Posts by El blissett 71 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jul 2017
Probably because DHH has form for constructively dismissing employees for not conforming to his political beliefs, or daring to advocate for something he doesn't believe in, alongside valuable contributions to code and products. For example, buying out a third of a company in 2022 instead of reinstating a works council, and he's only gotten more hardline since then.
We use Oracle because it's a supported platform for business critical software. Yes, there is a supported open-source alternative, but who has time or money to do a migration?
Source: The same IT people who thought it was a great idea to purchase Sun thin clients in 2009 that became more obsolete than the computers they were supposed to replace.
I work in the industrial heartland of "the West" and my workstation options are an 11 year old Intel desktop or a 5 year old Intel laptop, with no money to replace either unless they break and performance about equal between them. Given how little hardware refresh most companies around me have done since Covid, and the opportunity for local supply chains you only get in China, this kind of machine looks pretty sensible - and you avoid all the AI processor slop being forced at you by big red and big blue. Sign me up for an import!
Too heavy, too thick, pointlessly hamstrung without an accompanying BB9 or BB10 phone, a business device with a movie aspect ratio?
QNX powered BBOS10 itself was fantastic - the hardware BlackBerry was shipping at this point to compete with iPhones and droids let it down.
Transmeta! That takes me back... the front page of liliputing.com used to be full of Crusoe and Efficeon vapourware, including the OQO palmtop and one of the OG netbooks, the Dialogue Flybook. Without hiring all their famous names, no way their terrible chipset would have gotten inside as many machines as it ended up in.
Basically had this at my first (and last) custodian job looking after a UK school computer cluster in the 90s (ring networked). I had to come in in the morning, switch everything on, clean etc. Check on it during the day and switch off lights and a single power bank by the door at the end of the day - leaving the computers to their server commanded start up and shutdown jobs. They didn't tell me or someone they got in to do a machine-by-machine backup and update to do anything differently the day he was in. He'd moved the lighting controller to another socket to make room for the enormous plug for his backup trolley, so when I left for the night and did what I was told to do by switching that off, I wiped out minimum 6 hours work and possibly totalled a machine or two.
My contract wasn't renewed at the end of the year, luckily, I've never studied or worked anywhere since that had electrical and network setups that easy to destroy. The school itself was shut down a couple of years later - no idea what the fate of the pricey OS X kit they had just purchased along with a new on site BOFH. I hope they both found a new home.
Sad news - I've been using pageplus and its descendants since 1995, and beta tested the Affinity apps. In the UK at least Serif held its own against Quark, Adobe and Macromedia back when competititon in this space was still a thing. Looks like Affinity 2 will be the end of the line. Still, as long as I don't have to go back to using Quark again, it's not the worst outcome.
Type your comment here - basic HTML and hotlinks allowed.
Yes, I've been in this situation and there's few others that have made my blood run quite as cold. It's always a customer you don't have any problems with who ends up on the recieving end of it so you just have to leave it in your head (and certainly not in comments).
For volume printing, soy based inkjet technology (what we used to call Risograph) is the only sustainable solution compared to printing with the same volume of plastic (laser toner).
For individuals who don't need to print much - which is quite a few people these days - or for those who can't refill their cartridges - also most people - the lack of maintenance or inks drying out with a cheap laser printer blows the impact of the ink vs the toner out of the water. I'm in the same boat as commentards above, my old Samsung printer is going to stop working with Windows before it runs out of ink on my usage patterns. The horrific amounts I used to spend on inkjet printing in the 90s and 00s to get something splodgy out at the end is a distant memory.
Amazed that you would bother accusing a client this size and risking it over one drive? All the Greeks in Delphi could have seen it coming but apparently not at this laptop company.
I guess there really is one of all sorts under the celestial body in the daytime sky.
Hope that the unnamed company in question learned to place contracts with suppliers that have professional approaches to working with large enterprises, not just supply the cheapest laptops.
We restored a Mac Classic to working order in a middle-school computing project during the early 00s. It would complement the all-Mac computer suite by allowing people to work on real computing things and code in a safe, no Internet environment.
Reader, it lasted 1 week before it was relegated to Risk duties only.
Ultimately doing something different is really hard. You're on your own. I followed the development of Mezzo/Symphony in the 00s, which correctly identified the upcoming obsession with convergence and tried to design an accessible UI for all screen types not just the CUA/HIG terminal and keyboard. The developers would post these updates that showed their research was taking into account all types of users and not assuming the Win95 shell was the foundation. Unfortunately it was abandoned before it was completed and didn't get beyond putting menus in 4 places. http://www.tuxmachines.org/node/17107
Full-fat Enlightenment being vapourware is almost a meme a this point. Then of course there was the Moblin/Maemo/Meego fiasco which did a huge amount of work on fundamentally reimagining the interface of a computer for the 2010s, but again didn't go anywhere. I would argue it never got the chance to be offered as a serious alternative. The problem becomes that all the software you want or need to use has been built on the older paradigm of the CUA/HIG and developers have no interest in changing that. Unity/GNOME3 had to beg developers to make some applications compatible with the global top bar, but trying to reinvent the interface is just not people's priority when the people who have done it get burned.
On my first weekend job as an extremely untrained PFY, I was told to just do what I normally did for the same client during the week - look after the Mac kit on a bus/ring network during the day, make sure the OS X server was happy, then switch off and lock up when I leave. With a line of sight to the doors, I could live the life of Larry sitting in the server room doing whatever I liked, like fixing up an old Mac II to play Risk clones on or messing around with the likes of Photoshop and Captivate that I would never afford.
If someone quiet came in, and I was otherwise engaged, I wouldn't see or hear anything different if I missed them coming in the door. The server room was out of sight of the main room, and they hadn't told me anyone else was in - I couldn't see anyone else on Sunday night and wasn't expecting anyone. However, there was indeed someone in doing a sensitive sequential backup. As I left for the night, sending the shutdown command (which had been set to be ignored this time) and flicked the switches, I'll never forget the blood-curdling "NOOOOOOO!" my long haired silent colleague screamed as I wiped out his day's work.
Oddly enough I didn't lose my PFY status, at least until the long haired silent colleague became the long haired silent boss, but I never got asked to do weekends again.
