the psychology 101 perspective:
It may not be the speed of the computer that causes the lack of morale. It may be how long they've had it. If you take away one old computer and replace it with another that looks different but runs at the same speed, will that raise morale? Of course this would only work if both computers are capable of doing the required job. - amoeba, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3This is a classic case of correlation masquerading as causation.
Sure, there may be a correlation between old computers and workplace satisfaction.
But as you learn in Science 101, correlation is NOT causation.
There are zillions of other variables that could influence this result.
It's possible your job just sucks. - skarbreeze, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Even upgrading my laptop was huge motivation to be AT my job instead of home. I've been willing to work longer hours at jobs that had high-end computers that were fun to work with instead of a drag and annoying. Nothing says I-care-about-my-employees like buying them PC's with high end video cards so they can game while taking customer calls...
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I do graphics design for a newspaper, and we're stuck with Photoshop 5. I started with Photoshop 7 and have bought each upgrade since, and it pisses me off how many things I can't do anymore, or take much longer to do. It's certainly a drain on morale. Often I can't wait to get home so I can actually finish something.
- andoru, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3If they have shown a corelation between the two variables (computer hardware specs and amount of sick leave), this does not imply that one is the result of the other - it could be that both are the results of a third factor. For example, if management refuses to allow the necessary budget to keep everyone's workstation PCs up-to-date, they might also skimp on the budget to maintain other benefits in the office environment - thus leading to the reduction in morale.
- p9s50W5k4GUD2c6, on 10/12/2007, -4/+6OMG this is so true. I was just thinking this same thought this afternoon while I clicked at my 50th consecutive MS Outlook 'go the hell away' reminder repeatedly. I know that doesn't help - technologically (but it seems to fit emotionally).
My workstation might as well be a stone tablet (it's that 'responsive'). One of these days I'm either going to cuss my head off at my PC (and then get fired), physically destroy my stone tablet (and then get fired) or just ***** quit (and spare them from firing me). See the common theme here? PC = Get Fired!
Why is this bad: leaner workforces have much more they need to do in a workday with tight deadlines and a supermarket full of deliverables. My conduit to meeting all of these deliverables is.... (yup) the stone tablet. My job dishes up enough pressures on its own - I don't need a PC to make it worse. But that's what I have: the bane of my work existence.
Yes I am working on getting it replaced.... - davidjunit, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2ehh, well, problem is that sometimes software is installed on a machine that can't run it efficiently or too much software is running simultaneously and the machine can't handle it.
A good example is that of the computers at the university I went too. The machines were 1.5GHz P4's but only had 256MB RAM. These machines ran one-to-three pieces of software in the background for virus protection, user stupidity protection, and another thing for remote control of the PC. Then whenever you wanted to run an MS Office application or something like Visual Studio the machine would take a crap and would operate painfully slow.
It was frustrating to have to work on these machines. They took around 5 minutes to boot and applications usually took a minute to get going all because they were lacking RAM.
So I can see how workers can become irritated if they have to run demanding software on a POS machine. - regeya, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2True...the company I work for is currenty upgrading administrative computers and doesn't seem to mind spending $$$ doing it, to the point that one person at our office has brand new equipment gathering dust. Meanwhile the production people who help make the administrative people necessary are using beige G3s...hm...
- Chompy, on 10/12/2007, -7/+9Those poor Europeans.. next thing you know those slavedrivers will be asking them to work 40 hour weeks!
- Chompy, on 10/12/2007, -7/+9France's problem isn't old computers, it's the fact that the French just don't like to work. A friend of mine had to do something at the French Consulate in LA, so he drove over there and discovered that they were closed for a holiday. What was the holiday that the French Embassy staff decided to skip work for?
Martin Luther King day. - proidiot, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3if you don't like old computers, send them all to me!!!!
- WarlordFDC, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3"If all you're doing is word processing, you don't need a 4 ghz P4EE and 2 gigs of ram. You need a PII 233mhz with 64 megs of ram running Windows 95."
Not true when the IT department wants you to use the latest bloated version of anti virus. You need the extra memory and faster processor just for the extra crud they install and want working in the background. - wintermute1974, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3If my 128MB, 350MHz, NT4 computer didn't have dual 17" monitors, I'd be upset too. Since I'm the only one in the office with this perk, I let the general suckiness of the system slide.
- RobotCitizen, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I can certainly believe this. It's really frustrating when you feel like the infrastructure is working against you, slowing you down, making simple tasks more time consuming. It's a real PITA.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3all a terminal does is display a screen from a centrally managed computer.
there's no reason you can't use photoshop on a terminal, and i can promise you that the terminal server + terminals is going to be much cheaper then desktops + file server.
and haven't you heard of windows terminal server? the key difference is that it's centrally mamaged and won't get bloated with people setting up themes and kazza and other *****. - richardiscool, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3or freedom-hating terrorists..
- DwightSchrute, on 10/12/2007, -5/+6Nothing is wrong with MLK day, but do you celebrate bastille day by staying home from work?
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