Article Inspired by Conversation with @Minion-Queen

I had no idea that things on your desktop are automatically cached to RAM. When did they start doing that? It kind of makes sense, give you effectively a RAM disk to use easily, but as many Linux systems throw /tmp into RAM, but without people really knowing this, it is pretty surprising.

The Wallpaper has been for years, Never heard of the desktop itself being in ram though.

MattSpeller

@scottalanmiller said:

You want tiering with an auto-load to RAM disk, I guess?

Y'all get so complicated lol

I'd take a simple folder that's mirrored to disk. Mirroring is important to me because I usually care about keeping what I work with, but like Office's auto-save it could be something basic like twice a minute.

Now I'm going to spend the rest of the day setting up a RAM drive and writing a script. Sigh.

I'm not sure how much I can agree with this line The job of an IT Professional is to fix, document, and improve. We fix things that are broken..

That sounds more like a Technician. I would say an IT Professional's job is to apply technology to the business process.

dafyre

In similar light to the article's title... I've always heard of the seen words ofa dying business: "We've never done it that way before."

Similar in light to the "That's how we've always done it" -- only different.

Doing things because that's the way they have always been done without questioning it is when that becomes a problem. "That's how we've always done it."

What about this way?

"We've never done it that way before."

Why not?

dafyre

@thecreativeone91 said:

I'm not sure how much I can agree with this line The job of an IT Professional is to fix, document, and improve. We fix things that are broken..

That sounds more like a Technician. I would say an IT Professional's job is to apply technology to the business process.

But aren't we often applying technology to improve or fix a broken process?

We've had people do desktop replacements by copying the files over the network \computername\C$ to the new computer (after first login) you don't copy at the user folder level you drill now into each folder, and copy what needs to be. (it's always been done manually to keep bloat down, as some software's will put folders in places). The Documents etc folder is redirected at most companies these days so no need to copy those. Desktop doesn't store the files to ram. So I'm not sure what AJs problem with this process is. It's a fairly effective process really.

@dafyre said:

@thecreativeone91 said:

I'm not sure how much I can agree with this line The job of an IT Professional is to fix, document, and improve. We fix things that are broken..

That sounds more like a Technician. I would say an IT Professional's job is to apply technology to the business process.

But aren't we often applying technology to improve or fix a broken process?

No, not necessarily. How do you consider not having web meetings to having them a broken system? Break/fix is a bad assessment of it. most of IT is consultation and design of systems.

scottalanmiller

@dafyre said:

@thecreativeone91 said:

I'm not sure how much I can agree with this line The job of an IT Professional is to fix, document, and improve. We fix things that are broken..

That sounds more like a Technician. I would say an IT Professional's job is to apply technology to the business process.

But aren't we often applying technology to improve or fix a broken process?

Have to create first, though. All IT has been created, only most has been fixed.

dafyre

@thecreativeone91 said:

@dafyre said:

But aren't we often applying technology to improve or fix a broken process?

No, not necessarily. How do you consider not having web meetings to having them a broken system? Break/fix is a bad assessment of it. most of IT is consultation and design of systems.

We started with meetings that required everybody to be in a room. Somewhere along the line somebody said, "We can just do this over the phone." Boom! Some (IT ?) folks got together and built a teleconferencing system.

"Hey, we can do this using web cams now!" Boom! Some (more IT?) folks got together and bult a web meeting system that could be used with webcams.

Now, suddenly, IT is responsible for designing, and consulting with the business on how to improve their infrastructure to support said web conferences and meetings. In this setting, nothing was broken. IT Had to consult and design to improve the infrastructure enough to handle the new meeting servers, etc, etc. In essence the whole shebang that involved a lot of IT was an improvement on the process of having a meeting.

I agree that break / fix is a bad assessment, but it does depend a lot on your role in IT as well. I've been in IT at only 3 places, so my business level experience is limited, but I have been doing IT Stuff for my whole life, lol. At my first job, it was purely a break / fix scenario. At my second IT job, it was a lot of break / fix, but also a lot of impreovement, design and consultation with the stakeholders in IT probjects. In my current job, I do mostly design, consulation, and implementation.

thanksajdotcom

Ok, create/consult would have been a good one to add in. I won't deny that.