We have a clean desk policy at my workplace too, we also don’t take classified documents home

We need to provide a photo of our home work area as part of our application for work from home. It’s needed as part of the employer’s duty of care - managers are supposed to examine the photo and determine its a safe work area

Really all that happens is a photo is attached to the application and never looked at

I doubt American employers have any duty of care towards work from home employees.

I bet the unblurring was about being able to see the documents. AI blur is pretty aggressive at blurring anything that isn’t a face

Lucky kids

Disney will happily spend a million to defend against 50k if they have a chance of getting a court decision that their contract is valid for everything associated with the Disney brand

I’m 47, and the early games for me were clear. Five year olds don’t get to play arcade machines in 1982, but they do get to play an older relative’s game and watch

And that stuff is memorable

I doubt the post iPad (maybe the post home computer) people have much chance though. 3 year olds have games made for them, though they’re in this thread, naming popular games

Octopus on a Nintendo game and watch (though it’s hard to put things in order, I had a knockoff portable game in 1987 “submarine battle”, and I feel the Nintendo has to be earlier, or what else could the knockoff be knocking off? Yeah game and watch was 1980 onwards)

I moved from one project in my scaled agile using organisation to another and a week later got a phonecall “why are you billing half an hour a day to admin”

“Um” says I “working out where to put how much time against each of the five rows we’re tracking our work under takes at least that long”

Then management shot themselves in the foot

Step 1. Instruct people that all their time must be allocated to a project task, no more admin time, no more corporate role time.

Step 2. Assign a “tiny” piece of work to a team of 10, so the tiny work costs (10 x number of days to deliver) pdays, but was costed at a reasonable level of 20 pdays.

Step 3. Don’t assign any other work to the team

Step 4. Dissolve the team and scatter the staff 2 weeks later

So by the time the team was dissolved, the work was done but for QA, which was delayed and idle because of a bug found in unit test. At that point it had cost 10 people * 10 full days — a hundred pdays.

Management has been calling former team members asking for them to assign their time to a previous project to get the cost of the work down to its planned amount

I don’t think it’s fraud since it’s billing this part of the organisation for work done for that part of the same, but it really makes a mockery of the idea of tracking time per project being meaningful. Anyway, I’m glad they asked me to lie on MS project in writing

I lost the only job I have ever left involuntarily on a helpdesk for a small system partly because of the tracking tools they used

I was top in the team by tickets closed. The person they kept was top by time per call (spent the longest time on each call/worst at efficiently fixing callers’ issues)

Tech tools are not a solution for incompetent management

I wouldn’t do that. I installed the software for them and set up their email and showed them how to do things. Linux was harder to set up back when I did that. Printers were a headache especially

But once set up a Linux box is no harder to use than a windows or apple one

It’s not surprising you can remove it, but it seems contrary to teaching good habits to not install it by default as a basic utility. You don’t want to train people to log in as root

Actually I think the only way I can log in as root is sudo -i

Pretty sure root has /bin/false as its shell and it’s configured as no login my machines

Surely any user planning on using arch would want sudo. I mean if Ubuntu desktop didn’t come with sudo I’d understand but arch? Linux From Scratch was a thing when I was still playing with Linux (rather than just using it) and that also was very much an if you want it, install it, but that suggested sudo as the likely alternative was the user would log in as root

(But I don’t see why VLC shouldn’t be able to run as root, if the user so desires.)

You don’t run VLC as root because you don’t especially trust that build of VLC

We don’t run random stuff as root because it’s a stupid risk. We try to only take necessary risks. Risks that make things easier. Running random programs as root gains you nothing and causes annoyance in that you need to fix permissions on its configuration files if you want to run out as a user

There is nothing stopping you though if you want to set up a Linux machine where you log in as root, run a desktop environment as root, run apps as root. You’re unlikely to be taking an unreasonable risk as a home user.

I feel like he has a machine that someone set up for him, and he can’t escalate permissions, because he’s on a basic user account.

The normal way this works on a single user machine is:

1. You try to do something that is restricted to admin
2. Windows puts up a modal dialogue box asking if you want to do it as admin
3. You click yes
4. You do it as admin

But in that case he can’t have locked himself out of a file, he can only be locked out of things Microsoft think you shouldn’t muck with unless you know what you’re doing

I think we’ll see more office drones happy with Libre Office (perhaps even on Linux) to avoid the monthly fee for MS 365, not in the office, because few care about what the boss provides (except for the crap screens) but at home

Linux is especially good for normal boring people. It’s only bad for tech-adventurist idiots. It does email, web, documents just like windows. There’s no learning curve (though it isn’t great for users unwilling to log in, as their keyring won’t be unlocked by auto (or biometric) log-in, so they need to add their login password before they can get email or have their browser log into Reddit for them

Always know your escape characters! Usually \ works

(I wonder how many clients show that as double backslash)

Did I do something odd when I set up my windows 11 machine?

If Microsoft has something marked as admin access, it just presents me with a dialogue asking if I want to do whatever as admin

I mean it’s not like I have open hardware so there’s a whole lot of my machine I really have no practical access to, but everything this guy wants is there

Him saying he’s the owner suggests a private machine, so no corporate lockout from system components. Do computer shops set up admin accounts and lock their customers out as low-privileged users?

As much as that extracted a snort from me, it’s almost true, at least in the sphere of printers that talk one of the few major print languages

Funny, in Australia we have school dances and they don’t get anything like American proms, with the possible exception of girls’ debutante balls which we dress up for

If they’re embedded in a combat group they take their chances.