Posts by Edwin 546 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Apr 2007
Because only there would an employee even consider calling an employer "very forgiving" when they've just docked your pay for an innocent mistake (especially if you're fresh out of school and thus presumably cheap)
(I suspect btw it's pretty easy to dock the pay - especially for an hourly wage employee - just tell them not to book the hours or they're fired.)
Agreed - I take issue with the "it was all much more secure before computers" because that's not the same as "election outcomes were more accurate before computers"
Automated vote tallying of paper ballots is indeed the way to go if you want absolutely demonstrable results.
With regard to voter registration - I've never understood the slightly weird US system. Most of the countries I've lived in are infinitely more democratic: you get a document by mail allowing you to vote, and you get it by mail by definition, not depending on whether you've followed some arcane process.
I once had a similar experience in sunny New Mexico in the late 80s or early 90s - a somewhat older vehicle was standing by the side of the highway showing clear signs of overheating. We stopped and offered assistance and showed them the trick of running the heater to help cool the engine.
They drove off happily, and we followed for a bit to make sure all was well. Sure enough, after a little while, they pulled over again. Turned out it was too hot in the car with the heater running (it was nearly 40 degrees outside), so they'd switched on the A/C, and a late 70s/early 80s A/C compressor represents a significant engine load...
Advised them to roll down the windows instead, which got them to the next exit.
Indeed, and hunt groups don't all ring at once, but they 'hunt' from extension to extension if I remember my Nortel days correctly. It seems unlikely you'd set up your PBX hunt groups to hunt to extensions all over campus, if for no other reason than that the accounts department can't help you with a bug report and his billness can't help with a billing inquiry.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but it seems unlikely the PBX would be set up this way.
...and the reason I think El Reg should purge itself from Facebook is the (only) three comments below this story on that platform. Sadly they originate from a countryman of mine.
For those who don't know: Lange Frans is a washed-up has-been from the dutch rap scene. He's trying to make a name from himself (or return to the spotlight) as an 'influencer' by peddling consipiracy theories and other social mechanisms that seem to exist only to prove Darwin right.
I'll be the dissenting voice then :)
I quite like LinkedIn, but must confess that I'm more of a Dabbsian generalist than a hardcore specialist.
The term 'Facebook for suits' is perhaps pretty apt, but I wouldn't go so far as the OP who is - presumably - engaging in a bit of commentardism on the boss' dime as well.
In every company I've ever worked for, IT has wanted to position itself as a trusted partner for the business, rather than a service provider. And that's as it should be - otherwise (as a company) you're wasting the tremendous competence that exists in the IT unit. The ownership for the IT processes goes hand in hand with that, so IMNSVHO, my pain is very much IT's accountability.
The title says it all. I work in a company where admin rights were (recently-ish) withdrawn, but there's no software request or release process. So when I urgently needed a piece of software for a customer presentation, I wasted two days trying to work out how to get it installed on my workstation because - while every other process known to man was designed (badly) and published (better), the 'non-previously-approved software' process seems to not have been a prerequisite to withdrawing admin rights. And of course IT support is designed so that the poor sods on the helldesk are your only point of contact. Everyone with the ability to *do* something is heavily shielded from the coalface.
1) Nobody at my company would ever behave that way
2) Been on the receiving end of such bureacratically-inspired nonsense
3) Been on the receiving end of such bureacratically-inspired nonsensemore than once
4) I don't see the issue - change management is a sacred process and Sam should have been sacked
(anyone answering 1 and working at a company over 5000 people is a liar, and anyone answering 4 should be sacked but will probably hang on to their job long after the Sams of the world are sent packing)
I've run into similar rules on company cars in Europe. Only one previous employer gave the option of taking a car or taking cash instead. All others were variations on the theme of 'take it or leave it' - in some cases not even offering public transport compensation (let alone a bicycle) as an alternative.
The holiday pay thing is also reasonably common in Europe - many countries will pay out an extra couple of weeks in summer and/or winter.
That puts of in mind of the company I ran local support for in the late 90s... We had a number of cases where users called up after a tech support visit to complain that their files were gone or their email didn't work. A reboot usually fixed the problem, but it wasn't until someone complained that their password didn't work that the penny finally dropped.
As users didn't have admin rights, anything more complicated than a printer install required the support team to log into the machine using their own credentials. Best practice was to reboot the machine after the work was done and remove your own username from the login prompt before handing over to the user, but it turned out one of my team regularly skipped that last bit and left the machine logged in with his own credentials. We had more than one savvy user obtain admin rights that way, too...
I think I did my first commercial website around 1995 or 1996. If you do the math, the candidate was pretty young when they claimed to start building websites, they probably used notepad or hotdog to code the HTML and upload it to the ISP or perhaps used something like Geocities (founded 1994).
As to ignorance of Tim's existence - I'm not surprised, really. The early days of the web were pretty fragmented, so as long as you could find your way to the TUCOWS website, you could do a *lot* on the web without knowing anything about it.
Your comment doesn't conflict with the 'true admins are the banes...' comment.
A true admin differentiates between users that know what they're doing (and are therefore allowed to game) and users that don't (and are therefore not allowed to game).
To the uninitiated, that differentiation could be viewed as somewhat arbitrary, of course ;)
Of course, there the admins were more knowledgeable, so they had a boot floppy that would wipe a disk and initiate a fresh install from the network. The process took about 20 seconds after boot to start and half an hour to complete. If you were caught gaming, they would lean over your shoulder, insert the floppy, hit 'reset', wait the 20 seconds or so and then reclaim the floppy.
In later years, the machines could be booted from the network and wiped without the benefit of a floppy.
...of a usenet post I once read that went something like:
"I'm a computer nerd and do tech support for all my friends and family, but I've never installed Windows. How do you get Windows95 onto the hard disk if there's no operating system?"
Queue vast quantities of righteous derision - everyone has to learn sometime, but this particular user chose his words rather poorly...
(nb: this was before bootable CD-ROMs, when you had to make a bootable floppy with CD ROM drivers. Or install Win95 from floppy disks)
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