IT, dirty secrets
Actually, not that many.

We won't read your mail, unless it starts hitting spam catching keywords or lots of people take the piss. However, you can't hide what you're doing, and clearing your browser cache will not help.

The reboot advice is either because we're a) crap or b) it takes too long to diagnose the real cause

We'll always slightly over spec machines, because requirements will always expand, never reduce.

Don't be too much of an arse, because you'll get asked to replace software or hardware, rather than us spending our time doing extensive investigative work. Never expect v1.0 to be error free..

All hardware sucks. All software sucks. Just in different areas. If you want it to be stable *don't mess with it* once set up.

Whilst we may know a fair bit about applications, diagnosis, programming, operating systems, networking and so on we don't know everything about specific cases (i.e. how a Quadro and ServRAID copes with a shared interrupt on a 975X board). We won't specify any old crap, because we know claims of a product being fully tested with verified drivers are always bollocks.

There are tools which can make things faster, or give you more control. With practically no exceptions this comes at a risk of breaking other stuff, which is why they're not immediately available to plebs.

Sometimes software is an utter ripoff, but sometimes it isn't. It's especially not a ripoff if you have to have more than one emergency fix. You're also paying for future release development, and the money has to come from somewhere.

We find a lot of this stuff boring too, so don't think every nuance of computing excites us.
(EssY, Thu 27 Sep 2007, 16:21, Reply)