Posts by A Non e-mouse 3275 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Jan 2010
And then there is this strange obsession with degrees
It's not just degrees - any type of "qualification". All that these qualifications mean is that you've passed the exam: Not that you can do the job. Sure, the qualification can be a useful steer as to whether they have some background in an area, but it shouldn't be a deal-breaker.
Some places I've worked at use the phrase "degree or equivalent experience" which is much better.
At our place they started centralising and standardising the production of job descriptions & adverts and I supported the idea of standardising the recruitment process. A short while later one of our administrators moved to another part of the department. HR's new process got on with doing the job adverts, etc and finally presented us with a shortlist of candidates we were going to interview.
Reading the CVs it became clear that HR didn't have a clue what the original person did. They'd shortlisted systems administrators whereas we desperately needed an office administrator (ordering, billing, stock control, etc)
I had a summer job in a supermarket X years ago. During training we were told our checkout could be randomly audited to make sure we weren't on the take. Sounded reasonable: We were handling money. One day I was audited. I was a bit nervous, but shrugged it off as it was just a random event as told in our training.
An hour later I got audited again. A short while later I got audited again. And later on a fourth time. All in one shift
During the last audit I asked what was going on, as I thought these were supposed to be once in a blue moon events.
I was told that the computer consistently had my checkout as being out by a certain amount. Yet the checkout next to me was out, by the same, but opposite, amount.
I never found out what was wrong - but I never got fired so clearly they didn't blame me.
I rarely need to boot to Windows on my Macs. What I do do frequently, though, is fireup VMWare Fusion and run a Windows VM to run minor applications that are only available as Windows apps.
*IF* VMware/Parrallels, etc were to emulate an x86 processor on ARM on Mac, top speed isn't required. It just needs to be fast enough to do a task.
I think Apple's arguement is that they feel Intel's CPUs have stagnated whereas their own ARM based SoCs have grown (in performance) in leaps & bounds. Also, by owning the entire stack (CPU all the way up to software) they can design for just one customer with well defined use cases rather than as a more general design.
This is a brave move by Apple (In my opinion far riskier than the other two CPU transitions they've performed) Only time will tell if it's a good idea or not.
if earth has cleared its orbital neighbourhood, why are we looking for asteroids that could wipe us out?
Because Earth has cleared its orbit. All these asteroids we're looking out for are in orbits that happen to cross Earth's orbit. Occassionally, they cross Earth's orbit just as Earth is getting to the same point.
'monopole' not sure what that is
I suspect the commentard is referring to a magnetic monopole - a hypothetical particle with just a north or south pole.
Even now they support IMAP, some institutions refuse to enable it (my university IT team claim IMAP is not GDPR compliant!! so they can't turn it on)
At our place we switched off IMAP on Office 365 because the implementation is so bad. I'm sure one of our engineers still has nightmares after seeing what Microsoft did to IMAP.
Never forgiven MS for what they did to Netware.
Novell were partly responsible for their own deminse.
NDS/eDirectory, Zen for Desktops (& Servers) & DirXML were good products. Groupwise was fair but they were very slow to update the SMTP gateway. BorderManager was OK and Manageworks was just *meh*. (Have I missed anything?)
The Netware kernel was basically a one trick pony (Blazing fast file server) and was a deadend so they should have moved to a Linux kernel much sooner. (They did port Java & Postgres to run on Netware but those had problems - mainly due to the limitations of the Netware kernel) They also took their time to properly accept TCP/IP (Netware/IP does NOT count!)
Trying to compete in the desktop office arena was a major distraction and the company's reluctance to investment in marketing was probably the final nail in the coffin.
Sure, Microsoft "bundling" filesharing & directory with their own operating system didn't help Novell but you can't blame Microsoft for everything.
In my opinion, NT4 should have been the kick up the backside for Novell to up their game but their failled to move fast enough.
I've heard anecdotal evidence that email is already becoming passé with businesses moving to Slack/Teams/Hangouts/etc and individuals using Facebook/Whatsapp/etc.
With the likes of Google, Microsoft, et al offering free email services, I think paid for email/messaging is a tough market to be in.
Small (Not one person companies) rock.
I deal with a small company who prided themselves on their software never crashing. A week before go-live we managed to crash it. I logged a support case and the news was ominous. They had no idea what was going on or where to start looking. Left the office that day stressing about what we were going to do about that go-live date.
On the way home got a call from the lead engineer (Yes the lead engineer. Not tech support. Not account manager but the person who actually writes the code!): "We've worked out what's going on. We've got a reproduceable test case. You'll have a fix on your system first thing in the morning"
Still using that company's software over a decade later.
I'm involved in a couple of projects where we're moving customers from Exchange on prem to Office 365/Exchange Online.
Having seen the state of these on-prems Exchange setups, I think the skills required to manage on-prem email (Exchange or something else) are rapidly diminishing. For many people cloud email (Exchange Online, gmail, etc) is the sensible solution. I used to be anti-cloud, but for many people, there just isn't any point in trying to run your own mail setup. It's a distraction you just don't need.
Is cloud perfect? No. But I'm a pragmatist and even the occasional cloud issue is minor compared to when a customer hasn't done any maintenance to the email server for years and finds their server then goes belly up for days as we come in to try and rescue it.
Granted there was plenty of terrible copy-pasted code out there..
Terrible copy & pasted code exists in all languages - mostly driven by Q&A websites that just post a line or two of code without bothering with error or security checking. e.g. How many code examples out there just disable SSL certificate checking and then get blindly copied?
The episode has also triggered a wider review into corporate private prosecutions brought by companies who are "victim, investigator and prosecutor
In the UK, the prosecutional role was removed from the Police into the CPS years ago because of problems. Why on Earth have private companies been allowed to continue when this system has shown to be broken?
There are several things that surprise me about this kneeling on the neck technique.
First, it's an official method of restraint. WTF? Who the heck thought that restricting the neck was a good restraint technique?
Second, this isn't the first death of a suspect from being restrained by this technique. Here's a suggestion for you: If people are dying from your restraint technique then clearly somethings wrong!
iWork is utter crap compared to LibreOffice.
I've used both iWork and LibreOffice. Sure, iWork doesn't necesarily have the same depth of features as LibreOffice, but I think the UI is better for the simple use cases. And if you're storing your documets in iCloud, then the seemless transition between MacOS and iOS for editing your documents (and the iOS apps are quite good) is very useful.
Do I use iWork as my primary office suite? No. My go-to office suite is LibreOffice - but I'll fire up iWork some tasks.
Ah Z80 assembler. I remember doing that on Spectrums & Amstrad CPCs. Once I went to Uni and discovered Intel CPUs I was shocked by the x86 memory segmentation and wondered how anyone could work with such an environment.
I have a dream of getting back into assembly programming - but with a CPU with a sane instruction set.
We had a HA system which worked fine. Then one day, the primary failed and everything jumped over to the secondary. Which promptly failed and everything failed back to the primary (which was just about getting back on its feet) Which failed, etc. , etc..
It turned out one client got into a very weird state and sent command packets to the servers which the servers couldn't handle. Once we managed to get some logs and isolate the client the system became a lot more stable.
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