Posts by Il Midga di Macaroni 160 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Feb 2009
The store doesn't get those profits, the reseller does. And the reseller will make it a condition that the store offers both and with a price difference of at least a certain percentage. And just to be sure they'll have a nation wide monopoly on the big brands, so the store has to buy through them.
A certain company had been well known for its employee Christmas gifts for years (a bench top BBQ WTCLOI, a picnic cooler bag with built in boom box WTCLOI, company themed monopoly game, etc) but at the change of a managing director, influenced by a few people in HR who think Christmas gifts are heteronormative and white supremacist, it dropped off sharply. The first year under the new MD we got four Lindt chocolate balls in a paper gift bag. This year we got a pair of socks. Seriously, I'd rather they just decide not to give gifts.
I can't use presentation mode because our company PowerPoint template (that we *must* use for all company presentations) is somehow corrupted and displays the dot points in reverse order. So everyone sees my full deck at the left, but it doesn't help them because they don't know when I'm going to insert a highly unofficial joke into the presentation.
At my place of attendance they took down all the instructions, refused to fix any broken cables etc and just allowed the users to sort themselves out - ie they implicitly discouraged hybrid meetings. You either gather everyone in a room, or you put everyone on Teams and allow them all to work from home on their own laptop and headset. It works like a dream.
The more inconvenient it is for the great unwashed to work from the office, the more likely they are to work from home. The more they work from home, the less likely they are to disturb the peace and quiet by trying to barge into mission control.
They might ring, but a deft >clickety< to remotely drop their connection will soon sort that out.
SimonT has hit an inspired streak. BOFH has been around for nearly 30 years and all the old fans are expecting the boss to be the fall guy yet again - but this time the boss is just a pawn in the game to take down the bigger bait (and net the Dynamic Duo some dosh too). It's a very elaborate form of meta humour.
I once had a colleague KVM from his work computer to his own during a long and very dreary meeting. His expression was correctly studious and attentive, but the reflections on his face of explosives and gunfire from his first person shooter were a dead giveaway.
There is no truth to the rumours that he was playing against someone else who was equally bored by the same meeting (your honour).
I have trained many, many new PFYs, some male, some female, most green and keen, some healthily cynical. I always start with a brief explanation of the pecking order in the company (me, then the other data sysadmins in my team, then the software sysadmins, then their boss, then sundry bit players like marketing, suppliers, HR, etc). Almost all of them have gone on to happy and productive careers, and those that don't, well, they don't last long. Moral of the story: knowing your job is important, but knowing how to avoid idiots is utterly vital.
Back on topic: I'd like to nominate the author of SharePoint to this gathering of bastards, with a view to making him/her the chairman when the current one resigns/dies of old age/is helped under a taxi after annoying Simon or Stephen. I've used a countless number of poorly designed software packages over the years (including, I'll admit, several of my own making), and my conclusion is that SharePoint is so wilfully bad that it must have been deliberately designed to be so. Not just designed to "encourage" users onto a more expensive product, like Photoshop Elements, not just hastily put together and in desperate need of some attention, like Stibo Workbench, but actually designed to drive its users over the edge. Who knows, maybe the project manager owns a chain of pubs and wanted to drive people to the bottle. Speaking of which, thanks Simon and have one on me.
Is SimonT actually talking about human rather than computer viruses? And how they get distributed via a plausible sounding expert and an idiot on the inside? If so the reason justice hasn't yet been served on Jim is because it hasn't yet been served on the culprits IRL.
That said, if the BOFH is on form Jim won't suffer anything as mundane as a fall from a window or a cattleprod-carpet-quicklime operation. It'll be something special - probably involving him "offering" to help clean up the mess and then being found, along with his mate the idiot on the inside, en flagrant and smeared in Marmite having unfortunately passed away in the middle of a particularly depraved act together.
One of the normal tests a new aircraft undergoes is that they take a wing and bend it til it breaks. With the 787 they took it to the full capacity of their hydraulic jacks and it still didn't break - so they asked special permission to skip the test, because they said if it takes that much force to break it the broken piece is going to fly around and puncture something.
/^v.+b$/i
All this stuff with criminal charges is pointless. Just toast his account and quietly tip off any other ISPs about his activities, and BOOM, he's out of action.
The IT industry has its own justice, which is faster, simpler and WAY more effective than the court system.
No, seriously - if there was porn on Osama's hard drive it would tarnish his reputation with his followers. That would actually be a highly effective way of ending the war on terror, if their revered leader was indulging in one of the evil pastimes of the western infidels, what's left to fight for?
It's like the security measure they proposed just after 9/11 - legislate that a stripper be rostered onto every commercial flight. If there's a hijacking, she goes into action. Muslim men aren't allowed to look on the body of a woman, so they'd have to cancel the hijacking. As a bonus, every businessman in the world would want to fly just in case there's a hijacking - free striptease!
Paris because... isn't it obvious?
Telstra should have been split into wholesale and retail at the beginning! That way their wholesale customers aren't competing against their major supplier.
And then Telstra Wholesale could have handled the NBN rollout on their own, we wouldn't need an NBN Co. And they could have done it like this, bit by bit when it needs to be done, which would reduce the price drastically.
Oh, and that $11bn of taxpayer money NBN Co paid to Telstra for the use of the ducts? Yeah.
Out here in the colonies we have 3+2 seating on all our long distance trains (and most of our short distance trains too). And they only go 70mph so they take longer to get there.
I've made the trip to the mother country several times and let me tell you, you have NOTHING to complain about with regard to your trains. Nothing at all.
With this paper iiNet have done the impossible - found a solution which isn't ideal but is at least bearable for all parties. It's a very clever idea - and therefore will be rejected by the people who have to make it happen. The IT industry doesn't sit well with legacy institutions like governments.
BTW I'm not employed by iiNet or anything - although I do use them as my ISP and find their tech support excellent.
If the boss ever lasted long enough to learn from his mistakes, or if the higher-ups on the corporate ladder were a little higher up on the evolutionary ladder, someone would eventually decide that the BOFH and PFY really need an extra £10,000 a year expense account for safety-related items. For instance, six beers at each lunchtime would prevent users from annoying them, thus reducing user fatalities. It's a small price to pay!
Also, the company safety manuals should be rewritten. The #1 rule of computing is DON'T HASSLE THE BOFH. It should be written in 36pt type on page 1 of the safety manual. And in 18pt type at the bottom of every other page.
Come on Poms, surely you have groups of students, politicians and academics that come up with idiotic ideas? And you wouldn't want us to think the whole country felt the same way?
If you lot want to send the map over for a touring museum for the anniversary of Flinders' death I reckon that'd be a nice gesture. But in 2015 you can take the bloody thing back again, I don't want to have to pay the power bills for the climate controlled room it has to live in.
And of course if you don't want to come to the party we'll just send Warnie over to beat your whole cricket team single handed. And have affairs with half your female population.
Beer because I can't be bothered arguing.
$43 billion is the figure that's been thrown around, and the rationale behind it is so rubbery (as well as being kept out of view of the public) that industry people are saying it'll be something like $10bn on top of that.
And for what? I know we keep hearing about doctor's consultation rooms via webcam and online education - but really, it's mainly going to be used for streaming movies and BitTorrent.
In any case, none of that NEEDS fibre-to-the-home. If we spent even $5bn extending the quality connections currently available only in big cities out to the country we'd have all we need.
They can promise no scheduled downtime *to the end user* because they have redundancy across multiple data centres. Anyone who knows anything about networking has looked at Google's operation purely because it's a brilliantly elegant way of taking reliability past that seemingly impossible 99.95% barrier.
For my operations, the only outages I'm afraid of are the ones that originate in the browser - since Google Docs is Java heavy, and most implementations of Java are leaky in the extreme, it's possible for my people to get major problems if they don't close and reopen the browser every few hours. If Mozilla, Opera, Safari, Chrome et al could lick that problem they'd have done humanity a real service.
Beer because it's Saturday out here in Australia.
Looks like we have a manager in the house... someone get a fire going and heat up the tar, I'm just going out to the chooks coop to look for feathers.
Any IT person who accepts a position in management has ipso facto admitted that they were never a true IT person in the first place. The wiring of the brain that makes a person good at programming (or actually anything IT) also makes a person a bad manager - and vice versa.
... they'd better work on the reliability of their code. Facebook beats every piece of software I've ever worked with (bar one accounting package which had just been hastily recoded - shoddily - to handle networks, back when they were a novel concept) for the sheer pervasiveness of its weird bugs and inconsistencies. I've never actually lost data, but I've been given false-negative notifications of its existence countless times.
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