Be Excellent To Each Other

But they are rolling back 4000 prices a month...



Banning the fuzzie wuzzies from the TV would be an interesting suggestion to make on PoV.



The T Mobile dancing one is brilliant. no one on here will like it though.

Outside Asda there are signs saying "Saving the Planet - One Bag at a Time". Yeah, good luck with that.

What's wrong with leaving them on one night a week, for this stuff? It's Wednesday, here.

I do think Wake On Lan is very clever but I've never seen it used for actual IT purposes.

No, actually it's the tick-sheet way they do it. I'd actually like to have way more ethnic minorities on TV, and decent drama and documentaries structured around the lives of other racial communities. Because I hate cockneys with a burning passion and it's all we bloody get on TV nowadays. Plus, I think I just resented the plastic falseness of the advert with wrongly smiling people in a 'we are teh world' stylee.

I do concede that I sounded like a 'political correctness gone mad!' mental right then though. I'll give myself pennance later in the day, perhaps by purposefully dropping a heavy reference book on my toe.

They could start with Jacqui Smith.

One night a week is fine, as long as you're certain that:
1) Staff will remember to leave them on. Assuming they remember to turn them off in the first place
2) If someone doesn't come in on the Wednesday, their machine will still be off from the Tuesday night, so you can't do anything with it
3) You don't need to do anything on a day that isn't Wednesday.

We've got over 300,000 machines that put themselves in full S3 suspend out of working hours (after 10 minutes of inactivity), bring themselves back up again in the middle of the night (spread across dozens of timezones) for patching and software distribution, and then put themselves back into S3 until the user comes in the next morning. And all of it costs very little indeed to manage.

Relying on users for your power management isn't great.

I like it.

Thinking about it, this credit crunch thing. it does make sense as if money keeps appearing in the system over time, then it is essentially worthless, and, over a given lifetime, one could go from 1 to 1,000,000,000,000 without ever doing anything. So you might as well use raindrops for currency.

I am genuinely interested in how you manage that. Place where I'm at has been trying to find something similar.

I'll get you some details - probably Monday, as I'm off work tomorrow.

I was on the phone to someone yesterday who hadn't uploaded any sales for over a week (they're lost if they don't do this within seven days) and when I asked why they ended up bursting into tears saying they'd been made redundant.

Happy times.

For those of you who remember my woes towards the end of last year, the day has come. This morning over a nice cup of tea I was given notice that I was going to be redundant at the end of March.

Things in the construction industry really are dire, we've managed to pick up bits of work (small commissions 2k here and there, whereas a commission would normally be 25 - 30k!) but with clients being so edgy regarding finance we simply cannot plan far enough in advance. So the decision was made to let me go.

Today it feels like an almighty cock slap, although I knew that it was highly likely to happen there was always a glimmer of hope that one or two of our projects would get financial backing and proceed or that we would land one of the highly coveted public sector jobs.

Unfortunately none of that was/is happening quick enough and lack of cash flow and borrowing capacity is crippling the viability of the (small) business.

Still. it's not the end of the world. No amount of worrying is going to make things any better and at least I can say that I tried, I took a risk (leaving the relative security of a big QS firm) and it didn't work. I gave it a shot and hung in there and saw it through to the end. If it had worked out then things would be, as I believe the youth of today say, 'all gravy' which is would be fine by me!

Sorry to hear that, The Egg. I admire your stoicism though, so let it warm your heart to know that, with your up-front philosophical acceptance of this, you are mighty. And as you say, at least you know now, and don't have it hanging over you. Bravo again on your inner strength.

Let's have some pics of what you set fire to later though, plskthnx.

"Relative security"? Aren't almost all your old colleagues on a standing redundancy notice? I think your biggest risk was your sector, rather than your employer. If you can make it tonight I'll buy you a pint to sup, dude.

Haha, yes of course there is that! Being relatively senior in the only office in Wales and therefore one of the last to have faced the chop was my security.

However, they all find out on Tuesday and at least I haven't had seven months of them all moaning about how rubbish everything is!

Thanks Chap



Pics to follow over time, just need to remove all of the valuables and the booze first!

Quantities, I predict.


Sorry to hear that too The Egg

Haha, yeah. "Survey this, bitches!"

Commiserations, The Egg. Good luck in finding something. Try banking, you might not have any experience but the people running it know fuckall, so you might be well in there.

There are indeed significant quantities of toxic asset-backed products that could do with some surveying, pronto.

There are indeed significant quantities of toxic asset-backed products that could do with some surveying, pronto.

/

That's exactly why quantitative easing is just about the stupidest thing that the Bank and Government could be considering, so it's a good job they still have plenty of other bright ideas before having to try that.

"Oh no, all the magical fairy money is vanishing out of the computers! Whatever can we do? Ooh, how about we print billions more cash, that's real money after all! What could possibly go wrong by devaluing Sterling even further?"

Ha. We're all so fucked.

Publisher's disclaimer: This isn't levity, it's desperate, sarcastic cynicism.

A gentleman I was in the pub last week has a friend in Zimbabwe. Said friend has recently just bought a car. On his phone he had a photo of the cheque used to pay. It started with "73 quadrillion" and went on from there (entertainingly ending in 'only'). It was clearly something of a challenge fitting it all on the cheque.

Let's be fair - the devaluation of the pound worked wonders for the economy after Soros attacked Sterling back in the 1990s, and there's a fair body of economic work that suggests that limited printing can have impressive effects when an economy is caught in a liquidity trap (as we appear to be).

Inflation in Zimbabwe is running at 89.7 sextillion percent annual, something like 230 million per day.

They've just introduced a $100 trillion note. Worth about $30USD.

Do people still even bother using it? Surely once it gets to a certain level simple barter is a better system. It is a physical entity which can have an appreciable and real value that isn't going to decrease arbitrarily at any given time.

I think the regime has bowed to a semblance of reality and is allowing US$ transactions now, which helps a little...

Then why haven't they done it sooner, instead of all the batshit insane "tactics" that were never going to work? Separately, the (attempted) removal of the requirement for the Bank's weekly cash printing report to be public doesn't instill confidence in any printing being limited, especially when there's apparently little else for them to do if that doesn't work either.

Possibly because of the stigma associated with printing money? They are waiting for the rate inflation to decrease more before adding in a new source? Or perhaps they're still hoping for co-ordinated action between the Fed, the ECB and themselves? I was just pointing out that a weak pound and / or starting up the presses can be very useful in certain situations...(consider the straightjacket that Ireland and Spain find themselves in, for example).

I think the ECB is in enough trouble with the Stanford mess...

i heard yeasterday on tv that someone in britain sold the rights to film her death. Do really people there like to watch other people dying?

I was quite

Yeah, famous for nothing except being thick pseudo-celebrity Jade Goody.

She was on Big Brother a few years ago.

is any of you going to watch her die?

is she that hateful?

I won't watch it, but then again I've never watched anything with her in it.

The bloke that was on SKy was better at it. He only needed 4 takes.

I nearly couldn't be arsed posting in this thread as it wasn't on the first page.

Our German parent company are thinking about outsourcing all our work to a third-party. Joyous times ahead.

We are a company that does out sourcing work.. it could be us

How considerate of you.

I share your pain Myp. Myself and the other techs here suspect that the IT consultant brought in a year ago is deliberately running the department badly to justify outsourcing. Ethics are... flexible it seems.

If it went ahead it's possible that we'd be taken on by the third-party, I suppose.

Should hear more in the coming months. They seem to want to make a decision "mid-2009".

Depends on how big the companies are. We only deal with government agencies or big big corperations, as far as I am aware. But when we get a contract, we normally TUPE staff over to us.

We are a big corporation, so it's possible I suppose.

You could end up working for Kovacs. Imagine that!

Could do

No offence, I think I'd rather be made redundant.

Fair enough

A friend of mine yesterday found out that her boyfriend and mother have both been made redundant.