Posts by Triggerfish 2482 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Feb 2010
Even interviews can be marked secret.
I was once sent for a job interview for the Mod on recommendation of some people who worked at a TLA.
No one would tell me what the job was for. No one would give feedback, or ever contact me again if I failed. I wasn't allowed to say what the questions I was asked or the exams were.
I had to sign the secrets act twice before the interview and once after.
Did you miss the part where it's being transfered into the presidential library? At taxpayers cost of course.
So not much point or sense at all in spending so much to get it running.
It would be nice to have a us president worthy of respect, only about four more years to go and well see
There's nothing wrong with some appropriate metrics. But when everyone has to deliver one cos metrics it becomes a farce.
Some poor cable guy, well he cant say I completed the site because if he says that they'll sagely point out how PMO has already mentioned that and use them as an example of how they are delivering a useless metric like a silly person.
So whats he gonna say, "erm I did a cable run using 80m of cable".
I mean whats the use of that? "Oh wow, can you reduce that metric make it 70m"?
What they expecting? Your gonna knock a buildings wall down and shift it and the desks, data points and all 10m closer to a riser?
This sounds more like the weekly stand up. Intended result friendly relaxed meeting, every stands up gives a quick run down of weeks plans, says if they need help etc on something, gives metrics if relevant. Everyone is informed of what people are doing and help out if needed or they think they may be of use. Efficiency increases.
Actual result. C Suite stand about like the inquisition picking shite apart so they look good and powerful. Everyone has to give metrics even if they're pointless. Whole morning is spent by teams prepping for them rather than working so they can avoid being the one picked on. Depression insue's and morning is lost.
It comes from those wank MBA programs and courses like scaling up. Where they chuck around words like lean management like it's a new revelation, and then just mentally tick the box (but don't actually work towards implementing it) saying we're doing that we're very very cool.
Often worshipped by the sort of execs that think Steve Jobs and Elon are cool innovative businessmen who can do no wrong.
Yeah I've worked with ASDA/ Walmart IT as well. They actually are pretty good and took it seriously, a lot of ASDAs IT infrastructure was run by Bentonville teams, including support.
A lot of the UK teams were good as well and very skilled most AFAIK were not your average level one support techs. But it seems they got rid of them for a cheaper outsourced option, losing a lot of institutional knowledge of very complex IT systems and how it interacts with all the processes of running a large supermarket concern.
There's been a similar growth in size in Thais and the Vietnamese.
But there's also been changes in family structure from large families to more nuclear family set up (especially with people coming into the cities), an increase in convenience food reflecting working lives, and an increase in the middle classes.
They're also both countries that have had before a lot of people in poverty with not much access to food, (which gives a smaller average size).
I'd say there's more factors than just apps like grab and gojeck causing this rise.
Decent sized store.
Rack A, maybe 4 or 5 42-47 U racks that are filled. Some SAP servers (plus redundancy backups), various other servers for things like muzac, ads, loss prevention systems, CC, IOT stuff etc. Shitload of switches. Rack B checkout switches (all doubled up for redundancy), couple more racks dotted round the store mainly switch racks again (also doubled up) for other checkouts, scales, AP, stuff like that.
It adds up.
I've worked with ASDA when they were Walmart owned. Walmart's actual IT infrastructure is huge they also had some highly skilled network engineers etc there. They took their IT infrastructure very seriously as down time was measured in tens of thousands of dollars per hr at large stores. God forbid you needed to do work at a store during certain seasons - it would only have been mission critical stuff like a dead switch, the managers would be actively hostile to people trying to do the work at this period (whereas they usually were accommodating for the most part) and the change controls to do the work got bumped up several layers of management for review.
The IT overhead for a large supermarket chain is actually pretty big, LIDL have recently started selling their services as a datacentre - they probably didn't need to scale the teams, skills. or hardware up much.
However some of us do live in and travel in cou tries that QR is used so it's useful to us to read.
I think your missing a reason why visa and so on never got traction as much over here vs QR. Because you can certainly use it in larger stores and chains.
As it mentions in the article.
You need a POS system, and many places don't have them, the average market stall, street food, corner shop, taxi driver etc just doesn't have that sort of set up in a lot of places like SEA and China, their owners do have smartphones.
It's going to struggle with English sarcasm on energy.
My American and Canadian friends generally you can tell the sarcasm because of pitch and energy, they want you to know they are being sarcastic.
They struggle with sarcasm from Brits, Aussies and so on because we prefer to just deliver it dry, there's been many a time in a bar they didn't pick up on a comment for a good few minutes.
The human brain can infer things. That's why you could teach a child what a chair is, but when saying where can you sit they would choose things that are not just chairs, tables, low walls etc.
Is AI capable of this? Because I feel it's a big factor in things like using language, that is not just having a good vocab but also understanding nuance, idioms and so on.
I mean there is an official NK restaurant chain "Pyongang" in Vietnam, Thailand etc.
Which may or may not be selinng dodgy software as well.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2019/05/18/asia/hanoi-north-korea-restaurant-facial-recognition-software-intl/index.html
But as a percentage market wise I'd wonder what your odds are of actually hitting an undercover one. There is a huge amount of places to eat in these countries. Chances are low your going to hit many.
The thing is there isn't room to dig for a lot of the suburbs in places Thailand and Vietnam.
The areas people live behind the main roads are a maze of alleys ranging from just big enough to fit a car to just about wide enough for a scooter.
You start digging up that to lay cable and you could end up shutting offf access to the homes of hundreds of people, some of these alleys as well have loads of front yard shops, markets and so on. The disruption caused is impractical.
Underground there's probably just enough room for standard sewage and water pipes only before you hit building foundations.
In top of that. I've never had fibre in the UK, but copper was just a swtich over at a junction box. There doesn't seem to be any main faculty that oversees that sort of handover here. Change isp, new cable gets laid and it's such a tangle of cables that removing the old is probably like a game of jenga except you take out everyone's Internet when the whole tangle falls down.
Also Google maps just falls over in some of these places I'm not sure if there are adequate maps in general.
Ah yeah maybe it's where we see factories being placed. Where I have been living there are a lot of old
factories that are smack bang in the middle of a small town. Different suburban environment to the USA so bit if adapting needed to each place.
So I think from your comments we may be on the same page (we don't really have small local malls in the UK in these little dying towns).
I think there is still use for a co-working space for these places because not everyone working from home can always work at home, so a local co-working type space using these local empty large buildings may have a place as a temp peaceful office with a five min walk commute.
The dead end town centres that will be re-invigorated, the enironment becoming cleaner due to less cars, think of the little independent cafes, coffee shops and reseteraunts who will actually pay taxes, think of people having more free time to spend in them rather than commuting, think of the old factory buildings that can become local co-working type spaces, think of cities becoming more places to visit for enterainment and being able to afford some green spaces instead of car parks...
I have no idea why you dragged QAnon and MTG into this, But I can assure you the connection has not been that bad in Vietnam in the past few years. In fact a lot better than my connection was in the UK in both mobile and househol It has however downgraded severly in the past few week, juist after new year as it were.
