Posts by networkboy

'Twas the night before Y2K and a grinch stole the IT department's overtime payout

Re: Overtime payments

Actually, "Always get the offer in writing signed by someone [in management]" is all you really need.

If they are a project manager or HR manager doesn't matter. In the states at least that will be enough to get paid, and if not it will be fuel for a great lawsuit. Juries particularly don't like businesses that shaft their workforce so where the compensatory damages may be modest, the punitive damages can be quite the retirement account if invested appropriately.

I know one guy who ended up with a $2.2M payout. $200K / $2M. After taxes and such he still has 7 digits in the bank, invested such that he earns ~$50K/year just from that, and the principal still sees some dividend reinvestment.

Seagate's lightbulb moment: Make read-write heads operate independently

Or the of 160MB WREN iii ESDI drives. Those guys had linear voice coil actuators on both sides of the drive. Showed up as two LUNs on the ESDI controller.

T-Mobile USA sued by parents after their baby dies amid 911 meltdown

GPS no workie on 911

The 911 system in the US ins *unable* to use the GPS data from phones. This is not a carrier issue, it is an infrastructure (of the 911 system) issue.

The best the carriers can do as a result is give an appx location based on cell location.

As to the ghost calls issue, IDK if that is a T-Mobile or Dallas infrastructure issue. 911 calls do not go over the normal cell routes, they have a priority circuit (of sorts) so that if you have a phone with no SIM, or expired SIM, or revoked IEMI the emergency call can still be placed. If the issue is with how T-mobile handles this priority circuit and that's what caused the ghost calls then yeah, they may have liability here, if it's the city's link that didn't act to spec then...

BOFH: Password HELL. For you, mate, not for me

Re: "I rarely get cold calls"

"One of these days, I'll spin up a Windows VM and let them play a while, then power it off in mid-stream and claim they broke my computer."

You can do soooo much better:

not sure if URLs are allowed, but:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Du6acZ-PZQ8

Love having my own mail domain

"when they asked for an email address gave them a unique one @mydomainname.com"

I do the same thing. [e-mail]

Set up my server so the catch-all address forwards to a unique address for my inbox.

When I start getting spam from someone I :bounce: their address and have a script that fires off an email to [e-mail] complaining about it for every spam I get.

IT team sent dirt file to Police as they all bailed from abusive workplace

Re: Uhhhmmmmm

On the topic of satisfying if non professional exits...

My kid brother was a yard guy at an equipment rental place. Manager was a prick and my brother was "young, stupid, and brash" in the way most of us just past teen males tend to be.

He quit by locking himself in the managers office and getting on the PA for the yard (naturally while customers were present) and listing of his grievances in the most colorful language he was able to muster.

Pretty sure that earned him a termination for cause (which here in the states means no unemployment). Not much of a loss though and he had a new job soon enough.

Splunk: Why we dumped Perforce for Atlassian's Bitbucket of Gits

Re: Saucy!

I don't know that I'd dog P4 that bad.

I used to work at Intel and we converted over from ClearCase to Perforce. While the transition was a bit painful (as one would expect) the overall workflow was much better. Again, the big selling point for P4 was the blob handling.

Git may be better in many ways, but P4 has strengths where siloing of access to source trees and large teams are concerned too.

Did webcam 'performer' offer support chap payment in kind?

Re: Oops

Some my female colleagues in the 1990s were very vocal about any female "pin up" on their male colleagues' desks. However - they thought it perfectly ok to display a postcard from someone's holiday with the subject being a Greek/Roman "Priapus".

Got to love those double standards eh?

On topic of helldesk, I've *never* understood why people think browsing for this crap at work on on work PCs is okay... Boggles my mind.

Bloke sold cash register code to restaurants that deliberately hid sales from taxmen

Worked at a place

worked at a place in the 90's that did this. Will leave industry and name out.

The register system was bespoke for the place and the guy who wrote it ultimately ate a shotgun. Bad things happened when the system eventually had a fault (as most bespoke single dev systems tend to) and there was no one with access to the software to "fix" it.

Ultimately the whole house of cards came crashing down. It was not a pretty workday.

Asperger's and IT

Being an Aspie and working in validation is interesting. I produce test harness code that is very detail oriented and functional, but not always as broadly covering or as fast as desired. My manager has teamed me up with another programmer that codes fast and loose, covering a lot of ground but with unhandled codepaths, or other 'features'. I take the code over once he's blazed the trail and re-factor, clean up, complete, and close paths. Together we produce code that is orders of magnitude better than either of us could do alone.

Re: Me Too

Yes. This is absolutely true. My son is autistic and I am Aspie. We both have a very strong delineation of right and wrong, however, not always does it align with societal norms.

IBM's BlueGene/Q super chip grows 18th core

This isn't consumer electronics

You bin sort for yield on consumer electronics, sure. If it works sell it for more $$ and make more $$. In the HPC space reliability is king, so you take an improved yield and any that are still good can also be used as spares.