Posts by Alien8n

Re: We only have her word for it

@boltar

"So because she has XX chromosomes we're supposed to automatically believe everything she says? Grow up."

No, but given Oracle's track record on this, and the fact that everything she's claimed will be verifiable by the court (Oracle will have financial records and disciplinary records for everyone involved in the case and the court will have access to them) then I'm willing to bet that yes she was fired for simply being an older woman. Which just begs the question why you're so willing to immediately accuse her of lying purely based on the fact she's female?

As stated elsewhere, when an entire team is underperforming it's a safe bet the problem isn't the team, but the management. And by singling the women out it's also a safe bet that the prevailing "boy's club" mentality was in full swing and her managers were looking for scapegoats. Also the fact that she was granted medical leave by Oracle's HR department also shows they were aware of the harassment she was getting but refused to intervene to prevent it. All of this will be on record, and all of this will be viewable by the court.

But don't let your hatred of women get in the way of facts ($deity help any women defendants if you ever get put on a jury)

Re: The inverse case

Went for a job at a certain anti-virus place based in England. Role was for 3rd line support, they were offering what I'd expect to be offered if I'd literally just come out of uni, but expecting 5 years knowledge of not 1, but 3 different operating systems. Ironically I'm now working in their old headquarters (they moved across the road, our postcode still directs people to their new building).

Strange you mention that, that's exactly what they're being suggested for as it's being considered for a large multi-national bank to restrict access to "sensitive documents". Sounds like a strange euphemism for "tax dodger's offshore bank account details" to me...

It wasn't the routing per say that was the issue, it was that it was routing to effectively a dead end. A bit like saying Google | Africa > Dev/Null

Re: Northern Ireland

@ Phil OS you seem to have a rather rose tinted view of the RUC, or are you deliberately ignoring the fact that the RUC in the 60s would regularly attack the homes of Catholics and were ruthless in attacking civil rights activists, even beating some to death? The British troops went in as a direct result of the RUC's actions in Bogside. And this is BEFORE the Troubles. Just because you happen to know some good people who happened to be in the RUC it doesn't excuse the ones who blatantly used their position of power to commit indiscriminate murder.

Re: Karma?

Actually the CIA can be directly linked to plenty of deaths. As can the British Government.

Look at the CIA led coup of Indonesia that led to Suharto gaining power. The CIA gave the names of Communist sympathisers in Indonesia to Suharto which led to one of the biggest mass murders on the last century. Estimates are 500,000 people were killed in the purge, and the CIA was directly responsible for every death as they provided the names of every single one of them to Suharto's government. The British government, along with the US, collaborated with Indonesia when they invaded East Timor in 1975, even providing navy escort ships to the Indonesian government for transporting prisoners to their deaths. 100,000 East Timorese died from starvation and disease as a direct result of Indonesia's invasion, fully supported by both the British and US governments.

Re: Electricity

@Juice thanks for finding the youtube vid, being at work it's not something I can really search for just yet.

The Men also have some rather more IT related songs, notably "Vive La Difference Engine", an ode to Babbage and Lovelace :)

Re: The irony

I did mention that at the start of my reply "On sales, yes". I'm more than aware that the US charges effectively VAT twice, both at a local and a national level. My comment on Council Tax is about the fact that we pay a local tax, admittedly property based and not income, but it's still local. And it's a top up to the taxation the government takes and then hands to councils. You could also argue that business rates are also a double taxation as companies pay corporation tax on profits, but councils then also charge business rates. The big difference being that while corporation tax is only paid on profit, business rates are paid regardless.

Re: Been there got the t-shirt

Our previous contractor was asked to leave his employment as a result of an errant Robocopy statement.

He left the MIR switch in his script when copying over some errant files that hadn't copied due to permission issues, 2 days after the file server had been replaced. Result? We lost 2 days data. His biggest mistake though was doing all this before checking to make sure we could actually access the backups of the new file server. Small mercy being only 2 days data lost, and it wasn't the database server.

Re: Karma

Very familiar. I still end up with the occasional contract job to keep me busy in the evenings because it's still cheaper to hire me on a contract rate than pay someone to take twice as long. In my defence I helped design the system while at a previous company. Said previous company however couldn't find anyone else who could do what I used to do so in the end replaced the entire software package. I heard after I left that they went through several IT managers in just a few months. Served them right for blaming the IT person for an accountant's cockup.

Re: Revenge...

Not sure how true it is (certainly someone cementing the art teacher's door up with bricks was true) but apparently a group of sixth formers at my old school took a mini apart and reassembled in on the roof of the music block and took it for a spin on the roof.

Re: Put a heater in the safe then ?

@Unicornpiss

"My question would be, why was it just the one PC acting up then? Didn't they put all the disks in teh safe? Or did the office only have one PC?"

Judging by the description I'd say they only had one PC. Remember it wasn't really until the 90's that PCs came down enough in price that they became almost a commodity item, even in an office environment. My first PC cost me 4 grand back around 1995.

Re: One reason for removable batteries...

This has always been a bugbear of mine. It's called a mobile, not a desked.

Re: Reliable internet

I was looking at that and thinking "who doesn't have a smart phone for business?"

While it's entirely possible he's unable to connect his PC to the internet via tethering (your business means going to homes and you don't have a laptop?) it's almost unthinkable that he wouldn't have access to email. Even for the most basic of businesses there should be multiple ways to access emails. He certainly seemed able to get onto Twitter at least.

This to me just strikes me as someone who hasn't thought about any contingency planning and is trying to do everything with the bare minimum. Hopefully this will persuade him to actually consider how he runs his business.

(Edit - just looked at his Twitter feed and it would appear that he's a serial complainer with a huge sense of entitlement. Also, why are people still using gmail for their business emails?)

Re: Could ask the Chinese

It's not that the ISS is going to be scuttled, just that the only escape pod available at the moment is nearing it's end of life. Not helped by the fact that it's also suspected to be in poor condition to start with. Without a second pod they'll be forced to abandon the ISS temporarily until they can recommence manned missions again.

Then again, the main unit of the ISS is now out of date, so maybe a better option would be to scuttle it and start again. Maybe replace it with something that uses the Blue Danube as part of the docking sequence.

Re: Where I work

Back in the alt.sysadmin days I recall a story that got posted:

"I can't access the internet"

"What seems to be the problem?"

"Well the screen is black and there are no lights on the computer"

"Is it plugged in?"

"Yes"

"Can you check to make sure all the cables into the monitor and PC are connected?"

"No"

"Why not?"

"It's too dark"

"Then turn the lights on"

"I can't, there's a power cut..."

Re: RAID 1 - yank the wrong Hard Disk Drive.

The police?

Re: RE: Mooseman

@Phil O'Sophical that's why a second referendum should not be just In/Out. It should be on the deal itself.

And it should be truly reflective, with a transferable vote so we don't have the ridiculous reality that a Minority of the population can hold the Majority of the vote. Select first and second preference, In/Out No deal/Out with deal. Effectively EU/EEA/WTO and you make it explicitly clear that it's a binding vote. Not an advisory one that somehow is treated as law without any further discussion of what it actually is everyone was voting for.

Re: New contractor

Yup, basically he'd made so many mistakes at so many clients that he was fired for gross misconduct.

The bit that beggared belief was that he was still expected to work out a notice period, which meant his last couple of weeks also involved watching him like a hawk. If he'd been working for me directly it would have been a straight forward "go home and don't come back until your disciplinary hearing" and then all his access removed there and then. Some people really don't understand how damaging a disgruntled employee can be. Reminds me of another conversation when engineering.

"We're going to be making half the company redundant."

"What are we doing to prevent sabotage of the equipment once we tell everyone?"

"Nothing, no one would do that."

Followed by half the factory going down over the next week as the operators started sabotaging the equipment.

Re: "over-zealous yank"

They really need to stop just tossing these headlines out there..

Re: Reminds me of the time ...

My first proper foray into IT was when the warehouse system for one of our factories bloated to £2.7M due to scope creep from management. When asked to look into it as it was unusable I replaced it with an entirely touch screen based system written in Access in about a month. I designed the database on the system that we used at my previous role with the sole purpose of it being as easy to use as possible from an end user perspective. When the engineering team was made redundant that database was my ticket into IT, that and my knowledge of manufacturing systems that meant I was moved onto the data migration project for another factory that we'd just bought.

Re: Nobody cares

@Voyna I Mor

Not strictly true, my old Apple Watch was given to my daughter when I upgraded mine.

Reason I have one? I find it useful to get notifications on the watch while the phone is in my pocket and I get around 3 days use between charges. Not too bad considering. Very useful when doing the weekend job wandering around a festival for 3 days and unable to hear the alarm on the phone going off telling me I need to be somewhere in 5 minutes.

Re: Hey! I earned a badge again for posting too much. Sorry!

Most blind people see something, even if just different shades of grey. So they can usually tell which direction a light is for example. Singer for a band I shot not that long ago is legally blind and uses a white stick, but actually has pretty good forward vision. The stick is more to do with the complete lack of any peripheral vision. At a guess it's classic tunnel vision, so like staring down a cardboard tube.

Re: Developer PC

First proper engineering job there was a report run every morning on the slowest laptop (old 486) in the engineering department. The report took about 20 minutes to run and the reason it was ran on that machine and not one of the new P90s was that the button to run it was pressed at exactly the same time that the day shift took their break for breakfast. Cue mug of tea and a full English every morning.

It was still running on the same laptop by the time I switched jobs about 2 years later :)

Re: "Video addicts/hobbyists or folks who have DLSRs"

Hitting the nail on the head there, always store in RAW. For your average hobbyist JPG may suffice if you don't want to do any editing of the photo, or if you use Photoshop for editing, but for serious photographers it must be RAW and something that like Lightroom for editing. 1TB might be a bit limited though, I do about 1TB a year with 20Mb RAW files. The newest cameras are 50Mb + per file.

That is a good point, especially on a Friday afternoon