Posts by Timo

Re: I did solve a programming problem after I went to bed

Took a nap during my freshman engineering FORTRAN final. Put my head down on the desk and woke up a few minutes later with the full solution, just had to write it down.

two-legged

I believe milking stools had two legs, that allowed the milker to swing closer or farther away without having to shift the stool itself.

Re: "it's a complete rip and replace of everything that you have today"

About a decade ago I worked in a company that got bought by another one that used SAP. When faced with integrating the company the story we got from execs was that it was easier to reconfigure the company's operations and "way of working" than it was to adjust the SAP software so that it fit the company. Somehow SAP had defined the optimal way of working and that was it. Full stop. I bet that hasn't changed, or maybe the consultants that can manage the customization have gotten cheaper.

Re: What's new?

The origin story and the whole tired Northern California and silicon valley narrative is what is new. You know, where a couple of startup nerds try to tell you how to perceive things. And how they co-opt normal words to mean something completely specific to them, like a cringey inside joke that you're not enlightened enough to be in on.

its all part of the grift

The current regime is all about saving money, and redirecting it to their cronies. When you are in the defense industry or department of war there's no money to be made during peacetime.

Don't fix things, drop everything and write me a report about why you can't fix it.

Never mind that all that management "oversight" took perfectly good time away from letting you solve the real problem. There's an opportunity cost to all that. And they hate it when you explain that back to them.

Re: If an employer asks you do to this ...

I applied for a job at a company that had the questionnaire, but decided to subject its candidates to a video interview format where the question was presented and then you had to formulate and record a response, with a two hour time limit. Somewhat stressful, and completely impersonal. They had some semi-robotic claim that it would let the team review my answers when it was convenient for them, and so I wouldn't have to answer the same questions multiple times.

The cognitive dissonance with their HR marketing material that claimed "we value all our people" was pretty off-putting. We value people, but not enough to be considerate to the applicants.

Re: been there, done that ...

On the systems I've worked with it seemed that tripping the panic threshold would cause the ntpd to give up permanently, and the only way to get it right was the run ntpsync before starting ntpd. So this "change the time server and hope all the clients fall in line" would not have worked, would it?

I guess I never had the ability to change the time source as it was synced to an internet pools.

Re: This:

Why wouldn't you have all the access points with the same credentials so client devices could roam freely? And adjust footprint based on power? Its not mesh (wireless backhaul) as much as connected and centrally managed.

Re: Consumers vs Creators

This is really the key distinction. A phone or tablet with a touch interface seems to be for consumption devices. Maybe just because it is hard to "create" on them. OK there are the handful of photoshop type apps for iPads that cross over, but its nearly impossible to edit a spreadsheet or document or write code with a touchscreen.

Re: Phone down

Could they have done a boot of a live Linux system to test those parts of the system? Would not be able to read the hard drive but the rest likely would work.

Re: VAX field service engineers

Jimmy Fallon (US comedian and late-night TV show host) did that to his ring finger.

https://www.nynjcmd.com/jimmy-fallon-suffers-ring-avulsion/

I grew up in a rural state, and we were shown the farm safety videos in high school. Lot of pictures of people that jumped off something and left their ring and finger behind. Also the effects of loose shirts caught in PTO shafts.

Re: At my last place....

satellite providers can usually predict when the outages will occur. it might be determined months or years in advance. when they get closer to the sun outage period they will send out alerts

Re: Listening outside the box

That reminds me of a customer site a long time ago. Machine room with lots of server fans and general noise, and the manager's office that overlooked it with a glass window. Nice and quiet inside the office. Right outside said office was a fax machine. While having a conversation in front of the fax machine was pretty common, you had to speak loudly to do it. And that made it very clearly heard inside the office.

I don't remember if I got caught out for saying something disrespectful of the site, or if a friendly customer worker made a point to tell us. I think he did a demo and it was shockingly clear.

Re: That's way to lenient!

You make a good point, but with the numbers of flights per day and month that Southwest operates one or two chronically late ones might amount to a rounding error.

Re: LDAP?

thanks for the explanation, I ALMOST understand it. Just got done with a day or two of that fun when I had to change my password on my machine, from home.

There seems to be a way to get it to sync everything (desktop and apps etc) but our IT dept haven't been able to write it down. There are myriad ways to initiate a password change, from the desktop ctrl-alt-del menu, to going to myapps.microsoft, and with or without VPN engaged, and I SWEAR I got it to work one time so that the login to my computer was updated along with everything else, but I can't seem to reproduce it. It could also be some misconfiguration by our IT people, they seem to be in the low cost arena.

So I'll have a machine (win10) that I have to use the old password to log in, then everything else uses the new password. Until I go into the office and on powerup the machine will get its update and then everything is wobbly for a bit while the machine and everything microsoft and in the cloud somehow thinks that its out of sync (when it should be in sync.)

Re: ...using the payment details stored in the user accounts...

It dates back to the ancient old days of app stores and buying apps, before the apps themselves had a way to charge you directly. You could (maybe still can) buy and pay for apps / "channels" using the credit card that you stored in Roku, likely when you originally set up your account and then forgot about.

Remember when you'd go to the app store and buy an app for $1.99 and that was it? And Apple or Google got their cut? Now you download the app for free and sign into your Netflix or Amazon.

Re: The Real Reason

I think the first counter-point to your point is that they'd pay the lease whether employees are in the office or not, so its a false economy to have people come in to the office.

Second counter-point: the company is actually saving money over the lifetime of the lease. One of the other posts here calculates the lump-sum vs. the total lease payments. They just elected to buy it out in one lump sum.

You forgot "unloved"

Article mentioned also-ran status, but your post captures why it made it unloved. A previous employer used it and the majority of the time the video feed would fail to work or would be irritatingly blocky, even if only between two people. The hassle factor was very high, the conference room features and functionality were aggravating at best.

I think that employer probably got some early adopter silicon valley deal where Blue Jeans was buying customers with VC money. The platform never seemed to improve. Didn't take long to dump them for zoom.