This is a real problem....
Happened to my husband. He wasn't a heavy Facebook user, but one day couldn't log in and was never able to recover the account despite repeated attempts. He finally gave up.
63 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jul 2007
Good. I just paid an absurd $250 to replace the battery in my husband's four-year-old MacBook Pro. I could've replaced it myself except the stupid thing was glued down and the number of steps to repair it was like 52. I'm an experienced IT guy, but I was not about to undertake that nonsense.
A replacement battery on Amazon was somewhere between 30 and $60,
That says it all. I've been in this business for 30 years. HP sells GARBAGE. Their printers last maybe 10K prints, if that, and the cost/page is enormous because they can't stop milking their customers for ink and toner that's more expensive than gold.
F them. I stopped buying their printers when they bricked one of my personal ones. And Brother printers cost the same initially but the ink is vastly cheaper.
Long gone are the days of Laserjet 4000/4050s that printed 200K pages and showed no signs of slowing down.
Never, ever again if I have anything to say about it.
I realize this guy has only been there since 2019, but why does he still have a job?
Why do ANY of them still have a job?
I don't know if the UK has a version of criminal charges against a company, as in the US, but if it does, charges should be laid against the Post Office AND Fujitsu. They've both lied repeatedly.
This whole thing beggars belief.
This is hardly just as British problem. American governmental units of all levels are notorious for poorly managing IT projects. Oracle in particular is notable for walking away from a project that is deemed unfixable afte,,r say $150 million has been spent. Then they just get another contract with the same entity.
Republican politicians in the US are always talking about waste, fraud, and abuse, but they ignore stuff like this which happens all the time. Larry Ellison of Oracle is a notable Republican donor.
Yes. Brother. When I was a freelance consultant, I bought brother printers for all of my clients. They're very reliable. The software is decent and pretty straightforward and it doesn't install a lot of garbage. I also like that their laser printers, have a separate toner and drum and you can buy third-party toner and it works just fine.
They bricked my printer by sending me an unauthorized firmware update in 2015, and I raised such a stink that they ended up sending me a new printer for free. But I was really pissed and I have never bought another HP printer. And I never will. When that "free printer" died, I replaced it with a Brother, and I've never looked back.
It's been a complete and utter disaster. I'm routinely getting anti-Semitic stuff pushed at me and when reported, there's never a violation of TOS. In addition to "groomer" this and that because I'm openly gay.
It's completely absurd. Muskrat has also descended into being the nasty racist, anti-Semitic (replete with Soros memes) piece of trash that we always knew he could be.
It's only a matter of time before the whole thing goes titsup because advertisers don't want to be next to LITERAL Nazis.
Astoundingly idiotic. But not a surprise.
I've been working on remote software development teams for 3.5 years. And we've done just fine, thank you very much. My company has its problems, but they are very clear that we don't need an office to do our work, and they're RIGHT.
There is an office if you want to go there (and I do occasionally, it's not far from my house) but it's not necessary to do the work.
My favorite version of this story was finding emails from the co-owner of the business that was my client (a gymnastics school). He was sending emails USING HIS WORK ACCOUNT to Craig's List personals for escorts.
This was the week after I'd heard his wife's diatribe about how she had caught her 16 year old son looking at porn. DUH. He's sixteen and he's male. Of course he looks at porn. She ranted that all porn ALL PORN is exploitation of women. Um. Sure. OK.
The other was walking into my boss' office, during work hours, at a large University to find him looking at porn on his work computer. DUDE. REALLY? At least turn the screen away from the frickin door!
Once again Britain has never come to terms with the end of the Empire. The UK just isn't that important anymore, and hasn't been since 1945, except to itself. It never figured out that it was just a medium sized power. France, Germany, Italy and Spain, the Netherlands all did.
What do you even say to someone who thinks he can manage an entire company (including HR matters) via Tweet, in public. Then when someone kindly points out that he's being an mega asshole to a person that EVERYONE LIKES he backs up and lamely apologizes.
Twitter's bankruptcy is going to be hilariously terrible. I can't wait.
I was living in Boston when DEC and Wang were dying in the late 80s and early 90s.
Wang's huge headquarters (five or six buildings), in Lowell (built there to spur business in an old mill town that had seen. better days) ended up selling for $525,000. It had cost $60M to build.
They just couldn't catch a break.
I was once the IT manager of a now defunct taxi company in New Orleans, USA.
One day I got a call from a police detective on a Monday afternoon, enquiring if he could look at the tape of our outside security cameras on the side street. Someone had been murdered a block away the previous Saturday night.
I said "sure," and arranged for him to come down. When he arrived, I pulled up the footage, only to discover that the cameras did NOT HAVE INFRARED. So about 10 cameras were taking video all night. Of nothing. The previous IT manager was apparently a total idiot.
I had to replace all of the outdoor cameras, which involved climbing a 20' ladder. Did I mention that I REALLY don't like heights. Yeah. It was a fun job.
I really hope he charged them a LOT of money to fix that. I would've charged £25,000 to fix it. Just because it wasn't my problem anymore. I've done a lot of these in my day.
My favorite was the one where I started as IT manger in 2005 of a video production company which had never had one before. Just part time contractors who dropped in now and then. During the second week I was setting up a new email server for them. I had gone to run an errand at lunch and got a panicked phone call saying email was down. I got back to the office a few minutes later and it was the exact same problem. Disk was full. I cleared years of old logs and rebooted it and it was fine.
For my trouble I was fired the next day. They told the unemployment people that I "crashed the email server on purpose." I told the woman "why on earth would I create more work for myself?" Which made her laugh, and I got my benefits. I later found out that the people who ran the company were nuts. One of them had fired an entire department of people over the intercom once before.
When men see behavior such as that alleged in the complaint (and women's public airing of their experiences) and they do nothing, they are complicit.
One of the allegations involved the head of the WoW franchise having to be physically pulled off female subordinates (more than one!!!!!) that he was hitting on at a conference.
"During a company event (an annual convention called Blizz Con) Afrasiabi would hit on female employees, telling them he wanted to marry them, attempting to kiss them, and putting his arms around them. This was in plain view of other male employees, including supervisors, who had to intervene and pull him off female employees."
This isn't "frat boy behavior," this is sexual assault IN FRONT OF A BUNCH OF PEOPLE. And nothing happened to the guy, but he eventually left the company.
https://kotaku.com/blizzard-harasser-from-lawsuit-is-still-all-over-world-1847345457
If you see a woman being harassed by her boss or you hear men making disparaging comments about female co-workers and you do nothing then you're part of the problem. Why is this difficult for men to understand?
Whether it's legally allowed and whether the company SHOULD do something are two very different things. Sure sounds like a way to discourage your sales reps from pursuing big deals.
Why would a sales person go out of their way to land the big sale if the company's going to nickel and dime them on the commission? It's penny wise and pound foolish.
Oh Jack. You really are a douchebag. You could've stopped this years ago, but you chose not to. Because you're greedy. Donald Trump was violating your TOS before he became President, but he drove traffic to you so you didn't care.
So spare me your crocodile tears, whining and pearl clutching. It's disgusting.
Wait. What? Apple wants to continue to make oodles of money by selling computers and phones?
<GASP> HOW! DARE! THEY!?
I use Apple products because I like them. They're well made and they last a long time (although Windows is better at this now) so they tend to be a good use of my limited money. I'm not an apologist for them and they sometimes do silly things. But expecting a well established, phenomenally profitable company to change its business model is also incredibly silly. In 1997, no one expected Apple to survive, let alone become the largest corporation in history. They're apparently doing something right.
Wow. StichFix must be really hard up for IT talent if they're willing to keep on a person who plead guilty to sabotage. Remind me never to use their services for anything.
I spent years as a freelance IT consultant and several times after I parted ways (occasionally unpleasantly) with a company I noticed that I was still getting important emails for them or had access to one of their systems. I informed them right away and deleted the saved password.
Why? Because I'm not an unethical douchebag.