BOFH: HR's gold mine gambit – they get the gold and we get the shaft BOFH logo telephone with devil's horns So the Boss has quit and we have to replace him. I suggested a piece of office furniture might achieve the same purpose – and not eat all the biscuits – but the Director would still like to fill the position. So the PFY and I are looking through a veritable mountain of CVs and cover …
"Done for security as the ground floor door was a fire door that lead onto a public road."
That sounds a bit over the top. Fire doors such as this are usually emergency exits and should only open from the inside. They normally have a door open sensor linked back to security too so unauthorised use to let someone in, assuming you jave some "naughty" staff, can be detected.
I'll join you. When you start Kite Buggy Jumping the question is not 'Will I get hurt?' it is 'When will I get hurt?'
The one thing you learn is that Mother Nature IS a bitch that is just out to kill you in interesting ways!
For me it would have to be Socket 754, as used by AMD's first ground-breaking Athlon 64 CPUs. Fine pin pitch, the perfectly proportioned hole in the middle, and a very satisfying mechanical clamping when you lower the lever, just brilliant.
Never been a fan of LGA sockets :(
Nope, the correct answer is "no socket at all"
Solder the CPU to the mainboard,
slot the mainboard into a matching milled aluminum frame, and apply a thick layer of conformal coating / potting.
Ensure that all components are properly specced and avoid tall components.
Install the Mainboard vertically, so that g-induced forces will not flex the board, and use a sealed enclosure with a proper gore-tex membrane.
The device will continue to work even in a shallow grave long after the local wildlife has made off with your bones.
I've not upgraded in a long times, and this last decade or so, upgrades have been so far apart I've needed the faster CPU but also a new motherboard and new RAM. Back in the day, faster CPUs commonly went in the same socket on the same board and you just changed some jumpers to match the new required clockspeed, often for two or three sequential upgrades, before needing a new motherboard, let alone new RAM.
I get the sense that AMD outlasted Intel in terms of how many times you could upgrade a CPU before needing a new and different motherboard with a new and different socket, as well as new RAM. Maybe because the AMD model didn't rely on selling motherboards as an income stream. Intel, of course, have sold motherboards for a long time, so having every new iteration require a new socket helped that bottom line more than it did AMD. Am I being cynical?
That's your least favorite? I think the DIP-40 was the best processor socket in history! Bent pin? No problem, just bend it back with your fingers. Broken pin? A bit of stiff wire and solder and you're good to go. None of this fragile surface mount crap, thru holes everywhere! No PCB? No problem! Just wrap wire around the pins. Best of all most of those chips are still good today! Maybe a few caps need to be replaced, but somebody with a soldering iron and basic soldering skills can fix it.
"It is only real electronics if it uses a vacuum tube."
Funny you should mention that. I picked up a brand new set of 4 6V6GTA's at a thrift store today. $4 for all. I'm contemplating a bulk purchase of the Edison recorded wax cylinders they have at $4ea. I forgot to ask about the price on the metal soprano clarinet, but I'm not sure if I want to spend the time rebuilding it.
It depends on which sort. If you used a decent one (turned-pin?) that used a circular piece of metal then it was fine.
If on the other hand it was one of these (disclaimer - lunchtime and just picked the first one that matched)
https://www.modellingelectronics.co.uk/products/dil-ic-sockets/
they were bad when the contacts got a bit bent and didn't make contact - and you had to remove the IC to visually check the pins
And "thermal creep". Probably one of the most common fixes on a failed PC back then was pushing all the socketed chips firmly back in their sockets. And there might well be 36 DIL chips in sockets if the motherboard was fully loaded with an ENTIRE ONE MEGABYTE or RAM!!! Possibly many more on an ISA card if there was an EMS or EMM RAM expansion card in it. Or RAM on a SCSI card.
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It's a hard question to answer... I can tell you there's a very long list of my LEAST favourite types of "processor socket" - top of which is that one Dell uses for some of its daughter boards that seems to rely on a couple of aligning "punches" about 0.2mm away from the contact pins, that mates blind using the force of a lever press mounted on some very, very flimsy punched steel razor blade-like vertical risers. Costs around £700 a pop and it's only after you fit it that you realise the dip switches that you need to set to enable the CPU1 riser are located under the metalwork of the component you've just added, meaning that you have to unmount it again in order to flip them, which inevitably results in the punches crushing the edge of the socket and ruining both the daughter board and the £2400 motherboard.
Quote
""Perhaps we could ask some questions that would be directly related to the role?" one of the HR blokes suggests.
"Sure, sure," I say. "If you woke up in a shallow grave in a forestry setting with a lump on your head, would you tell anyone? Asking for a friend."
And thus died another keyboard.
But I think sadly our beloved(and feared) BOFH has made a great mistake involving himself with the HR dept(also known as the department of people who were useless at everything else so they're giving this a go)
We all know HR is just a good way for senior manglement to deflect blame for whatever PHB they've hired now on the basis of a CV and a interview consisting of doing trick dancing.
Unless..... and unless our BOFH has a cunning(and evil) plan for HR to fail....... watch this space.....
Knowing how the BOFH's mind works, I suspect there is a very cunning and very evil plan underlying this, probably involving amongst other things, emails thought to be deleted and footage (with audio) from carefully placed cameras in the HR offices. All the better to capture naughty goings on by HR staff, exploiting their power to fire and hire.
Did go for an interview years ago for a hardware repair job. He picked up a PC main board that had IBM (quick Google search to refresh memory) MCA (Micro Channel Architecture) slots on it and asked "What type is it?" I said that I didn't know, and he patronisingly said that it was MCA.
I said that I knew it was MCA, but he asked what Type, as I knew that MCA came with Type 1, Type 2 sockets....
Didn't get the job
I remember we had a graduate doing a year with us. He was outstanding - but very quiet.
After his year with us we all thought our company should hire him - and he would go far. A few weeks later my manager called me in and said the graduate didn't get through the HR interview, did we still want him - I said yes!
My manager escalated HR who came back and said "he was very quiet", and didn't have the social skills they thought every one should have. We replied that Einstein was a bit quiet - eventually HR approved him.
Some one in a different company said that HR pre vetted candidates and wanted people who ticked all of the boxes in their template. This meant that all of the technically brilliant people who may lack some of the social skills were excluded, and so they got technically average people (which my friend turned down as not being good enough)
I accidentally got hold of the rejected CVs for the IT mnager role, and the third one had 'this is the one' so thickly oozing out from between the lines that I had to know why HR gave that a no. Apparently this person "would not fit into the culture".
We got him back in and he got the job there and then. Even stayed there for 6 years.
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