Our Opinion May 2001

Our Opinion Page for May 2001.

May 2001 - Are Internet Service Providers doing a crap job or what ? I use BT Internet on my home PCs and have done for over a year. Over the last few months I have watched the service deteriorate from first time access to having to redial about 50 times on average to connect. Not a real problem, but when they disconnect me every two hours it becomes a right royal pain in the rear. I have decided to install a high speed broadband service and say goodbye forever to dialing in to my ISP and hello to always on and early nights for me.

Personally, I think there are far to many DIYers in the computer industry. There is no where near enough training. Computer engineers are expected to know everything without first being shown how. I don't have any objections to a person who has learned about their computer getting a job in the industry. What is a bummer is when the DIYer accepts five pounds an hour for doing the job. As a result the engineers that have all the experience end up carrying the job. Some twenty years ago when I started in the computer industry, I was earning as much if not more money than I earn now.

We recently sold a new hard drive to a customer. They walked in and purchased the hard disk with the intention of fitting themselves. Less than an hour later the customer was on the phone, asking how to fit it. They had followed the instructions, but it wasn't working, and claimed that the drive was faulty. Out of good faith, we didn't charge the customer to check the drive was working, nor show them it working in one of our machines. Within the hour the customer again phoned explaining that the drive must have a fault because it still wasn't working in their machine. Again we took the drive back and this time reluctantly changed the drive for another, showed the customer it working, answered about three hundred questions from them in the processes then watched them leave. Guess what. The customer phoned again, this time a bit annoyed (This is not a joke) asking what he might be doing wrong. Again out of good faith we helped the DIYer fix their setup.

Why has the computer industry allowed this kind of service to become expected from customers. If you went into a supermarket and bought ingredients for a recipe, you wouldn't then expect to ask how to actually cook it, a demonstration of it being cooked and an exchange if it all goes wrong. Likewise, if you were to buy a part for a second hand car from a garage, you wouldn't expect them to tell you how to fit it if you intended to take it away and do it yourself. Fitting is part of a service they provide, for which they charge and make a living.

RedHat Linux

We installed Red Hat Linux on one of our servers this week and it crashed four times in the first day, was hacked within another two hours and we had some spammer send out emails using our mail server. Its a bitch to configure and is enormous and out of date - a bit of a dinosaur actually. Add to that the fact we haven't used any flavour of UNIX since our college days. After a couple of hours we started remembering how it all worked, finally got things going and then bang along come the hackers.

Finally, I have my 18" LCD back up and running. It's only taken me six weeks to get round to it. I now have three LCD monitors, one of them is a digital panaflat monitor. When I bought these superb screens I was not aware that the florescent tubes, one along the top and the other along the bottom of the screen only lasted an average of 4000 hours. Worse still, they are over one hundred pounds stirling each to replace when the time comes. During the overhaul of the 18 inch LCD one of the tubes blew and that was when I found out the downside of having a fashionable LCD monitor as opposed to a standard CRT. So, I do not use my LCD monitors for heavy duty sessions at the keyboard - but instead I use them on the servers, which do not have any form of power management and benefit from the soft power on/off switches that the LCD screens feature. Unlike the CRT monitors that have a normal on off switch that makes an almighty boing noise when it is powered up. The other thing I like about LCD monitors is they do not need degaussed.

June's Opinion

April's Opinion