Posts made by tirendir

Yeah.. and the term "politics" is often so poorly defined that an aweful lot of things are dumped under that umbrella, whether actually political or not, so I suppose I'll just refrain.

I kind of want to comment about McCain... but it would be rather harsh, and I don't know that peeps want to see/hear it. >.>

Been playing some Total War: Warhammer II, game is fantastic! Even better now that they've released the first free DLC that includes all of the races/legendary lords from the first game, and added a reduced version of the map from Total War: Warhammer I to the existing Warhammer II map, making it absolutely gargantuan!

Only downside, is that I can tell they're pushing the limits of the game engine, because they reduced the texture quality of the champion porthole (probably to accommodate for the insane levels of environmental effects on such an enormous map). Starting count of factions is now 198 different factions to conquer and/or parley with.

@travisdh1 Hats off to you travis, you can keep the trophy, the cake, and all that lol. I was working food service at the time, no way I was ever going to afford another computer (I did have a laptop and desktop at the time though). Hell, I got into playing MMOs because it was SOOO much cheaper to play them at the time than it was to play consoles or other PC games at $30-$50 apiece, and I would blow through 2/month or so.

@scottalanmiller said in Business thinking - PC replacements:

If the company can't utilize that time, they should seriously rethink employees.

FTFY

The further you take things out in terms of considering what employees cost to employ versus the cost of hardware, it's extremely difficult to justify keeping hardware that causes unnecessary labor waste. It's the same exact phenomenon that explains why executives get to be driven around rather than drive themselves at a certain level for instance. It's got nothing to do with their capacity to drive or not, and everything to do with it's more profitable for the organization to hire someone extra to drive them around and such so they can work during transit times, than it is to have them spend that time focusing on driving or whatever.

@quixoticjeremy Only for one, relatively brief period over the entire time I played MMOs was I ever in a guild that was pushing world-firsts. It was brutal, and part of what burned me out on Everquest, even though I up to that point had loved it.

Little-known fact - The lore and story for Everquest was actually pretty bloody good! It's the biggest reason I also played WoW for as long as I did too. Yeah, I was kind of a serial-MMO-player for a while... including dual-boxing Everquest on two separate characters, often in different raids while playing WoW simultaneously. I was pretty nuts back in the day lol. =P

edit: Also though no, I didn't bot.. I was just crazy lol

Scott's assessment is pretty much exactly what I'm suggesting, although a significant majority of users aren't likely to be getting paid anything nearly as low as $12/hr in most organizations, which skews the numbers far more in favor of replacing hardware versus not. My subordinate makes approximately equivalent to $16/hr. However I only used that number to make the math simple/easy.

@quixoticjeremy Nice! I got up to being the top Ranger for about 6 weeks in Everquest, but since we operated with a loot council in my guild, I got bumped down due to others being more favored. I still hovered around top 10-15 for a few months, but I just got burnt out with the brutal 4-6 hours raiding 5 days a week after working 80+ hour weeks at work at the time.

@scottalanmiller I see what you did there, lol

@scottalanmiller lol, right out of the gate! Although I shouldn't be surprised.

I guess I'm posting more for those who want to do right by their employers, even if the employers are dumb and don't understand the issue(s) around IT. Or even for those who aren't forced to handle the droning day-to-day monitoring sort of work and get to operate in more of the company officer who oversees the technical side of the business sort of role perhaps?

For instance, more and more I'm shifting into that sort of role, where if we were a much larger organization, my title would be much different... but as it is, I am predominantly operating as the company security officer and the head of IT's short and long term planning and implementation. Being in a small org though means that I'm also hands-on involved in the actual acquisition, deployment, and management of the environment as well.

I do have an MSP that handles much of the everyday, routine monitoring for me, and a subordinate who is basically our on-site bench-tech who handles all the user-support side of things because no MSP wanted to hire and train someone to put on site for us for any less than we could do it ourselves. My boss just prefers to keep folks in-house when able, and in this case, it gave me a chance to pull somebody away from Geek Squad and offer them a legitimate career-starting opportunity.

@scottalanmiller Ah gotcha, missed the key word in your response. I guess my original statement still stands though, that I am essentially a unicorn in human clothing. lol

@dashrender I guess I'm not explaining enough of the specifics, which is something I'm guilty of oftentimes, and I apologize if that's the case. If there is more work to be done than is getting done, then there is automatically a need to increase the available labor availability to address that need. The only good ways to do that are typically to pay for more labor time (generally by hiring more people), to demand more labor out of existing laborers (still not free unless employees are salaried/exempt), or to as the saying goes "work smarter, not harder" by reducing impediments that are costing labor time. If I only replace computers every four years, but doing so will save something in the ball-park of $400/year, then I've saved the cost of the computers twice over in that span of time in user labor time that was up to that point unavailable for other tasks. It's no different than the robots vs humans argument. Robots and automation tend to cost a lot of money, but their costs to install and maintain are often significantly less than the costs of the time humans spend getting less done. Erego, most businesses have implemented or begun considering implementing automation for all sorts of things. Giving humans better tools so they have the capacity to be more productive is in the same vein, as it's removing hard limits to certain portions of their productive time.

In the aforementioned scenario, a faster computer would ultimately result in each user having just a half-day shy of an entire extra work-week a year of productive time. With 100 users for instance, that's a hell of a lot of opportunity cost that was just recovered, and a hell of a lot of productive labor can occur in that much time. Sure it will cost more in year one, but year two would result in saving thousands upon thousands of dollars, assuming that the organization makes good use of all the extra usable labor time. Again though, it's all based upon the assumption of the organization making good use of their labor. As you suggested though, if the business sucks, it's probably a waste of time.. but the problem was always much bigger than IT, and not something IT could ever address in the first place if that is so.

IT's job is just to enable the organization to do what it needs to do. Improving efficiency to free up labor time that is otherwise spent wastefully is only ever not beneficial if there is no additional work that needs to be accomplished, which I dare say is fairly rare. There is no such thing as zero-cost. Everything costs money, time, or both in some form or fashion, so there's really no reason not to reduce inefficiencies as long as the improved outcomes are greater than the cost to achieve them.

I'de been involved in a discussion on another thread about SMBs and IT, and wanted to follow up with the thread about good moves SMB IT should make when they're expected to carry the load themselves rather than being allowed to push the bulk of the day-to-day operations over to MSPs, per recommendation by a few others in the community.

Please discuss.

@scottalanmiller As of the 2013 census, the US Census Bureau estimated there were 242,470,820 adults (aged 18 or older) in the US, so the Equifax hack is still more than 1/2 odds of being compromised, something around the 60% of all American adults or so if the Census Bureau is anywhere near accurate.

As an aside, I'm currently mostly playing Total War: Warhammer along with some Heroes of the Storm and Hearthstone (Hearthstone only just enough for freebies and to kill a few minutes a day). I love Roleplay, and since my Everquest days, it's been exceedingly rare for me to remain satisfied with typical, linear RPGs that pretty much encompasses almost all RPG video games. =\

What I would really love though, is to get into a D&D game again, ideally using Roll20, since location becomes kind of a non-issue at that point.

@popester no... but you make a good point, maybe I should? lol

@dashrender While I do agree, misusing time freed up by slow technology just isn't IT's job to address is all I was saying. That's for the rest of management to deal with amongst their respective departments, where removing the limitations imposed by the technology was my/our part of addressing the issue.

Apparently I am on the lucky side of the one-in-two Americans who didn't have their information compromised by Equifax. But I seem to be like a flipping unicorn, because none of my information was exposed by Yahoo, Home Depot, Target, Anthem, or any of the other big hacks/data losses that have occurred. >.>

OK! Now that I've spent like 3 hours reading this ENTIRE thread from start to finish, I feel like I can start posting stuff besides the occasional response to something lol.

Total War: Warhammer is absolutely FANTASTIC! If you like any of the other Total War games, the Warhammer installment will likely make you happy. Unlike the previous Total War games however, they made a huge point of having a giant campaign map that mixes elements of city-building and tech-progression as well as just generally improving the overall complexity of the game without making it too nutty.

All races feel well done, with some being very difficult and very different from the rest, while the staple faction options all possess a specific quirk that makes them interesting and unique compared to the others. I rarely buy games, but I let someone talk me into paying full-price for Total War: Warhammer, and for once in a very long time, I actually don't regret shelling out $50 for a new game. I've got almost 500 hours logged into the game now, and there are still over half a dozen factions I have yet to even play yet. Has a multiplayer mode that can be coop or head-to-head in both campaign mode, or battle mode. Battles can be auto-calculated, or can be manually fought in real-time, per the usual for Total War. I highly recommend it, I've not had that much fun with a new game in ages.