7/18    Dell is making bank off idiot corporate CIO's who were
        "consulted" into the current situation. Everyone went out and
        said- owning hardware bad- you are all going to need brand new HW
        every 2 years- Thus everyone went to DELL and setup multiyear
        agreements where they would lease HW from DELL. Now everyone is
        stuck with existing HW and simply can't upgrade until DELL allows
        them. ALSO FYI our service company charges $5/hr for computer/
        network/ support ( ie type ipconfig /renew - oh that didn't
        work??? ). Just sad.
          That comes out to $10,000/yr per employee just for basic computer
        service- sickening. There is huge money being made to tech- only
        problem is that is it all money being thrown around internally in
        huge multinationals who think they need to support ONE major
        computer image to standardize software upgrades. Thus they
        massively beef up central support- which really isn't "support"
        but simply 1000 people who constantly have to "upgrade" servers
        to meat the corp policies which are developed by another group of
        1000 people. Thus all this CRAP is billed to the end consumer-
        just sad. AND on top of this todays CIO are making bank because
        they all look so good with these cost effective agreements with
        DELL, and ORACLE, and MSFT, but interally the management sucks
        shit as no one will accept the possible risk. What manager wants
        to be known as the guy who didn't fund the tech to correct the
        corrupt version of office installed on the cEO computer. Of
        course no one cares about WHY the damn version was corrupt-
        because the damn legion of 1000 support techs maybe missed
        upgrading a server to the correct version.
          JUST BS ALL OF IT-
          I make 40,000 yr and can work from home using my computer and my
        apps. ( well be legal and I'll expense the one time charge for
        $1000 for all the user apps- and the $30/mn for broadband cable
        access )
        Give the employee the $10,000/yr instead of the bloody IT group
        Give the employee the $10,000/yr instead of the office.
          EVEN WORSE YET-
          This line of reasoning is permeating corp america too. Problem is
        the solution they have devised is sickening. We have spend 2M on
        a web interface to access our "standard server" called joshua.
        They are now spending millions teaching people how to use it and
        advertising it. The problem is that we can just setup a VPN
        connection ( which is a half page doc of instr to setup ) and
        bamm, remote computing FOR FREE. But no- they had to do the sexy
        expensive way and all the execs were all onboard because it was
        a web based app.... big frickin deal.
          SORRY FOR THE RANT
          actually had a good day- realized I don't have to use table joins
        using Oracle remotely. I just select what fields I want and bamm
        it does everything for me ( or course I do need to specify some
        crit - but no complex joins - which I have been ripping my hair
        out trying to map )