Re: UV check lamps
The fact the rest of the note glowed as well when they didn't normally could well be enough to raise suspicions...
236 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Aug 2007
And in parallel: a lot of your better employees who can see this happening and can easily get other jobs will leave fast and early. Thinning out doesn't only lose the people that you want to get rid of. Unless you are desperate to cut costs and don't care about the damage that will do to you in the long run, of course.
TVs have a much longer lifetime than apps, and TV manufacturers typically don't care much about updating their 'smart TV' apps once they have your money, even if the apps are still available and being maintained.
I treat TVs as dumb monitors and rely on cheaper 'evolving tech' boxes like the Roku or Chromecast to.providevthe smarts. It disconnects the update cycles.
You may be an example of someone who SHOULD be working in an office, some people just aren't suited to working at home. But then again if you only work half the day at work and none in your two days at home I wonder how much the job actually needs doing at all?
Personally I've been WFH since the start with maybe a dozen trips to the office in 2.5 years and I've found that I work more more intensely than in the office with fewer interruptions. I always worked with remote teams a lot anyway though, so I didn't really have to be in the office anyway before this.
There is more to it than recognising C++ code or SQL. There is a lot of domain knowledge about what the company is doing with them, how it interoperates with all the other systems they use, what the plans are for the next stages etc. Often a lot of that is held by the dev team NOT by the managers so swapping dev team members in and out quickly means you are always in the stage of finding out about stuff and inevitably losing some clarity on the way. It's much less efficient, it's just hidden by simplistic measures like headcount and words on CVS.
I don't know if it's the same compiler but I was writing raw ARM code in the 1980s to drive an Archimedes (and before that came out, an ARM dev board that hung off a BBC micro). I pretty soon found that for the non-critical parts the compiled code was just as good as my handwritten assembler, sometimes better - so I started writing the system in C with just the critical parts hand done and linked in. At the time compiled code generally was nowhere near as efficient as hand tuned code, so between the nice ARM RISC instructions and the compiler I was using somebody did a great job. Well done if it was you!
You don't want to use Citrix over a high latency connection, trust me. I used to install satellite broadband to rural business parks (one ground station then VDSL to all the companies) and it was very much wait-wait-wait-everything. Bandwidth was excellent for the time but latency was awful.
There were even split dialup/satellite systems that tried to push the more interactive bits via the phone lines but that didn't get far before adsl came in.
We have several buildings on a small business park. The local power company substation had to be worked on but we got plenty of notice for a change so arranged a full outage of the one affected building, with enough time for an orderly shutdown. It all went really smoothly and as Friday evening drew to a close the whole building was off and the main breakers isolated to avoid the self-same "turn it off and on again and off again and on and off and on and off again and...".
Then early on the Saturday morning they threw the power. Guess which building feed wasn't labelled correctly at the substation...
We are about three months into a four month project (as one of a million things we are doing so we didn't mind not being asked to do anything towards it yet) and the project manager has only just asked us to suggest a few requirements...
Sounds like it's going to be yet another project where the end result will be a vague definition in a wordy document that gets sent to the everyday team to 'productionise in the margins' because the project funds have all been spent on contractor Project Managers who have now gone.
Or as in one memorable case a whole small CSP was down for a week with the BT leased line failing in interesting ways and other business users in the same area also reporting issues, but BT repeatedly stated there were no known issues. Then suddenly it started working without us doing anything (we'd run out of ideas after doing everything we possibly could multiple times over that week) and a couple of days later BT sent out an email telling us that they'd finally fixed a major fault and they were sorry for the intermittent service over the last week...
Around the same time we were developing a dynamic interactive data visualisation tool, and we had a roomful of Silicon Graohics Iris workstations. One of the few non-PC machines to play Doom II. And it played it very well, on some of them you could even have left and right screens to get a nice wrap around view...
Every year or two I get the same "your email may be insecure" message from them telling me to change my email password. The first few times I found the same issue I wrote to them about how terrible it was - even ten years ago that password policy was feeble.
I just stopped using it for email at all and never read it. I asked them to just disable it but they say they can't. The impression I got was that they just kept the old systems from all their early mergers with Telewest, Blueyonder etc. around and had to use the lowest common denominator across all of them.
I stuck with virgin cable for ages because it was the only way to get the speed I wanted but now we have a Gb fibre alternative locally I'll be off soon, after about 15 years... it's just got way too expensive and their systems are antiquated.
Totally agree. I got torpedoed by a manager once so hard it wasn't worth fighting it. But I also knew a guy about four levels up the food chain from him who steered that manager away from several promising fast track opportunities over the next year or two so his career just stagnated.
They can take you to court, and they will often rely on you being scared off by that or just plain not being able to afford it (yay justice!) but if you get them in front of a judge AND you have solid documented facts on your side then you will win in all but the oddball cases.
Some of the more popular games on the most common VR headset (also owned by Facebook/Meta) is 'Job Simulator'. The reason this is making the news now is that a lot of non-gamers and older folks are now using these to explore multiplayer VR and clashing with the shitty teenage boy/troll/gamer mentality that has evolved over many years in online games.
We had a Stalwart for some tests once - a big 6 wheel drive, 6 wheel steering amphibious armoured truck thing. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mr_pCrhTkk.
We were using an old airfield for the testing which had big white crosses painted each end of the runway to stop people landing on it. The squaddies we borrowed to drive it were loving the easy duty and were tearing about happily in this 'unstoppable' beast.
Turns out if you drift it 180 using the slippery painted cross then when it hits concrete again all three wheels grip at once and flip it neatly on it's side...
Embrace, Extend. Extinguish. It worked for MS, but I was deeply saddened by RedHat doing it.
I was expecting it though, ever since IBM moved in. At my company half the product teams are moving to Alma but many others are leaving RedHat entirely for Ubuntu/Debian. If you can't have the slow-but-steady stability of CentOS and don't want to pay then the RedHat-sphere doesn't really offer much now.
Oh, because I wrote that same line and I meant to write == but it got debounced. A lot of these warming are there to force you to not make the same easy mistakes over and over again. That's why they are warnings not errors.
But when it comes to the production release of high value code like the Linux kernel it seems reasonable to make you split it into two lines and let the compiler di the optimisations
Unless there was an implied /s missing as well
I once had a year long contract supporting some similar old code. It had lots of weird "can't find them" issues.
In between what they asked for (document and tidy up all the workarounds) I ran static analysis and -Werror and fixed those too.
After the year was up there was no document to hand in for the workarounds as there were none left. Nor were there all the weird issues.