* Posts by Dancing With Mephisto

7 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Feb 2013

Slack flaunts enterprise handcuffs

Dancing With Mephisto

Re: Yay for more fragementation and bloatware in the Enterprise

"Well, yes, but if you're worrying about the overhead of running a little chunk of javascript versus breaking out Microsoft Office Communicator For Skypified Businesses 2016 365 On The Azure Cloud then your priorities are a little different from their target market."

The point of the original comment was fragmentation; we have to use the O365 tools for the *rest* of the business and to talk to other people who are *not developers*. I don't work in a tech company, I work in retail; if you were to ask a Store Manager what Slack was, they'd look at you funny.

Therefore, instead of just having one communication platform, I've suddenly got two. And two processes running instead of just one. And you say "little chunk of JavaScript" - it's basically doing the same thing as SfB, just in your browser instead. It's nothing revolutionary. It's unnecessary and a duplication of concerns.

Dancing With Mephisto
FAIL

Re: Yay for more fragementation and bloatware in the Enterprise

"It's web based."

And because it's "web based" (which also apparently makes it "secure", according to your comment) that doesn't make it a process that you have to have open constantly in your browser?

Dancing With Mephisto
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Yay for more fragementation and bloatware in the Enterprise

Oh, fantastic. Yet another piece of crap process slowing down my already slow corporate laptop. It can barely function as it is with all the McCrappie/Windows Bloatware they've managed to cram on it.

I work for a large retailer in the UK, and Slack has really taken off (for some reason) with some of the development teams/individuals. In my eyes, it just serves as yet another distraction and place to communicate potentially sensitive company information "off the grid". How use of it got past the higher-ups in the various security departments at this place is beyond my comprehension.

Is anyone else just plain sick of the fragmentation of communication platforms these days, not only for home use but now creeping into the enterprise? Should we really just be jumping on the next shiny POC purely because it's fashionable despite having full O365 subscriptions available? Skype for Business and Outlook isn’t perfect, don’t get me wrong – but it’s at least tried, tested and true.

Rant over :P

Staff 'fury' as penny pinching IBM offers legal minimum redundo payoffs

Dancing With Mephisto

Re: Redundancy - Custom and Practice can help a lot

Remember to check your house/contents cover - I have "Family Legal Cover" added as an optional extra (for something like £12), which covers me in court for cases like this, if I need it.

The gender imbalance in IT is real, ongoing and ridiculous

Dancing With Mephisto

Fashion

I don't see this as an internal problem - i.e. this isn't an issue with the IT industry, instead it stretches much further than that. It's the other way around.

At the age of 28, when I was growing up with IT, it was seen as an unfashionable thing to want to do. No one really even knew what a computer was, and the internet was only just starting to enter regular people's lives. Not only would female classmates see it as unfashionable, but just generally, it was not seen as something serious. I remember my Form Tutor telling me there wasn't a future in IT and that I should focus on something else instead. To this end he ended up sending me to a "Careers Councillor" who echoed the same sentiment.

I'm a Senior Software Developer now and doing pretty well for myself.

I think it's been embedded in western culture as a whole that "someone into computers" is a geek and not "normal". A clown-like figure or a novelty. It's only with the recent explosion of popularity with "apps" and touch screen crap that "geek" is becoming "cool". Hello, Hipsters.

Fashionable is doing Law at University. Not Computer Science. It'll remain this way for at least another 5 or 10 years.

Schoolkids given WORLD'S CHEAPEST TABLETS: Is it really that hard to swallow?

Dancing With Mephisto

Re: All the world's knowledge

You are assuming here that all children are the same.

I had always been interested in computers, and myself had Encarta on my first PC, a Windows 95 machine, which, as mentioned by someone else cost my parents a fair bit to buy for me. There was a feature in Encarta to connect to the internet, but it was always too expensive, so I spent hours reading through articles on Encarta, watching the video samples, etc. I always knew about this 'internet thing' but never actually got access to it until a few years down the line.

When internet became affordable, and my dad got us on AOL, my learning only increased. I became more fascinated with how it all worked 'under the hood', and I remember the first thing I did was find out how web pages were put together, viewing the source of pages, studying the HTML underneath and playing around with stupid pages that were full of horrible little JavaScript games :)

The fact that I'm a Software Developer these days probably isn't surprising. The medium in which I accessed this information (the 'net) is also not very surprising; I didn't spend hours in libraries, but the moment I got access to the internet, I saw it to be what it really was; an electronic library full of information with easy to use index systems (search engines). The technology behind it admittedly interested me more, but either way.

I was never spurred on by teachers to follow down this path, and in fact had teachers telling me that 'computers' and 'the internet' were 'just a fad'. I remember in secondary school being referred to numerous "careers officers" concerned with the fact that I had such an interest in technology.

My journey of learning was mostly a lone one; certainly, at least, the things that I know now and keep me employed in a reasonable job were learnt by myself through my own desire to just know how they work. This is still the case to this day. Secondary school teaching was abysmal, come to think of it: copying down passages of text into our own books which was written onto a blackboard by a teacher. We weren't even allowed to go near a computer, despite the school having a small Windows 3.11 network. The room was just locked up and never used. And this was about 15 years ago now.

To summarise, not all kids are the same. Some children, given a portal to vast amounts of information -will- just absorb it. Some will just not be interested in the slightest and would rather kick a football around outside, or consume Facebook on a smart phone, not caring how it works or how it's put together.

Why you need a home lab to keep your job

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Re: Creeping Death

Some people have home labs because it is, to them, a hobby. It's your choice to have a family and other hobbies. It's theirs to have a home lab and use that extra knowledge in the work place.