Posts by mr_souter_Working 140 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Nov 2013
a job I had previously, we needed to clean out the server room and servers for a company that made Carbon filter material - by burning Cow Bones - the fine black soot was everywhere - it took us a couple of days and a lot of cleaning supplies to get the room even half decent.
Lovely - was sneezing it out for a week.
I changed jobs just as Covid-19 started to take hold.
my role at my previous company meant that I had to be onsite a lot of the time, because the work I was doing could only be carried out in a specific location. But they were encouraging people to WFH as much as possible.
My new company, it has been WFH unless required to be in the office (which is rare). My work involves servers and network kit spread across the globe - so it doesn't matter if I am in the office or not - VPN and RDP works fine for me.
I always hated open plan offices - not just because you would always catch any bug going round. Noisy people on the phone, or random people asking questions (generally interrupting my train of thought).
Much happier with no commute (I actually changed jobs because the new one was going to be a 10 minute drive to work rather than 30+ with my previous job), and no distractions from the work. woudl be nice to go in to the office every so often - but would not want it to be the norm - maybe a couple of days a month, or whenever something requires my physical presence.
I hate open plan offices
That is one thing I think may change for the better after Covid-19 - we may see fewer open plan offices with staff rammed in like sardines.
We will either be going back to smaller offices. Or, at the very least, we might have more space around our desks.
I'm sure we have all seen this before - someone touched something, so suddenly they are to blame for all the issues that people think they have, or that they have had for months and not bothered to complain about.
In this case Bose pushed a firmware update (and that alone would make me not use their headphones, if I could even afford them) - so people took the opportunity to blame that update for problems they've had for a while.
Does MS provide a cloudy replacement option for them?
Yes - they have for a while now.
you can publish the app (or a link to it) in Azure, you can migrate the app to Azure.
you can do similar with Google and AWS - and I guess most (if not all) of the other major (and minor) players.
there are a great deal of very, very large customers that require on-prem apps (large government departments all across the world). for assorted reasons (generally security and data protection) they simply cannot use public cloud services for everything.
Those customers spend many billions with Microsoft annually - for both on-prem software, and cloud services.
There is little chance that Microsoft will ever cut them loose, and lose that huge revenue source.
perhaps in a few decades, the situation will change (although I seriously doubt it)
I got a text last week saying that they were going to be carrying out work in the Bishopton area this week (near my office outside Glasgow), and hoped to be finished by the 16th.
so, I had worse than usual service yesterday - and no service at all today. no text, voice or data.
their website is still down - and I can't use most of the social media sites from my work computer (El Reg doesn't count).
I think the time may have come to move to another provider (not that most of them are any better)
from the users that store files in the recycle bin, to the staff member that was upset when I imposed a policy to empty the deleted items from the mailbox after 14 days, she complained that she used that to store the important emails....................................
yes - it's not a transcript - it even says so in the document
CAUTION: A Memorandum of a Telephone Conversation.· (TELCON) is not a verbatim transcript of a
discussion. The text in this document records the notes and recollections of Situation Room Duty
"Officers and-NSC policy staff assigned t_o listen.and memorialize the conversation in written form
as the conversation takes place. A numper of factors can affect 'the accuracy of the reco�d,
including poor telecommunications connections and variations in accent and/or interpretation.
The word "inaudible" is used to indifate portions of a conversation that the notetaker was unable
to hear.
these days I often find myself trying to write documentation - but never given enough time to do a proper job on it.
I like to write it, test it myself to see if i've missed anything obvious, then try and get someone else to follow it and make sure it makes sense to them - only then do I say it's ready for general consumption.
often having to change the document a couple of dozen times due to design changes, after all, why would we want to finish the design before starting to do the work and documentation on how to install it.......
"You still can't dial up how much fuel you want despite the pumps having keypads on them now"
my local Tesco petrol station certainly does - choose an amount in either litres or pounds, and it stops when you get there.
although, I do live in a nice country (Scotland) - maybe our pumps are better than those in Englandshire.....
:P
"car ownership will fall and everyone will hire an EV taxi t get from A to B" - if you live in a city, and only want to travel within that city, then maybe.
if you happen to live in a rural area, or feel like going for a drive somewhere, or fancy visiting relatives, or go on holiday, or work odd hours, or, or......
The idea that people will no longer want/need to own their own vehicle (of whatever type) is wrong.
"My statement was that there is plenty of capacity at night that is why the electricity is cheap in off peak"
hmmm - yes, if you have a dual rate meter, you get a cheaper rate at night.
however, as I was told just last week by the electricity company, the current crop of "smart" meters, are not compatible with dual rate electricity tariffs.
have fun
and by the way, some of us regularly travel 300 miles plus (round trips of 400 miles are not uncommon for me, with an average annual mileage of over 20k miles. My daily commute is 60 miles), have no way to charge an EV at home (I live 3 floors up in a flat, and there are no charging points on my street) - charging would require me to go to the local train station, and wait an hour or two to charge, before coming home.
I would also like to remind you that a large % of the population live or work in cities - with vast numbers of cars parked on the roadside. if you drive to work, and park in a city, you will need a charging point at the parking spot, or you will need to rely on there being sufficient charge left to get home - assuming you can charge at home.
and finally, something that nobody seems to want to think about. crime. theft of electrical cable is relatively common. all of those cars that will be charging on streets, will have quite hefty chunks of cable attaching them to the chargers. I have never noticed any method of locking the cables in place (and a determined thief would simply cut the cable to steal it). your car is not going to charge very well overnight if the cable goes walkies. and how about the anti-social yobs that cause damage just for the fun - cars already get scratched and destroyed by them - imagine the fun they could have with a tube of superglue and all those charging points..............................
I am trying to email another user in the same organisation, and the email is being rejected by Microsoft
A communication failure occurred during the delivery of this message. Please try resending the message later. If the problem continues, contact your email admin.
The following organization rejected your message: BY2NAM05FT033.mail.protection.outlook.com
there are still some of us here that can do the work - but nobody seems to be able to find us. And we tend to have too much work and not enough time. It's no wonder so many people put their hand up for voluntary redundancy, with more likely to leave before the end of the year through compulsory redundancy.
but, on the plus side - I got a dividend of 12p from my single share in DXC, and got to vote in the upcoming shareholders meeting.
so there is at least one vote against Mike Lawrie remaining CEO, and against the executive compensation package.
"Nuclear explosions have a distinctive "double flash" : you see the explosion, it's briefly shrouded in debris, then you get a lot of light over a longer time. From the viewpoint of satellites, rocks hitting us don't look much like nuclear explosions"
OK, most of the rocks that hit the earth are just rock - but we keep hearing about asteroid mining, and that there are trillions of tons of precious metals out there. what are the odds that some of them contain Uranium/Plutonium? what would happen if a 1km lump of uranium hit the earth at that speed - would it continue to be merely an asteroid impact, or could that potentially become an atomic bomb?
and how about a 1km lump of rock that turned out to be made of something super dense - like osmium. even if it was a relatively small percentage of the rock, I have to think that it would be likely to change the potential destructive energy.
I remember the halcyon days when I worked for companies that provided stationery to the staff - notepads, pens, etc...
sadly my current crowd (DXC) are such a small and poor lot, that there is no stationery anywhere - unless you attend an event that has customers (they have plenty of DXC branded crap to give away then)
my monitor stands are reams of paper - and if want any notepaper, I go and acquire it from a printer. Pens - I bring my own, and will cut the hands off anyone that lays a finger on one of them!
"But don't the hosts have to be members of the domain in order to move a VM between them?"
no - it takes some work, but you can get a Hyper-V cluster running with standalone (workgroup) servers - and you can have servers move between them - provided you have decent shared storage.
for $10billion over 10 years they could put together a pretty reasonable secure environment themselves, using many smaller contractors - with multiple redundant offsite data stores (I assume that the US Military has some secure locations) - then they wouldn't need to give any one single company such a huge contract.
But everyone is obsessed with putting their data into other peoples computers, even when it may not necessarily be the best idea.
"It's kinda difficult to get your team a merit rise when you're not allowed to rate anyone higher than a 3"
I managed to get a 2 on my last review - but I did really push the point to my manager after only getting a 3 last time (I made the point about what expectations I had NOT met.)
1 - Exceeds all expectations
2 - Meets All and Exceeds Some Expectations
3 - Meets Most Expectations
"The top talent from DXC is running like hell, or has already left, and they've replaced 100% of the talent with useless know-nothings from India who couldn't find their asses with both hands and a flashlight."
Yes - our internal helldesk (based in India) is every bit as bad as anything we force our customers to endure - I called them because a group policy has suddenly restricted the ability to run PowerShell scripts on my laptop - the person I spoke to did not know what PowerShell was, and then (after a long wait) said that they didn't support PowerShell.
It's things like that, that make me question my own sanity.
"The best admin is like the Maytag repairman from the old commercials, who appears to be doing fuck all 40 hours a week, and produces no output that can be plugged into a formula to determine his performance. A manager who doesn't understand this might see Bob surfing the web on El Reg and Slashdot during work hours and think he's a slacker and fire him"
Couldn't agree more - the best people have generally found and fixed all the issues before anyone else even knows they existed (often before anyone else is in the office) - or has worked hard to ensure that the problems never crop up in the first place (not that most managers would understand the concept of preventative maintenance).
"Smith said on the conference call: "Managers have the opportunities to evaluate, identify our best performers and make sure they are market competitive. I tell you, I see them, I approve them every week... that is just a reality of how we operate. Most progressive companies have moved far beyond basic entitlement raises.""
Asked for one over 3 months ago - after a great performance review - been waiting ever since. fully expect the answer to be no, but might be waiting months before I get any response.
set desktop background to be screenshot of desktop (bonus points for rotating image and desktop to random direction), hide all icons, move taskbar to top or side and set to hide, set screensaver to be screenshot - and set time to 1s (or lower)
have also set power saving options to 1s - and require password when unlocking - while simultaneously disabling the mouse, and often the entire USB hub, in device manager.
"to call for "a proper identity system in the UK" to underpin digital government."
I assume that he has forgotten that every British citizen is issued a unique ID that the government already uses to track us throughout our lives - our National Insurance Number.
This is already a computerised system.
it could (fairly easily) be built upon to provide a secure identification system - if anyone in power was interested in making something that worked, rather than simply grabbing more power and control for their own departments.
DXC - desk phones are almost non-existent (the few around are mainly because nobody has bothered to bin them yet)
No ability to receive external calls via Skype (at least for the vast majority of us)
No pens
No notepads
No mice
No replacement hardware - unless it suffers a catastrophic failure
.
.
Soon they will probably start charging us to have seats and desks.
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