Re: May have inspired a Dilbert
"...The original text link did not work for me because when I tried to select the text with my mouse it hit the edge of the desk..."
Lol...have an upvote and thanks for the chuckle :)
1599 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Dec 2010
...inevitable.
The staff in my local branch are all very friendly and as far as it goes, helpful, although not particularly knowledgeable.
But the tat they sell! And almost all of it seems so incredibly overpriced.
I bought my lad a couple of their electronics kits over the years and they were terrible. In each case, the solder just refused to flow to the pads (even after a good clean on the second one).
And yes I can solder :) in an earlier life, I was a fully fledged electronics engineer.
I don't know if it's the same at others' stores, but a good 25% of my local one seems to be given over to "Disco/DJ" kit as well and I've always wondered just how big the demand for that sort of stuff could possibly be.
..."Well I suppose it depends on whether they're trying to patent ridiculous crud like rounded corners."
Sigh.....
How many fucking times...
Well check my posts, you rude prick because it's the first time I've mentioned it, personally, so you've told me precisely zero times. Mind you I'd give you zero credence given your language.
..."I'm too fed up to tell you why you are so wrong bringing this up (YET AGAIN!)..."
But don't let that stop you anyway. You must be American with that grasp of irony. Or thick, as well as rude.
This isn't something such as a coke bottle that is immediately recognisable as a uniquely identifiable object specific to a brand - take a look at things like Compaq iPaqs as one example of prior art that existed way before iPhones.
Nor is it about who won or not - it's about common sense you ignoramus
@psychonaut - well not sure why you got the downvote for asking a question, but hey ho.
I ran owncloud for a while but switched to seafile. For some reason, at random I'd get data corruption on owncloud and could never track down why.
But also seafile can do delta based synch whereas owncloud was always a full file copy if part of it changed - that may have changed since I last used it but it was on their support site back then as being something they had no plans to integrate.
Not an assault weapon?
Really?
You may want to check various dictionaries:
"assault rifle"
noun
a lightweight rifle developed from the sub-machine gun, which may be set to fire automatically or semi-automatically.
An assault weapon / assault rifle is defined by far more than its rate of fire.
e.g. it should be short enough barelled to minimise the arc of travel whilst remaining long enough to ensure a relatively high round velocity. It should have a removable magazine etc etc. Twisting language to selectively pick apart facts is just another failure to comprehend.
"...Did you know games are 64-bit only and demanding 16Gb+ RAM nowadays? That's not the top-end gamers only, but just to RUN the game on Steam..."
Gaming you say?
https://www.techspot.com/article/1043-8gb-vs-16gb-ram/page3.html
Ok, a little over a year ago and sure some things do benefit from more RAM for sure but the difference between 8GB and 16GB for gaming isn't half as big as most people seem to believe.
"...Is about the role. Was it managerial and compensated as such, or was it just rated as managerial to avoid paying overtime?..."
You just reminded me of something else - I had a job for a large manufacturing company almost 20 years ago.
The salary and benefits (what few there were) was all agreed in the interviews.
When I got the contract to sign, the salary was 50 pence a year over the agreed amount.
I gave them a call to query it just in case (I was still fairly young and naive and had worries about things like would it change my tax rate or anything silly) and was told by their HR robot that it was just how their grading system worked and it's the salary band I fell into.
Fair enough I thought.
Except it turns out that 50p was quite important because it put me over the threshold whereby they stopped paying overtime...and it was quite a common practice they had going on.
Had they been up front, open and honest about it beforehand I'd have most likely accepted it for what it was as it was a job I really wanted but because they did it in such an underhanded fashion, I refused to do any overtime for the two years I worked there.
I'd forgotten that little gem til just now.
I found early on in my career in IT projects as a lowly engineer that overtime was usually paid.
Moving up through the ranks in latter years, you'd be expected to put in extra hours as required (to a point) unpaid but the salary and benefits you got by that time tended to reward you for it.
However, once I'd stepped up to the really senior roles, it became untenable - I was finding myself working 14-16 hour days and often having to respond to calls at random times of the day and night for very little extra reward and it began to feel like my employer was starting to take the pee with their demands.
I spoke to them about it and was offered more money to compensate but that was missing the whole point of my lack of work/life balance.
So...I moved to another company with more money and fewer demands.
I don't totally blame my employers at the time - I could have refused to take on some of the extra work, or turned my phone off etc as well as take the extra money being offered.
But...never in a million years did it occur to me that I should sue them though as ultimately it came down to ME making the choices.
They sent me one back in the day to test.
Huge slab of a device.
Now the OS itself felt unfinished in many ways but was fairly intuitive.
But one of the things that I feel definitely helped it to an early grave was the decision by MS to release version 8 (I think it was - it might've been a 7.x - it was some time ago) but not have it compatible with the earlier hardware.
So anyone who'd bought into their platform was screwed over and why stick with a manufacturer that throws their devices under the bus one version later? Not even Samsung do that.
"...Couple that with the threat of firing the person who clicks on a bloody link/attachment without thinking, and we have the start of proper on-site protection...."
Don't be bloody stupid. The only thing that achieves is a culture of fear and blame where mistakes - often ones that begin as simple for the right people/person to correct without much ado - get buried out of fear until they become much bigger, much more difficult problems to handle.
"...Our 'usual suspects' will once again prove that anything that is built can be 'mis-used' in 'interesting' ways and 'new' vulnerabilities will be found !!!.."
As E.E. 'Doc' Smith put it in the Lensmen books:
"Anything that science can devise, science can analyse and synthesise"
"...Well done you for learnings a life lesson, are you 12 years old or something...."
That all you have to say on it? Some pointlessly inane dig made (of course) anonymously.
You do realise that the majority of people tend to work close to where they grew up? Likewise they tend to make lives for themselves there so if that happens to be somewhere were the cost of living is high they tend to just get on with it and accept it as being one of the facts of life.
I was once offered the chance to move to the Southeast of England - my employer offered a decent uptick in salary along with offering to pay for certain essentials to help the move.
But when I did the maths - even with the salary lift I'd have had to downsize my home and I live on the edge of a national forest with access to both the A1 and M1 within less than 30 minutes of each. With trains I can be in London in less than two hours should the need arise.
So having thought about it all I chose not to make the move.
That make me 12 as well??
I mean where's the incentive?
Oops you done f****d up gents. Time to go. Have a multi-million <insert currency> severance package and good luck in the next role. If you need a reference, we'll be sure to put a good word in for you.
Only - and really only - when it begins to hit both the company AND the directors' pockets will they sit up and take notice.
Showing my age now although by the time I got into music in any small way we had tape recorders as part of a massive hi-fi unit that you could use to record the top 40 off of Radio 1 every Sunday whilst you tried to avoid the gobshite DJ talking over the end of each track.
And then of course we got dual-tap sytems which meant you could just copy your mates' mix or even their most recently acquired computer game.
Ahhh happy memories.
...is how his ex-nanny seems to have such a perfect recollection of the things Levandowski was shouting all night - specifically the names.
In my limited experience, people generally remember the gist of things being said and might even remember a name or two, but that all seems to be rather verbatim.
Meh - either way it'll be interesting to see where this goes.
The real world shows that engineering and abstract thinking is an occupation best left to the male brain. Other "brain-involving" occupations may show balanced or reversed ratios, it completely depends.
And it's a pretty well known fact that the way STEM subjects are generally taught from the earliest ages of childhood tend towards putting girls and women off. Perhaps, just maybe, if this were addressed as well as some of the rampantly stagnant sexist views that are clear in such industries, we'd see more women in them.
I don't know how LGBTUIOP brains would work, and I don't particulary care.
So...your sexuality changes your ability to think/do these jobs? Really?
As for brawn - yeah, the real world also shows things about that, in spite of gurrrll power propagandists telling whoever is ready to listen that women are excellent for firefighting, policing in diverse neighborhoods or military frontline duty (the last one is utterly retarded in more ways in one; also - want children? stay out of toxic industrial environments, lady!)
Seriously? I think the 1940's called and they'd like their ideas on sexual equality back.
Are you honestly claiming that women can't/shouldn't be able to choose careers in these fields? I know plenty of women who could kick the arses of, are fitter than and in many ways "better" than men. If you took your head out from your own posterior occasionally, you might notice them too.
I would just about consider something like this on my outside door, as I have a porch and an inner door.
So for my very specific use case, having something on the outer door like this wouldn't be such a security risk as I can still utilise a good old fashioned physical lock on the inner door.
That said...rely on any of these IoT locks for the only point of security? Hell no!
"...Well, if you're forcing me to use MSAwful, I wouldn't want to be working for YOU either..."
We're on the same page.
I prefer to work with adults, not children who post stupid comments like that (anonymously of course) rather than accept basic truths such as the simplest that the vast majority of major business run mixes of systems chosen to fulfil the necessary function. That will inevitably be a mix of *nix and various flavours of Linux. It also pretty much inevitable they're going to run Microsoft software.
I absolutely love how so many espouse the freedom of choice. But not if that choice happens not to fall into line with their own narrow view of what is acceptable.
You realise this is how religions work right? Freedom to choose any you like but only this one is the right one...
Laughable.
And sure - downvote away but at least I have the courage to not post shit anonymously.
"...I've used LibreOffice for years. If my colleagues have a problem with the files I send them, it's their problem, not mine..."
What a frankly shitty attitude.
I bet they love the extra work you cause them just so you can sit in your ivory tower radiating smugness at them.
Back in the real corporate world, you wouldn't get within a mile of any of my teams. We're busy enough without needing another layer of complexity and stupidity making our lives more difficult. Frankly I wouldn't / won't tolerate such diva behaviour. Use whatever product you want, but with that approach it wouldn't be working with or for me.
You make some good points there, Lost all faiith...
Throw in the inevitable extended journey to get to the town, where in our case, the parking is expensive in small bays.
The local council has all but killed the market due to increasing rents to unsustainable levels and to be honest, I'd much prefer not to be in a place where it seems like every third shop is either a charity store one selling random cheap clothing and "jewellery" or a pound tat emporium.
I can browse from my home, in comfort and read reviews etc before I commit to buying stuff.
It also tends to mean, as someone who mostly works away in the week, that I can actually spend my weekends being a dad to my kids and a husband to my wife.
There's a stretch of road near my home that's had several fatal crashes in the last 18 months.
Despite lowering the speed limit to 50, it continues to happen.
So...for stretches like this, if the only way to save lives is to have cameras, so be it.
But how about more box junction cameras? The number of stupid, unobservant or simply selfish drivers that sit blocking junctions and adding to traffic problems is ridiculous.
Eventually they'll run out of friends and relatives to act on their replacement companies.
Funnily enough I've just responded to the courts about a parking fine issues in 2016. I parked at the same car park for weeks, paying on an app.
One evening I was poorly and fell asleep missing the alert on my phone.
As soon as I noticed the next morning, I paid again but by then I'd had a ticket.
The car park was 99% empty at night.
The best bits are that I have all the receipts up to and beyond the incident, I have the automated responses from the legal company showing I've tried to contact them and a copy of a their letter explicitly claiming I didn't.
I also have a screen shot of their own site not actually allowing me to pay when I decided it might be easier in the long run in a moment of weakness.
So all in all I am quite looking forward now to seeing them in court. Even if I lose at this point, it's only another 50 quid and some time so really worth having a go.
"...Back in the 8-bit days of 64kB of RAM and no HDD, programmers learned to make neat and optimised code to work within the constraints. As memory increased, these skills withered and atrophied..."
I remember reading an article back in the day about the guy who was tasked with converting Sim City from the Amiga to the humble BBC.
Apparently, there was one routine in the Amiga that used considerably more memory than was wholly available on the Beeb.
And yet (apart from graphically of course), he pretty much nailed it with a like-for-like reproduction.
At college I had to learn to program in assembly - in hex - on "development boards" with <8KB RAM so it was imperative that anything you tried to do was neat.
Mind you I was never very good at it myself but some of the others there had a natural gift for it that was staggering.
@Lee D
A few years ago the motoring programme that used to be on Channel 5 (5th Gear?) did a little test where they towed a smart cart up to 70mph (might even have been more) and let it crash head on into one of those huge concrete "temporary" motorway barriers you see during roadworks.
Amazingly there was very little deformation of the car itself and even less of the safety cage. They could actually open the doors.
My immediate thought - actually later articulated by the presenter - was that as impressive as that was, the simple fact was that you wouldn't walk away from such an impact.
I think it was last year that NCAP celebrated 25 years of being around with some stats on how much more likely you are to walk away unhurt from a collision at various speeds than you were back then and it's staggeringly better.
They also had some videos of then and now vehicles - the vehicles back then just folded, effectively.
@Tom Paine
Indeed...to bring their insurance costs down, a company I worked for some years ago sent all company car drivers on and advanced driving course.
I still remember seeing pics of - and being told that - a tree (even a relatively small one) is just about the single worst thing to collide with in a car as they are almost entirely immovable and are just the right kind of shape to cause the maximum amount of damage.
Stuck with me ever since.
It staggers me that so many people still don't realise there is something called MailTips built into Exchange that can do this kind of thing.
Since 2009!
https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/exchange/2009/04/28/introducing-mailtips/
They can even be customised so there really is no excuse where Exchange and Outlook are in use.
Of course...that doesn't prevent someone sending them out in a badly written script.