Posts by Just An Engineer 93 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Nov 2010
"And Trump taking the stand would have likely added nothing. The prosecution could have called him but they didn't."
Wrong. The prosecution cannot call a defendant to testify. Only the defense can call the defendant. He is cannot compelled to testify against himself.
Speaking of the old Armchair Lawyer, it about all I have seen about this over the last 24 hours. Most of the "howling morons" only know about the legal system through their personal experience with it.
There are many large companies where the RE is a good size chunk of the overall portfolio. These are the entities that are the loudest about making RTO mandatory. The own large campuses in fairly expensive parts of the country, and not having butts in the seats is not a good look.
The outfit I work for currently requires 1 week a month in office. Later this year there is a rumor they may require 2 weeks.
It will reflect on the raise and bonus received at years end, if you decide you do not want to be in office, and may well reflect on employment status in 2025.
The problem here is, there are more Butts than seats in different parts of the country and they have given up leased space over the last 4 years.
So there is some real thinking that needs to be done before a full or in some places a partial RTO mandate can be applied.
“Some experts believe the €20 billion (£17.1 billion, $21.5 billion) price tag does not represent value for money and that the funds could be spent more wisely on research that addresses diseases or climate change.”
Is this due to the fact that value for money is code for cannot be profited from?
Similar I am also of the turn it off and see who screams.
After a 24 month project of decommissioning a data center, and trying to identify a bit over 1000 servers or VMs, there were about 20 that no owner could be located.
So we waited until almost everything else was either moved or decommissioned.
So it fell to one of the PMs to head into the DC and shut down the hardware.
So of the approximately 20 servers with no known owner, we only got 3 screams. When asked why they had not responded over the last 2 years, it was usually i did not know the server or application name.
I just click on an icon....
Turns out the servers in question had long since been abandoned, with out updating the CMDB, which in itself was a "shock"...
Back in the misty past, think early 2000's, I was a contractor for a large bank 40 - 45 hours per week. My job was to ensure the SUN servers were running, and the replication and DR environments were up to date.
The SUN environment was also in good shape, but with the occasional hiccup, but I also had a large tape library for all of the backups.
One day upon arriving at the office, there was a good old fashioned pager, on my desk.
It was requested that I go into the on-call rotation to take some of the pressure off of my co-worker who was based 2000 miles away.
I simply stated that as I was a contractor, that every time the pager went off outside of standard work hours there would be a 4 hour charge added to my time sheet.
Unfortunately he agreed, so I was in the rotation every other week. But all was not lost it was quite lucrative for the next year. The tape library was of an age and in an environment, where drives needed to be replaced about once a week.
Pager goes off, I check and then call out the Break/Fix engineer for a 10:00 am replacement.
This may be a little long but i think background is required..
I have spent most of the last 3 years with my team, Me + 1, preaching that you need to test resiliency (DR). Since this is a very large org, it was decided all IT, with limited exceptions would be migrated to "The Cloud".
The App Dev teams all look at you like" you do not know what you are talking about" when you mention it early on in the dev cycle.
The cloud is always on, we are in multiple compute zones, we can auto failover if there is a problem.
Me: Are you in multiple geographically dispersed zones?
Them: no no need to be the cloud is always available.
Me: So you decided not to follow the corp architecture guidelines for mission critical applications.
Them: We were not willing to incur that expense.
Me: What happens if the datacenter where this is located becomes unreachable?
Them: Can't happen.
Then you know what happens next, the Zones became unavailable and only those who followed the corp standard and actually tested the recovery, were able to continue with on like nothing happened.
The others had to explain why they did not and having a email trail from the Resiliency Team to the various businesses that did not follow standards and resiliency test had a lot of explaining to do and there were a few head that rolled.
But since I am just an engineer and don't understand tech, I was ignored, but not anymore...
I think he had 2 "education" secretary DeVos and Energy Secretary Rick Perry, and old Betsy has been a complete disaster.
While lining the pockets of her supporters and refusing to follow court orders to ease the debt, of students who were cheated by the "For Profit" schools like Trump U.
I always get a knowing smirk when I tell people what I think of having everything, including the "Family Jewels", in the cloud. I always get the "but it is always on" and we "do not have to test resiliency" (my favorite), and the always popular, "we are in multiple zones and regions so we can be back up and running in minutes".
I always say really you need to prove it to my satisfaction.
They then try to old "but they tell us it is idiot proof".
I usually just say, that is impossible, since there is always a bigger idiot.
Just another arrow in the quiver for these discussions.
Back in the day there was the "EMC Technical Symposium" which was geared to the technologist. You could get hands on with the products get training and make contacts on the tech side. At some point around 2005, it became EMC World, which was that taken over by the Marketing Droids. Nothing useful ever came and I stopped attending.
If you want the real story talk to the tech folks, you want B**L S**t talk to the marketing and sales droids.
You really should stop watching Faux News. These are all talking points presented by the entertainment division of that lofty and august network.
Unfortunately you are wrong. The Presidents "legal" team is not a relevant partner in these proceedings. The opposition party was in the room at all times, and had an equal amount of time to question the witnesses. This was not a Court of Law it was an Impeachment Inquiry.
If the president Cheeto wanted equal time he should have allow the witnesses that were called to testify.But as that would have been under oath, they would not want to run the risk of perjury, so they would have had to tell the truth. Based on the evidence presented, even the shame the Senate perpetrated would have been difficult to pull off.
But until they actually include the Politicians, in this robo-call ban, then it will make a difference.
Between my mobile and landline, i get as many as 5 a day, and during the high campaign season, there are as many as 10 a day. I live in a small state where the "first in the nation Primary" is held.
I cannot wait until the first of the year when and sitting quietly at home the land line will ring every few minutes until 9:00 PM, i just wait for my caller ID to tell me it is an unknown number, and then ignore it. I usually have to turn off the ringer and let CID tell me I have a call.
Currently only available on systems with access to ~10 percent of cable connected homes, not sure if available via satellite.
But it is a pay channel, and only the most die hard Trumpettes or Breitbart devotees would watch it and they probably can't afford the price.
They are mostly sustained by throwing out the most vile conspiracy theory's they can. But they do have a "reporter" with White House credentials.
... don't pay their sales droids on gross margin instead of revenue.
i have been with sales that essentially give the product away at cost or less to the company, but still made the commission on the revenue.
selling at a loss and then expecting full commission is just wrong. I have had this discussion before, but they usually say "well that is how everyone does it". Just because everyone is jumping off the building does not mean we should as well.
If you gave them 33 % of the GM the corp makes money and the droids will do quite well.
Since the Twitter in chief is the biggest purveyor of lies and misleading crap on his feed, he should have been banned a long time ago.
He is always insulting, misleading or just plain lying about his rivals and calls them out by name. I thought this was contrary to the T&C / rules of engagement of Twitter. It would have gotten many people banned for less.
It was legal until the Enron. WorldCom, Lucent fiascoes.
The law was changed after all of the value of these companies was essentially zero'd out, by mismanagement and fraud.
There was a time when 401K plans could be directed to company stock, and a second option was a guaranteed interest fund. Since there is no return on the GI fund, everything was "forced" into company stock.
Now they are no longer allowed this option, but you can have, I believe, up to 15% of your 401K invested in company stock, but it is the employees option, and cannot be decreed by the company.
You beat me to it.
Notice it doesn't ask, "what if it screws up N% of the time?" or "what if it wrongly identifies you?" or "would you support strict limits if facial rec. wrongly identified and caused X people per day to be detained for Y minutes/hours?" and "what if one of those wrongly identified and detained caused a delay to your flight?"
They did not ask as they know the results, if it becomes personal, then no one would want it around. if it caused them to miss a flight to see the grand kids they would be right pissed.
I have always had a healthy skepticism of the accuracy of "online" polls. Since most of us just ignore them and only those with nothing better to do will fill them out. But I am SURE it must be reflected in the margin of error.
"Now they're making money, as the shareholders insisted on some return on their equity"
I might just be me, but if stock purchased prior to 2006 for around $5.00 per, or even in 2016 when it priced out at ~$300.00 and today it is $1650.00 per share, I think they have gotten more then a fair return on equity.
Shareholders have not asked for profitability only share price appreciation.
The 2018 Ig Nobel Prize Winner
NUTRITION PRIZE [ZIMBABWE, TANZANIA, UK] — James Cole, for calculating that the caloric intake from a human-cannibalism diet is significantly lower than the caloric intake from most other traditional meat diets.
REFERENCE: "Assessing the Calorific Significance of Episodes of Human Cannibalism in the Paleolithic," James Cole, Scientific Reports, vol. 7, no. 44707, April 7, 2017.
https://www.improbable.com/ig/winners/#ig2018
"when the boss comes in at 5:30 in the evening and says he has a presentation at 10am at CeBIT the next day and needs 40 slides..."
There are 4 little words that come to mind when this happens to me. "sucks to be you".
Or conversely "it's really going to be a log night for you, boss."
Usually when this happens the "Boss" has known about it for 3 to 4 weeks, then the Oh Shite moment happens and remembers the night before. Usually when his boss asks if he is ready for tomorrow...
In the WAAYYY back in the day, you did the same with the Sparc IPXs and IPCs. If for some reason the system was shutdown over a weekend, you did not hit it with a mallet, you dropped it on the desk.
It seems the lubricant used on the drive spindle would congeal when it cooled off, specially if the system was a couple years old, so a good slam on the desk top while powered on would crack it free and it would boot up nicely.
Working for a large Financial Services firm via a well known Professional Services firm in the early 2000's. My jobs was to keep the Solaris systems running and ensuring the replication to the DR center was running and up to date, with limited back log.
Since I was a contractor and being paid by the hour, I did not care if I had to go to the Office once every 6 months, so the DR could be tested on a Saturday.
For the next 14 months This was done and duly documented. Then the S&%T hit the fan. There was a new Service Delivery Manager put in place, who frankly did not know his Arse from a hole in the ground, and he wanted his "own" people on the contract.
Since my contract only had another month to run I was shown the door at the end. He was "smart" enough to wait until after the bi-annual test. Test went smoothly and everyone was happy.
Then a mere 6 weeks after I was shunted out the door, a real disaster occurred. Apparently a contractor managed to dig up the networking cable to the building where the DC was located, and they assumed the fail over would occur automagically. It didn't since the clustering SW in use at the time did not have the intelligence to perform that act.
So my phone rings on a Wednesday night and it is the new SDM, and he is begging me to drive into the city and help restore the services. I politely decline the offer. My replacement was supposed to be fully certified in this particular SW and should have been a no brainer. Turns out that was BS as well (no one ever checked the certifications).
Since I had already accepted a new position and was awaiting my start date, and since I had tee times for the rest of the week I felt absolutely no guilt watching from afar the CF that was this disaster.
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