Posts made by Carnival Boy

What do you mean they "hid" the known vulnerability?

@Dashrender said in What Are You Drinking:

But if you're willing to splurg, laphroaig 18 is fracking awesome! Got it as a gift from one of my bosses.

That's a very generous gift. They don't make it anymore, but even if they did it would be out of my budget. Ten year old is about as much as I can generally afford.

Started to take my whisky drinking a bit more serious this year. It's an expensive hobby, but I'm avoiding the good stuff and focussing on the cheaper (but hopefully still good) end of the market. We've bought about 25 bottles and are making our way through them, trying to decide what are favourites are. It's a good hobby for lockdown!

Mostly Scottish single malts, but I'm also trying to up my bourbon game, as bourbon is probably my favourite drink. I've always drank Jim Beam, mostly because it is very cheap here in the UK, but I've got some Bulleit, Wild Turkey, Woodford and Maker's Mark. Again, only the cheap stuff, but they are a bit nicer than Jim Beam. Any recommendations always appreciated.

I was also amazed to read recently that there's a US law preventing casks from being used more than once. A law brought in as a result of lobbying by the coopers' unions. And also that casks are generally made from oak that is between 150 and 200 years old. That's a very old tree to be cut down and used once! So, US bourbon casks are used once and then shipped to Britain where they used over and over again by our distillers. Something like 80% of Scotch whisky is stored in bourbon casks, the rest in sherry casks. Thanks for all the wood!

What do you mean by "one extra step". Do you mean creating an account on these systems?

Otherwise, I find sharing a folder with an external e-mail in Sharepoint Online the simplest and quickest for users (if you have a Microsoft 365 account), but I'd expect Dropbox to be just as good. Then it's just dragging and dropping files in to a browser.

It's one thing writing a completely bespoke system, but who is going to design this for you? Sitting down a Production Manager (for example) with a blank piece of paper and asking what he wants is a recipe for disaster. Even if they had any idea what they wanted. A Production Manager might roughly know what an MRP routine does, but very few could actually design one from the ground up. It's an extremely complicated algorithm.

Even with an established software house you're entering in to a very committed relationship. You're relying on one company for modifications, fixes etc for years to come at an unspecified cost.

At least with major ERP systems like Microsoft, Oracle or SAP you have a partner network to work with. So if you fall out with your partner, or they put up their fees unreasonably, or they go out of business, then you can simply move to another partner and carry on. That's much, much harder with bespoke software.

Sure, with typical ERP systems you will have customisations on top, either completely bespoke, or industry specific verticals. But that might only be 20% of the system, with 80% being standard. So moving to another ERP partner means the new partner only has to worry about the 20% of bespoke code, not a completely unknown system that is 100% bespoke.

And the reality is companies are simply not that unique. Many think they are, but the majority of unique business processes are not ones that add value but are a case of "we've always done it like this". Identifying unique processes that add genuine value, whilst standardising other processes, reduces the amount of customisation needed, reduces costs, and actually increases efficiency and business performance.

@scottalanmiller said in Access 2003 in a 2021 World???:

That kind of budget would easily get you a full time crew of three people, if not more, that create exactly what you want and are there to develop, improve, update, tweak, etc. for forever.

It feels like you believe in outsourcing IT but insourcing ERP. But all the arguments you've made regarding outsourcing IT equally apply to ERP, if not more so. I feel you're taking a contradictory position.

@Dashrender said in Access 2003 in a 2021 World???:

If you have all those different products, you likely have tons of work-arounds you have to do to get data to work together... plus the cost of managing them all separately...

I agree, it does seem like a lot of work. I can't see the attraction. It feels a bit too 1980s.

@JaredBusch said in Access 2003 in a 2021 World???:

His point is that most companies don’t need all of those pieces in the ERP because some of them are handled in a different thing.

If they're handled in a different thing then we're not really talking about ERP. ERP is different things handled in one thing. It seems like we're talking about several separate systems, not ERP.

Which is fine. So you have a standalone finance system, and a standalone stock control system, and a standalone sales order processing system. But none of those are ERP on their own and you lose many of the benefits of running ERP.

So the argument isn't "build an ERP system in-house", it's "don't run ERP".

So I understand you, you're talking about designing and developing a bespoke ERP system in-house? So general ledger, receivables, payables, purchasing, sales, inventory, manufacturing? From scratch?

@scottalanmiller
But you've got those costs regardless? You need to maintain a bespoke ERP and constantly develop it due to changes in technology, legislation, business needs etc.

SaaS provides more certainty and ease of admin. Microsoft Dynamics BC, for example, is $100 per month per user and for that you get a new version of the software every month and no worries and all the benefits of SaaS.

@scottalanmiller said in Access 2003 in a 2021 World???:

This... I need to make a video on why buying an ERP is almost never the right answer. Almost every customer that we have that we manage an ERP for is sorry that they didn't spend the same (or less) money building something that they could control and customize.

I'd like to see that video. I've never heard of a company being sorry in the way you describe. I'd be interested to know why your customers feel like this.

I don't know how you could possibly build something for less - developing an ERP system from scratch is a massive expense. I think it would be ridiculous to even think about it.

It's kind of funny, when we all worked in offices there are loads of health and safety requirements to do with decent chairs, space, monitors at the right level. We did regular checks to make sure everyone was compliant. All good stuff - anything to prevent the pain and misery of things like back pain.

Now we all work from home and some people are literally lying on their beds with a tiny laptop on their laps.

I wonder if firms might get sued. I haven't heard of anything happening. Obviously when Covid is over, many people will continue to WFH, but firms aren't going to get away with this. I wonder how it will be dealt with.

My niece is a trainee architect for a prestigious Swedish firm in London. The top bosses have all moved home and are now working in their enormous houses in beautiful Swedish countryside and living the dream whilst the lower ranked workers are working in their tiny, shared, rented flats in London. My niece spends nearly 24 hours a day in a tiny room that is her bedroom cum office. There is only room for a bed, she sleeps on it at night and works on it in the day. This is the reality of WFH for a lot of young people in major cities. I'm sure it's the same in New York, Paris or Hong Kong. Maybe in the long run people will move out of the cities, but I'm not convinced.

My company are pretty good - basically telling people they will buy them whatever they need for home.

2 monitors, keyboard and mouse at work, and 2 monitors, keyboard and mouse at home. Then just use my laptop wherever I am.

Thanks, I will give it a go and see if it fixes the issue.

Thanks. Sounds like the issue may be reading then, with local caching, rather than writing. Is it possible to turn local caching off?

Can anyone explain to me the mechanics of what happens when I open a file stored in SharePoint Online using Windows Explorer?

So, for example, I open a folder in Windows Explorer by browsing the path https://contoso.sharepoint.com/sites/mysite/etc and from there I open an Excel spreadsheet.

I believe it first downloads the file to a cache on my local machine, but I'm not sure where or how. When I make changes to the spreadsheet, it saves those to my local machine and a background process uploads the changed file back to SharePoint. Is that how it works?

I really don't know.

But I occasionally get issues where the file I open is a previous version and not the latest version, so I am assuming there is syncing going on and I'm suffering from sync timing errors. I suspect this issue only happens when I open the file from Windows Explorer, as I don't appear to have any issues when opening from within Teams using the "Open in App" Teams action, but I could be wrong.

Is positive discrimination also illegal in the US then? What about the Rooney rule? I'm not sure what the rules are in Europe, but there are examples of legal positive discrimination, such as female only candidates in elections, and I believe in Denmark you have to employ a certain percentage of female executives.

I don't like wall-mounting TVs at all. Don't you find them too high? Aren't you having to crane your neck upwards? When I'm lying on the sofa I like the telly to be at eye level, so just stand it on a TV cabinet.

Bought the wife and kids new Fire tablets to replace the tablets they got for Christmas 3 years ago which are now dog slow. Didn't really want to but they were half price. They use them for several hours a week so they're not bad value.

My uncle ran a successful hardware distribution business employing dozens of people for over 30 years. His motivation was to generate work, security, and happiness, for owner and employees. He could have been more profitable, but chose not to.

I'll have to tell him he spent his life devoted to a hobby

But then he was a socialist. Maybe we just think about business differently in Europe? Scott likes to label things, but I'm not sure it makes any difference.

Plus, I'm not sure if Teams works with metadata. Which is the kind of thing that frustrates me a bit with Teams - its a front-end for SharePoint, but a hobbled front-end. Meaning you keep having to select "Open in SharePoint" to do anything complicated.

But generally I find the advantages of "going all in" with Microsoft outweigh the disadvantages.

I've also found Teams getting used more and more by companies compared with Zoom. At the start of the pandemic it was all Zoom.

@travisdh1 said in 75 User Exchange On Prem vs. Office 365 Cost Comparison:

I've yet to figure out how to manage file shares in it properly. They all just get dumped into the same bucket and good luck finding what you need.

It's essentially just a front-end for Sharepoint isn't it? With each Teams channel being a Sharepoint site.

I have to confess that I've never had success using metadata to organise Sharepoint files and still organise everything into folders and sub-folders. I then regularly use Windows Explorer to manage those files and folders, which I find much easier than Sharepoint (poor) or Teams (terrible). IIRC, @scottalanmiller has preached against using folders in Sharepoint, but it's the only solution that has consistently worked for me. Maybe I'm just too old to learn new tricks, but I think Windows Explorer is an awesome application and hasn't been bettered (on Windows), despite its age.

@jt1001001 said in 75 User Exchange On Prem vs. Office 365 Cost Comparison:

@EddieJennings Handle it now while you can. We did not and let's just say its the wild west trying to wrangle it all back in

Is that a weakness of Teams though, or a weakness in internal controls, training and workflow?

@scottalanmiller said in 75 User Exchange On Prem vs. Office 365 Cost Comparison:

Very hard to see and follow alerts and conversations. A lot more clicking around and searching for messages than with other platforms.

I agree, as a messaging app it seems very poor and MS definitely need to work on this.

@scottalanmiller said in 75 User Exchange On Prem vs. Office 365 Cost Comparison:

Teams is actively really inefficient

How so? We're using it more and more, including to collaborate with external people and everyone seems to like it now they've got the hang of it.

My kids also use it all the time at school.

I'd like a dumbphone that runs WhatsApp as 99% of the time that's the only way my family and friends communicate with me. Carrying around a smartphone all day just in case someone WhatsApps me feels like overkill.

It's so rare that someone actually calls me or sends an SMS. And when my kids call me, it's always through WhatsApp as they barely understand the concept of non-Internet calling.

I wasn't, but don't focus on the actual amounts - they were just arbitrary figures. Although salaries in Europe are a lot lower than the US.

But my point was that a lot of employers are flexible and will make exceptions for good candidates, regardless of experience. Specifying a salary can cast the net too narrowly. Finding a good developer is hard over here, there aren't many available.

@scottalanmiller said in Job postings with no salary listed:

@RandyBlevins said in Job postings with no salary listed:

I never understood the whole asking salary is taboo thing.

that's an excuse. It's not taboo to anyone. That's something employers claim in the hopes that people won't call their bluffs.

Discussing money generally is something of a taboo in the UK, but I understand it isn't in the US. I have some sympathy with firms not advertising salary if (and only if) it is because they are willing to look at a wide variety of experience and talent and will pay market rates depending on the candidate they offer the role to.

For example, let's say you want an experienced developer at $50k, but find an inexperienced one willing to work for $30k, and they are the stand-out candidate, you might prefer to employ the inexperienced one and train him up, with a view that he'll start on $30k but will eventually be paid $50k (or $60k). By advertising the role at $50k, the inexperienced candidate might not even apply.

Sure, you might advertise the role as "$30-50k depending on experience", but does that help? I can see that argument that says candidates know what they're worth, this is the job requirements, if you think you can make a difference then apply and if we agree we'll pay you what you're worth.

On the other hand, if you're on $50k then you're never going to take a job that pays $40k and you don't want everyone to waste their time just because money wasn't discussed early enough in the conversation.

But this is where a good external recruiter should be able to handle things.

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Drinking:

@travisdh1 that's REAL Pilsner Urquel!

Wait, did America steal Pilsner Urquel as well as Budweiser?

Our local micro-brewery now does deliveries of cask ale. One of the brewers just dropped off 3 litres on the way home from her shift. So I'm fairly happy again, after all the pubs/bars have been closed here in England since March.