Posts by My-Handle 894 publicly visible posts • joined 20 May 2011
I was also wondering how the machines confirm that you actually own the phone that you put in. Must make it pretty easy for thieves to cash in.
Hell, I can even see your "mate" (you know the one, the one who thinks he's great and that jokes like that are all in good fun. The one everyone hates but can't quite get rid of) grabbing your phone and putting it in the machine for a laugh.
<RANT-MODE ON>
We have a graphics designer here who shouted loudly and constantly that she absolutely had to have a Mac to do her job. She was working with Photoshop, had one of the best machines in the company, but it wouldn't do. When asked what a Mac would give her that her current PC wouldn't, she kept falling back on stuff like "you can click this key and that key to do this...", "the monitor's better" or "a Mac's just better".
We showed her the equivalent hotkeys in Windows, bought her a new, decent monitor (because that's actually a reasonable request for a graphics designer) and then showed her the specs for her current machine compared to the £2k+ machine she was proposing. Then we started giving a list of reasons why we wouldn't be buying one (mostly surrounding the fact that it wasn't cost-effective to spend the time figuring out how to attach it to the Windows domain, train support staff on how to support it, or spend a daft amount of money on a machine that's worse than her current one in every measurable way). IT helpdesk said no. She raised it to the engineers. They said no. She then raised it to her boss (head of Marketing, who bought it completely), who raised it to the IT director. Who laughed, then said no.
Then they raised it to the MD. So often, in fact, that he ended up storming in to the IT director's office and told him to get the damn thing because he's fed up hearing about it, and that the head of Marketing / graphics designer had better produce the increased workflow promised.
She got her Mac. We had to hire in a technician to hook it in to the domain & network (and it fell off again within days). Her performance actually went down. But on the plus side, all the technical issues she kept throwing our way (along with comments like "this wouldn't happen with a Mac") suddenly disappeared because she refused to admit that her beloved piece of Apple-ware had any problems.
<RANT OFF>
Whew, that feels better. Sorry, that word is one of my triggers.
The first road vehicle (the Puffing Devil) exploded when parked outside a pub.
The first jet engine couldn't be stopped, it carried on accelerating even after they turned off the fuel supply.
The Falcon 9 exploded regularly when attempting landing, and it's now the only rocket 1st stage to be regularly reused. And, you know, it can now carry people.
Plenty of new things are too dangerous to put people in, on or near. Then they get improved until they're reliable enough to do the job safely.
"I've managed to avoid being fired so far in my career..."
Ah, I'm not so lucky there. I either end up getting a great reputation and lasting years with an employer, or I end up getting kicked on short notice. Thankfully, that has only happened twice.
First was a data entry role that a recruitment agency managed to drop me in to. Company didn't have any idea what to do with me when I arrived. During "training" (i.e. watching other workers for several days), I wondered aloud about automating some processes in front of a late-50s woman who spent her entire day copy-pasting figures from a website to Excel and back. She made 3 petty complaints about me to HR in quick succession, who then terminated my temp contract rather than deal with them.
Second was a dysfunctional IT dept for another large company. I ended up working on a project for a project manager who had real trouble communicating and hated being asked any kind of a question. Got thrown under the bus (despite doing well on a couple of subsequent projects) and didn't pass the probation term.
Thankfully, the other 5 employers I've had have all fought to keep me. Even the large company that made my entire team redundant (including me) ended up with a whole lot of in-fighting to keep me on board.
Employees didn't get to decide the number of hours they were supposed to work. Theoretically, they were supposed to get a full week's notice of a change in hours. It didn't work.
The company actually ended up painting themselves into a corner on that one. There was a massive amount of admin to do around keeping track of who had worked how many hours, and they ended up using employees time far to liberally at the start of the year. Towards the end, some employees were owed something close to two months off! There wasn't anywhere close to the number of man-hours left to staff the company for the last month of the financial year. They ended up getting some employees back on overtime. Several just outright resigned, secure in the knowledge that they had a couple of months pay due.
The company went back to standard hours for the next financial year.
Incidentally, I won't name names regarding the company. Let's just say it was Hell working there.
Also, although a lot of contracts have a line in them to this effect, it's not actually enforceable in law. No company can change an already agreed contract in any substantive fashion without a renegotiation.
Of course, a lack of objection is often taken as a renegotiation with presumed assent. And said other party is often dissuaded most thoroughly from making any objection, in ways of borderline legality.
I was also the lone developer of a piece of software that kept two teams running, so I had a bit of bureaucracy armour. There was no way they'd fire me over not signing a bit of paper.
I had made it clear in my email that I agreed to all the various terms around appropriate / professional behaviour etc. I just listed the terms I couldn't agree with (because they were objectively false) and agreed to everything else.
Once that point was passed, it just became a bit of grandstanding with both parties wanting to make a point. Theirs was "We want you to sign anything we tell you to", mine was "You can write any document you like saying that the company is great, but don't expect me to buy into your bullshit".
Big companies do that all the time. One previous company I worked for did the following:
- Invoked the "we may change these terms from time to time" clause in contracts to switch from a 40-hour week to a 1680 hour year, essentially allowing them to up a working week to nearly 80 hours during high-workload times. No consultation, and anyone whose contract didn't have that clause in was lumped in with everyone else. Objections were ignored.
- They issued four new company policies that had to be read and signed by every employee. Said policies contained flagrant lies about how the company paid it's employees the industry standard rate at minimum, among other things (one mate of mine left and got an instant £15k boost. My own job was advertised with a £5k inflated figure). I refused to sign, and after much back and forth they decided to just declare that I had clearly read and understood the policies and had therefore signed them.
Another employer I worked for had the lovely habit of repeatedly sending out emails about mental health, including linking through to webinars and videos on maintaining your own mental health. And then they put their employees under massive pressure to do the work, wasted a lot of employees time and work through mismanagement and generally burned out a lot of their staff. They have a very high employee turnover.
Ah, now I am Cynical. I was in fact informed of this at the age of 18, by a mid-40s middle-manager, in a tone of mixed exasperation and respect. I've had years of real-life lessons since then.
These days, the barest sniff of an awkward client has me thinking "I know I'm going to regret this, but forward I must go. I wonder exactly how I'm going to regret it this time."
Middle of NI over here, and still 2Mbps. I'm loving the continued announcements of money being spent on the broadband network in rural areas, but I've seen squat for 5 years.
I've long since accepted that I'm going to have to take matters into my own hands. Most feasible options are 4g internet or Starlink.
I think that the article was pointing out that most people share these social media posts without stopping to think whether they're fake or not. When they're prompted to consider whether a random headline or post is fake or not, they begin thinking before sharing other posts.
I don't think this solution is designed to completely remove fake news, or to not be gamed at all. I think it's more designed to help modify people's behaviour by giving them a gentle nudge.
You can't drag a horse anywhere, but you can gently steer it.
“We have been warned that instability will be of serious concern to government,” Wood wrote on Monday.
Don't worry, mate. Even if it were a serious concern to government, by the time they get around to doing anything about it (after repeated debates, policy changes and deadline extensions) the new management will have things perfectly stable again.
I would agree. I was getting several spam calls a week about six or seven years ago. Signed up to TPS, and the calls tailed off pretty much to zero over the next week or two. I still get a couple a month, mostly automated "I'm calling about the accident you were in..." calls, so it's not perfect, but it's a big improvement.
Came here to say pretty much the same thing.
It's a very self-defeating attitude to take, to say "We'll never achieve X based on our current understanding, so don't bother trying or even waste time thinking about it".
In the pioneering days of locomotive steam engines, many believed that it was unnatural for people to travel that fast, and that travelling faster than 30 or 40mph (not sure which, my memory fails me here) would impart significant damage to the human body. Now we routinely travel at 70mph (if you're being good) on the roads.
It was thought to be impossible to split the atom. That's literally what it's name means; un-cuttable. That was disproven rather thoroughly, and violently.
We don't understand everything about the universe. A lot of what we think we understand probably isn't right, or at least isn't entirely accurate. It's probably best to say that travelling at lightspeed isn't possible for now, and to keep an open mind for later.
Theoretically speaking, a longer sentence acts as more of a deterrent.
Burglary may have a shorter sentence because less of a deterrent is needed. In most cases it's much harder to physically break into someone's house than hack their computer and you're likely to leave a lot more evidence behind. You're more easily caught, and that risk will act as a deterrent in itself.
Hacking, on the other hand, is much easier for a certain subset of people. The perceived risk is much lower, so there's less deterrent in committing the crime itself. So a harsher sentence may be needed to add that deterrent.
One small piece of criticism about the article itself...
A lot of companies block Twitter, Facebook etc. The only image of the machine in question was via a Twitter link, which if blocked renders the reader pretty much blind to what is being discussed. Serving a header image from your own domain would go a long way to fixing this.
I acknowledge there are difficulties around sourcing and licensing images, which might be the case here as the beast in question seems pretty elusive.
I've found that works in some companies, but not in others. One company I used to work for was so good at that approach that very little got done in any decent timescale because of the sometimes-circular blame-chains that developed (some links justifiable, some just well-worded excuses).
Another company almost had the opposite problem. If something landed in your lap and there wasn't enough time to get the appropriate people involved, it was your job to fill the gaps to the best of your ability. No excuses. I've set sites live before with no input from the persons who usually supply content, imagery and design, nor any legal oversight on the various policies, terms and conditions that were required (all requested several times over a two-week period). At point of set-live, I made it quite clear to every senior manager involved in the project what I had done, why I had done it, and what really needed to be reviewed and by whom at the earliest opportunity.
A month later, still no changes.
Said previous employer also had a similar scheme. Bottom 10 or 15% each month were put on a "performance improvement plan". If they came in bottom again, they were fired.
The kicker was that the targets for these teams were completely arbitrary and, for significant portions of a year, actually exceeded the amount of work coming in to the company. That's right, it was actually impossible for everyone to meet their targets because they weren't being given enough work to allow them to do so. And work was handed out pretty randomly, which made getting put on a PIP a dice roll.
As a side note, turnover for staff on the floor was about 2% -per week-. Some via the above rules, most by their own accord. Every Friday was a leaving do for a handful of people.
One big company I used to work for had an appraisal scheme where each team's average score had "be average". e.g. 2.5 out of 5 or whatever.
We had some teams full of over-performers, all of which went above and beyond, yet some of them had to score "below average". Then you had teams of lazy bottom-feeders, some of whom scored better than the over-performers.
Scores were assigned to fit what the company wanted them to be, not how the employees actually performed
"Harding confirmed that the average spending per consultant was £1,100 per day."
I'm an IT developer specialising in HTML-based information processing systems. I've got nearly 2 decades of experience in the field. Sounds like I shouldn't have a problem landing a fee like that. If I throw in data storage experience, it should be a guarantee!
/s
Given Ms Harding's technical knowledge, I'm sure she'd never realise that I was just talking about a "hello world" website that I built back in school. The index page file is stored on a hard drive somewhere, I'm sure.
The whole thing does bear an uncanny resemblance to events in Terry Pratchett's Going Postal.
- Bunch of profiteers taking over a company or institution previously founded to provide a service to the public... check
- Company begins hiking prices, engaging in shady business practices and ceases caring about the day-to-day workings of the company... check
- Company execs get paid bafflingly well, despite increased dissatisfaction with the company and it's services... check
Just rename Haworth to Reacher Gilt and be done with it. The only thing missing is him conning his own board members.
I took on a project recently which served to show me how much I don't know about electrics. Out of curiosity, what's the failure mode of a cable like that?
I'd have thought that a higher voltage would mean less current, and therefore less heat created in the cable. Do you just get breakdown of the cable insulation under the higher voltage?
I had the opportunity to run my eye over a temporary manufacturing facility near the start of the pandemic. With a double-handful of computers spread over a large temporary space, you'd think WiFi would be a perfect fit, but we quickly ran into noise issues even with multiple WiFi points, partly thanks to an order of hundreds of mobile phones in one metal walled building.
Obv fibre isn't a solution here, but it did illustrate interference issues pretty damn well. We even got interference in the bloody network cables, even with comparatively short lengths. The lot had to be shielded.
"There are few things an employer can do more annoying than phoning up at 5 minutes before knocking off time..."
Ouch, I felt that one. That's the favourite tactic of one particular high-up at our place. On a Friday, usually. He also has a distressing habit of chronically under-estimating the amount of time a job will take to do.
Didn't call, but did message my personal phone rather than use work email. The message was ignored completely, and when I got into work the following Monday there was an email waiting for me. Dated that morning.
I say the message was ignored, I did advise a colleague who also had the ability to edit the website to likewise ignore any similar message he might get.
I've always gone to lengths to ensure that most people at work did not have my mobile number. It was only given to my line manager (who required it as a point of contact), the Director of IT, and one or two colleagues, all of whom I trusted not to abuse it. All of whom were also made aware of that reasoning. By and large, they didn't abuse it.
Then Covid and mass working-from-home happened. My phone number was included in a Whatsapp group, and suddenly I was getting messages from the Head of Marketing and Head of HR. The former came to me in a flap, asked for a super-urgent update to the company website and gave some justification that made sense on the face of it. I dropped what I was doing, did the work, then went and did some digging on the reasoning behind it. There was none (A 20% impact on our sales, quoted by HoM, turned into less than 5% impact on traffic and less than 1% impact on sales for less than 8 hours overnight. Statistically, 0% impact). The Head of HR wanted me to add a job vacancy to the website on a weekend. She was pointedly ignored, then told to keep that kind of thing to work hours the following week.
If it's an emergency, I've made it known I will be available. If it's not, then I'm not.
"Yeah, it was dead simple." The perp told the reporter. "I walked into the IT guy's office, typed 'Passw0rd' into the login screen, dumped the database onto a USB pen and walked out. Made a mint on the dark web."
The institution concerned said it was investigating the sophisticated cyber attack and couldn't comment further at this time.
Free speech is the freedom to say what you like within the means you have.
It also carries with it the freedom to bear the consequences of your actions.
While you can say what you like, you do not have the right to demand that other people listen, or repeat / publish what you want using any means at their disposal. To do so would be to limit their freedoms.
At this point, I confess I don't have any firm idea of what "cancel culture" is supposed to mean. I hear it thrown around as an accusation or excuse an awful lot, but never any substantive argument or description to go with it, to explain why something is "cancel culture" or why that's a bad thing.
A quick dig about online shows that 0.65% of the population of the USA are currently incarcerated. One in every two-hundred people. Highest rate of incarceration anywhere in the world, and highest total incarcerated as an absolute figure as well (2.1 million).
"Land of the Free", everyone!
Data source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate
Wikipedia's data source in this case seems to be the World Prison Brief, hosted by the Institute For Criminal Policy Research (ICPR), Birkbeck College, University of London.
And quickly get fired. Yep, that's a nice attractive prospect for someone who didn't actually have any on-paper qualification or experience in the industry. I hate to burst your bubble, but it's exceptionally easy for big and powerful companies to take advantage of individuals, whether you let them or not. Theoretically, we have employment law to prevent that going too far, but that only goes so far.
If it's any consolation to you, once I had a few years experience doing that role, I walked in to a proper software development job and did demand the market rate from them. Timing was the key, there.
Yup, that seems disturbingly familiar.
My path into IT:
- Get hired by a website company doing basic QA
- Quickly start doing software development whilst still under QA contract. That was the kind of work my team needed, and given the choice between learning IT dev work and acting as a glorified spell-checker I'd pick the IT work any day.
- Continue doing software development for the next 3 years, still on original contract at £17k a year (in the London commuter belt). One minor raise in the last year or so. Did it because I liked it, and I knew the experience would be valuable
- Moved to NI (family reasons, and where the pay goes a lot further). I'm now the lead developer for a company website that handles millions in transactions a year. Pay still isn't great, but it isn't bad either.
It turns out that taking a shit job for the experience is an investment in yourself. A lot of IT workers realise this, and a lot of big companies take unfair advantage of it.
I don't mean to rain on this particular achievement, it is definitely impressive.
But I'm not sure the saying "What's old can be made new again" can apply when you've switched out the memory, processor, hard drive and graphics card for new versions. Pretty much the only original hardware in there is the case, motherboard and (I assume) power supply. It's more like new(er) kit in an old box.
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