What do you guys think of IBM?

[BigusSchmuck]

Well if it was IT's descsion we would have found something that fit the bill, but all we got was a crappy 30+ year old system. Hell this thing belongs in a museum, and the fact that its older than me makes me wonder what the hell were they thinking?

How can they make IT decisions without IT on board? Do they make marketing decisions without getting the marketing department's opinion too?

The closest thing that's happened in my company is that marketing and sales went ahead and bought a bunch of iPads without consulting IT, and then expected IT to completely support them - including app installation, etc. Damn how I loathe iOS. Stupidest 'smart' OS in history.

This isn't the first time they have done this. They tried to tell us that we shouldn't be building pcs anymore and that we should go completely to the white box solution. So what do they do? Buy a bunch of cheapo dells and wonder why they all have various issues. Half of them we sent back and now we are back building our own pcs due to this blunder. Call it old school, but out here in the sticks we build our own due to there is literally no big electronics store let alone a Dell store. Back on subject, found out this morning that this thing supposedly supports Cartrol, but we have to do some sort of crazy back end shit to get it to convert over whereas before it was pretty straight forward to do. Also, credit cards can't be stored on this system due to it being non pcicompliant, so we are still stuck using two different systems old and new. Ugh, yet another crazy day.

[soop]

If I were you, I'd get the head of IT to report to someone on the board and get whoever's responsible in marketing fired.  This is a stupendously idiotic move to be making in these troubled times.

[SignOfZeta]

My company uses Dell's for almost everything and...dang they sell some cheap as shit to their corporate clients. I mean, this stuff is CRAP. The laptop power supplies are always dying, the ports blow out, the keyboards and mice are just total f*cking garbage...its depressing that stuff this sad is even being built.

When you see what they are charging for these things and you wonder how they can even build them at all. I mean, $600 for a current-gen ship set and a 20" monitor? Like...how?

[kazekirifx]

I wish we built our own. That would be sweet.

[BigusSchmuck]

I wish we built our own. That would be sweet.

Its more out of necessity and practicality than anything. Closest Best Buy or even Dell is like 200 miles west in Portland Oregon and if someone's machine went down, they would be down at least 24-48 hours to wait for a replacement vs we can get it done in a fraction of that. Not only that, but its cheaper in the long run.

[kazekirifx]

Closest Best Buy or even Dell is like 200 miles west in Portland Oregon and if someone's machine went down, they would be down at least 24-48 hours to wait for a replacement vs we can get it done in a fraction of that.

Why is that really an issue? Just mail order. Maintenance would have to be send-away too of course, but just keep some spares around. If they're all the same model you can just put the end user's hard drive in a spare and they're up and running again.

I know it's easier said than done though. Building our own would be sweet too...

[geise]

Actually Dell workstation are pretty rad.  Our dell precision workstation never have issues and have top of the line specs.  They seem really well built.  Laptops on the other hand I will never ever touch from dell.  I got burned years ago buying one for my wife.  Past five years it's been Vaio and all is well.  Every manufacturer builds shit that's going to have issues, it just seems Dell it's usually more the case with their laptops.

[soop]

Actually Dell workstation are pretty rad.  Our dell precision workstation never have issues and have top of the line specs.  They seem really well built.  Laptops on the other hand I will never ever touch from dell.  I got burned years ago buying one for my wife.  Past five years it's been Vaio and all is well.  Every manufacturer builds shit that's going to have issues, it just seems Dell it's usually more the case with their laptops.

Dell Laptops are teh suck.  I'm using one right now (work).
The thing about places like Dell is they know most consumers only focus on HDD space, Processor speed (in Mhz), and the amount of RAM.  So they buy the cheapest components available in huge bulk, and use them as widely as possible.  And that results in all sorts of bottlenecks throughout the system that you don't get in a (well built) custom built PC.  So even though Dell seem cheap for what they are a "lower spec" machine will often outperform a Dell that should trump it.

As for Vaio's they're expensive for what they are, and pretty much for vain shallow people who are not quite pompous enough for a Mac.

Which is why I have 3 of them in my house.

[geise]

Hehe. That's funny since I just bought a 14" vaio for my wife straight from sonystyle's web page for $469 with a:
500gb hd
i5 2.5ghz (3rd generation)
6gig ddr3 1333 ram upgradeable to 16
dedicated 1gig nvidia 410
windows 7 64 bit home

If you go to their web page they have stuff on clearance for cheap.  Ordering straight from sony is cheaper than going on newegg.  Sony doesn't need to markup their own product to make some profit.  

[soop]

WOW O___O

That's an incredible deal.  I got my tiny netbook recently for £250, but I'm very happy with it

[BigusSchmuck]

Closest Best Buy or even Dell is like 200 miles west in Portland Oregon and if someone's machine went down, they would be down at least 24-48 hours to wait for a replacement vs we can get it done in a fraction of that.

Why is that really an issue? Just mail order. Maintenance would have to be send-away too of course, but just keep some spares around. If they're all the same model you can just put the end user's hard drive in a spare and they're up and running again.

I know it's easier said than done though. Building our own would be sweet too...

The problem is that any machine outside of this office isn't on our domain and they are only getting backed up locally. Good news though, we finally got some fiber wired up so we can start getting these machines on the domain and start getting replication servers out there.

Hehe. That's funny since I just bought a 14" vaio for my wife straight from sonystyle's web page for $469 with a:
500gb hd
i5 2.5ghz (3rd generation)
6gig ddr3 1333 ram upgradeable to 16
dedicated 1gig nvidia 410
windows 7 64 bit home

If you go to their web page they have stuff on clearance for cheap.  Ordering straight from sony is cheaper than going on newegg.  Sony doesn't need to markup their own product to make some profit. 

If you got a newegg business account, you get all sorts of great deals. We were building quadcore amd athlons for around $200ish with windows xp or about $400 with Windows 7. Nice thing about amd am3 boards they are forwards compatible so we can put am3+ cpus in them (trust me I researched on which ones can do this) with a simple bios update and save even more money by doing this. I also suggest getting 2 hard drives these days as it seems that drives crash way more frequently than they used to.

[BigusSchmuck]

Update on the IBM BS. After a month of going live, this thing hasn't worked out at all especially when it comes to doing statements. Since the company I'm working for is a CO OP, you would think this software would cover and do everything management wants and more right? Wrong, the supposed "interface" with our old Eagle, SSI and cartrol it only took HALF of our customers over into the new system and the ones it did bring over it DIDN'T bring over the signatures which is very important to our credit department. To top things off, a big portion of the cartrol data (transactions) were completely lost to antiquity. Mark off another $10,000+ in transactions that will never come back. Second, our agronomy department is on SSI so when they moved their invoices over some people got double charge and some people didn't get moved over because their account numbers were too long for this IBM crap to read. Take another $20,000 lost in transactions. Good news on the SSI stuff though, its still on the old system but they just can't bill them out so all is not completely lost. Finally, our retail stuff and petro had yet another similar issue with the customer transactions not going completely over on the other side. Not sure on the total loss on this is, but its easily in the $100s of thousands of dollars. Bottom line, under no circumstances do you let a dumb redneck accountant and Grain guy do ANY IT decisions, its just going to bite you in the arse in the end. Oh yeah, did I mention we had to buy $10,000 worth of printers just so they can work with this system because it doesn't like anything at all except Lexmark printers? Ugh.

[Tatsujin]

HAL

[soop]

Holy shit.  Those people need to be fired.

[BigusSchmuck]

I about shit my drawers when I read this:
http://www.vulture.com/2012/09/brad-pitt-to-produce-ibm-and-the-holocaust.html