I work in academia, which is in many ways culturally similar to working in government. I wonder how many of these inefficiencies persist in order to placate an aged workforce that refuses to embrace technology and learn to do anything in a new way.

I see a lot of people around here just sort of "running out the clock" - I can't imagine we're unique.

--saint

We have a group of professors at the college I work for who insist on using Powerpoint as a page layout tool for making posters. It drives the desktop support people and the print shop absolutely batty.

Hammer, nail, etc.

--saint

If you haven't read "The Two Income Trap", you might be interested in it; it's essentially an expansion of this idea.

The first two income families had a huge advantage in terms of acquiring desirable housing. So more and more people started doing it, and now it's essentially mandatory in many places.

--saint

For me it was a Jesuit high school, Rochester, NY, mid-90s.

Woe be unto the student who did anything wrong during the early spring, when the snow first melted. Because you'd be spending the next week in ankle-deep mud, dredging for the priest's cigarette butts under the windows of the residence.

--saint

As you can tell, after ten years of this, I'm fed up with trying to support my idiot family.

That's weird. Because judging from your other posts here on Slashdot, you've got excellent social skills and a surfeit of compassion.

Congratulations! You are the first person in the history of Slashdot to type "MAC" and not mean it as a borderline-illiterate abbreviation for "Macintosh". Excellent work.

Yeah, and they won't sell a decent maintenance contract on any of it.

Try getting a G4 or G5 XServe power supply out of them. That certainly taught us not to let the local Apple fanboy put things in the data center.

--saint

Time for another thousand posts on how Evil Apple should leave in support for hardware that they don't sell. Fantastic.

--saint

Hug rejected.

I just read that, and in my head, it was Dwight Schrute's voice. I'm pretty sure that he is now the Official Voice for your posts.

Thanks!

Today, we have ignorant marketeers, corrupt accountants and lawyers running companies. And they don't know what their companies even do for a living.

I'm taking MBA courses right now -- yeah, yeah, boo hiss, whatever -- and the other night one of my professors asked what seemed like a simple question.

"How many of you know where the company that you work for gets its money from?"

Out of nearly forty students, only half a dozen hands went up.

Scary stuff. We're all just hanging out, doing some minor task and watching the clock with no idea of a bigger picture.

--saint

I bike to work in Buffalo, year 'round. It's really not so bad. Good gloves help.

--saint

I've had luck using Linksys WRT54GLs, reflashed with DD-WRT, for branch office VPN routers.

(Yeah, yeah, look at Tomato, I know. Haven't had problems yet, so I haven't looked to switch.)

--saint

Speaking as someone at an .edu, we all saw this news yesterday. There are many other venues besides Slashdot that cater to higher ed IT, and it's being discussed elsewhere.

I wouldn't call the low comment count a sign of disinterest, but rather a sign that there aren't a lot of our peers here so it's not a productive forum for this sort of thing.

--saint

Or "youse" (pronounced "yooz"), as in "youse guys".

Is that just a Western New York thing?

--saint