Brilliant
suddenly I'm selling a chair endorsed by a certified IT professional with a background in health and usability research... And not a suggestible hypochondriac with the IT skillset of a potato
Well done once again, Simon!
"It's called Selection Bias," I say to the Boss. "What do you mean?" "I mean they're cherry-picking research that supports their opinion." "How?" "Okay, so say I think that playing first person shooter games gives you migraines." "It does," the Boss says. "No it doesn't," the PFY says. "It does - I get them every time I …
It's true. I was doing some photography last night* and my ears are still ringing.
* the fact that the photography was in a live music venue and I forgot my ear plugs is entirely coincidental**.
** That and the fact music photographers tend to be directly in front of the speakers half the time
>>I started to read Simon's stories during my formative years.
If I had discovered BOFH during my college years (when I worked as a computer lab assistant, teaching Word 6(66) to students who barely knew how to type and had waited 'til the eleventh hour to start writing their reports) I'd be in prison.
I foolishly let my eldest child read my BOFH archive plus "The Prince" and Kevin Mitnick..
She now works at a nice admin job managing real rocket scientists and sending stuff to crash on Mars. I was worried that my library might be a bad influence so I didn't give her siblings access, they all work in retail.
Suffice to say that I'm leaving my library to my grandchildren and seeding the books with fivers to encourage reading them.
AS: I especially like the Iodine-tinged lipstick. But getting back to bizniss:
" "She now works at a nice admin job managing real rocket scientists and sending stuff to crash on Mars."
So it's all your fault? "
Fault shared between Deimos and, Urban-Legendly, this: =============> ;
If need be, I select and test a sample on the basis of probable error and then write something like "14 out of a risk-based sample of 20 items were deficient." That the addressee of my report will think about an error rate of 70 per cent - well, that's part of the game.
Of course, to the best of my knowledge it might just as well be a total of 14 errors out of a population of umpteen thousands. But based on the approach it is simply not possible to draw any conclusions on the population.
This post has been deleted by its author
We did this last week at the NHS, albeit due to incompetance rather than a carefully thought out herd-culling plan.
A "test" email was sent to all staff.
Many idiots were exposed as people who think the right way to express their absolute apoplectic fury at being sent an email is to hit the "reply-to-all" button
A coworker sent out an alert to our building about the latest scam circulating, including a screenshot of the original message, showing the link and with instructions that "if you receive this, DO NOT click the link, just delete the message." (obviously not with a live link, for obvious reasons)
Within 5 minutes he got back the first reply: "I can't click on the link! What am I doing wrong?"
Oh God yes.
A few years back I sent out an edited version of an email like this, ( I think it was of the "your computer has a problem, click here to resolve it" variety - something like that) that a staff member had received and sensibly shown to me. I sent it with roughly that message, and with with the link(s) deleted.
It is a small organisation, - a couple of dozen staff- and I spent much of the remainder of the day being interrupted by people coming up to me and saying "I got your message, but I couldn't get the button to click".
Something about computers scares normally intelligent people to being unthinking, unobservant, uncritical sheep.
Icon used in lieu of a proper despair icon
"hit the "reply-to-all" button"...
... telling everyone to stop replying to all.
Oh yes, they did. Lots of them.
Some of the addresses were automated ticketing systems. That replied to all. One or two people even replied to all, asking why the tickets had been assigned to them. Definitely a popcorn day.
I ended up deleting 322 of the things, and I suspect I got off lightly. I've kept the original for posterity :-)
"Send out an email warning users never to click on a link embedded within an email, with an embedded link saying "Click here for more information..." and then sack everyone who does."
Priceless! LOLing* here! :D
* Yes, I took "LOL" and made it into a verb. I am low enough to do this. :D