Please can you re-send your CV to me in WORD format as I am unable to open the attachment. Please state the vacancy you are applying for in the subject line.
Kind Regards
[their name] Recruitment Advisor
I've read this myself before. To be honest, I have serious doubts that any business isn't putting Adobe Reader on their PCs but I do know that most of these agencies have databases which you can upload.doc files into and they'll do the grep(1)ping for the agent. Such databases don't support PDF files.
And why would the financial world trust Excel at anything statistical?
One would use a real stat suite, lest you implement the formulas (or MS) wrong.
There was recently an article stating that Excel stat isnt very accurate. It was rounding errors 10^-2 or -3, which could easily compound if used excessively.
They shouldn't, and IME if you speak to any experienced accountant who fully understands the limitations of the tools they're working with, they won't.
However, there are plenty of business people who don't fully understand the limitations of the tools they're working with. They just see Excel (and, for that matter, Access) as a quick, easy way to solve a relatively straightforward problem without having to go through all the hassle of finding an appropriate specialist tool and going through the necessary hoops to get up and running with it.
Fast-forward two or three years and this Excel spreadsheet is basically doing the numbers for an entire department, it's become absurdly complicated and nobody really understands it. Articles like this one from The Register prove that pretty neatly.
Is OpenOffice.org 3 actually better than Office 2003?
I haven't used either, so I have not idea, but that would seem to be an important factor for people who are worried about how well the software works, rather than about how recently it was released.
Dramatically better? Probably not. It's got a few features Office doesn't (eg. decent PDF support - unlike printer drivers such as CutePDF, it can generate PDFs with indexes), it makes some damn useful features more obvious than Word does (eg. navigate by heading) but other than that, they're not drastically different.
The big thing it does have is it's free. When Microsoft typically takes their US retail price and turns the "$" symbol into a "£" symbol to sell it in the UK, this makes a difference.
My company has around 2500 computers. Office 2007 standard costs 300-350 for each license. Assuming each computer has an Office Std license that would cost us $750,000 to $875,000 to license the entire company. Now, depending on how often you upgrade, that's probably $200,000 a year just for Office licenses. Now, I'm sure that there will need to be retraining, but 200k a year in savings should more than make up for it.
I don't know about in the US, but here in the UK buying site licensing typically reduces the cost by 50-80% (depending on how many licenses you're buying).
One of the reasons it's not always as easy as you'd think to push OpenOffice is because if you're resigned to spending £thousands per person per year in salary, an extra £120 per person in software licensing really isn't a big deal.
I only ever hear bad things about recruitment agents. I really don't know why more companies don't advertise directly. It can't be that much hassle to take a few phone calls and read a few emails.
Oh if you only knew..... Finding staff is easy. Finding good staff is damn difficult. I've been on both sides of the interview desk and the last vacancy we advertised got something like 70 responses from all over the world, most of whom were so blatantly underqualified I wondered if they'd read the ad at all.
Furthermore, most if not all of the responses were from people who were actively looking for work - yet someone who's good at their job, happy in it but could be persuaded to move on frequently isn't paying much attention to vacancy ads.
FWIW, I don't much like recruitment agencies because from an employers perspective, they're basically a very expensive variant on grep(1). But that, unfortunately, appears to be the world we're living in right now.
You should have sent a PDF instead and avoid all the problems.
Complete waste of time if you're going through an agency. Even if it's for a specific vacancy, they'll demand it in doc format so they can stick it in their database.
(Having said that, I've never had any success through agencies...)
I'm not trying to say "wah wah it uses more space". I'm trying find out whether it's worth complaining about:)
One important thing to bear in mind is that VMS systems were seldom bought as general purpose servers.
Quite often you'd run a specific application on them which basically dealt with most, if not all of the IT-related aspects of the business. So realistically, you wouldn't be storing that many files (except those that the application itself used) anyway.
A major benefit is that VMS (and the hardware it runs on) is generally as solid as a rock. It's getting rather long in the tooth these days, of course, but I wouldn't be surprised if you told me of a VMS system which hadn't been reset since before Windows NT came out. Historically, it's been popular with companies that need to know that the system will still be running when they open up tomorrow - think banks.
Do you have any numbers on how much space was used on extra versions for a "typical" distribution of files and usage patterns? TANSTAAFL and all that;)
Of course it did take up space and you had to do some maintenance to reclaim that, but ATEOTD if you've bought a disk with N capacity and you only use N/2, it follows that the rest of it is essentially wasted. Might as well do something useful with it.
Because such a product wouldn't need to be updated every year or require monthly subscriptions.
Which funnily enough is just how mainframe software is managed.
Guess what? We don't have viruses on mainframes, we have an IBM guarantee (since 1981) of security and integrity.
Most organisations that are big enough to run a mainframe almost certainly depend so heavily on it that they're unlikely to begrudge IBM the annual maintenance fees.
Which is fine. Though the cost to switch is way to high. I dont have a couple thousand of dollars laying around at the moment to get a mac, software I need, and to replace the external hardware (scanners, printers, etc) I have which are not compatible with the MAC.
Switching may be easy but it ain't cheap:-)
Horses for courses though, isn't it?
I've never bought hardware which isn't cross-platform compatible because IME Windows-only hardware is almost always cheap, nasty garbage, and I don't know about you but I can get on just fine with a mac mini.
And if the answer to that is "yes", then we should be asking the question: Why can't these vendors make a product that only allows my "good" programs to execute and nothing else?
Because such a product wouldn't need to be updated every year or require monthly subscriptions.
I have different Anti virus product on each of my machines at home. I figure the gap of what they won't detect is smaller then what just having one product will detect. [....] So far with Avast, AVG, (mind you one virus product per computer only) ZoneAlarm, FireFox, and some basic sense I haven't been hit.
I do not know much about RAID, but if the read error occurred during rebuild, wouldn't just that sector/cluster be lost and not the entire array?
Well, there's two problems there.
First, there's no such thing as one error. Once you start to see errors, they generally multiply like rabbits on viagra.
Second, where has that error occurred? If it's in the middle of a 2GB data file which forms part of the backing store for your accounts database, there's a strong chance you'll have to recover the whole database. Even if your DBMS can repair the file corruption, how exactly are you going to explain to the finance director that one or more transactions in the accounts system may no longer be correct and you're not sure which transaction it is or how many are affected?
So, I did read roughly 100 times 4TB. That is 400TB = 3.2 * 10^15 bits with 0 errors. That does not take into account normal read from the disks, which should be substantially more.
Nor does it take into account the invisible sector remapping that any reasonably modern drive will do.
IANAL but I don't see why Apple can't turn around and say "Fine, you can run OS X on whatever you choose but don't expect us to make it easy" - and then make it difficult.
You can't use the DMCA to lock out 3rd party's as Lexmark, Garage door opener makers and other have learned much less to define a court ruling.
No, but you can use TPM and you can pull some random stunt which identifies the computer as being a Mac and then patent that stunt so nobody else can clone it.
Assuming you're holding data that would get you in significantly more legal trouble if it were revealed than if it were to remain concealed, would it not make more sense to avoid using a computer of your own altogether for anything dubious?
You'd be able to spot a person wearing normal clothes in the open air (JUST) but you'd have a hard job telling *how many* people were in that blob of pixels and you'd have no chance at telling *who* they were and if they were adequately camoflauged... no chance.
So initial identification can be done by people on the ground; once that's done the spy satellite does the following. Just like any police show involving helicopters.
Slashdot Mirror
How is splitting and allowing the work to be done by someone else to do any more ethically sound than doing it yourself?
At the risk of invoking Godwin's Law so early on, how is taking this approach any different from saying to yourself "I'm just following orders"?
once one copyright infringer copies your movie, the whole internet has access to it via BT. :-)
Not on a closed platform such as a games console they don't.
DRM does not work.
Mathematically speaking.
Door locks do not work. Because it is always somehow possible to bypass them - be it by picking, drilling, bashing the door down or smashing a window.
They do, however, keep honest men from temptation.
I've read this myself before. To be honest, I have serious doubts that any business isn't putting Adobe Reader on their PCs but I do know that most of these agencies have databases which you can upload .doc files into and they'll do the grep(1)ping for the agent. Such databases don't support PDF files.
And why would the financial world trust Excel at anything statistical?
One would use a real stat suite, lest you implement the formulas (or MS) wrong.
There was recently an article stating that Excel stat isnt very accurate. It was rounding errors 10^-2 or -3, which could easily compound if used excessively.
They shouldn't, and IME if you speak to any experienced accountant who fully understands the limitations of the tools they're working with, they won't.
However, there are plenty of business people who don't fully understand the limitations of the tools they're working with. They just see Excel (and, for that matter, Access) as a quick, easy way to solve a relatively straightforward problem without having to go through all the hassle of finding an appropriate specialist tool and going through the necessary hoops to get up and running with it.
Fast-forward two or three years and this Excel spreadsheet is basically doing the numbers for an entire department, it's become absurdly complicated and nobody really understands it. Articles like this one from The Register prove that pretty neatly.
Is OpenOffice.org 3 actually better than Office 2003?
I haven't used either, so I have not idea, but that would seem to be an important factor for people who are worried about how well the software works, rather than about how recently it was released.
Dramatically better? Probably not. It's got a few features Office doesn't (eg. decent PDF support - unlike printer drivers such as CutePDF, it can generate PDFs with indexes), it makes some damn useful features more obvious than Word does (eg. navigate by heading) but other than that, they're not drastically different.
The big thing it does have is it's free. When Microsoft typically takes their US retail price and turns the "$" symbol into a "£" symbol to sell it in the UK, this makes a difference.
My company has around 2500 computers. Office 2007 standard costs 300-350 for each license. Assuming each computer has an Office Std license that would cost us $750,000 to $875,000 to license the entire company. Now, depending on how often you upgrade, that's probably $200,000 a year just for Office licenses. Now, I'm sure that there will need to be retraining, but 200k a year in savings should more than make up for it.
I don't know about in the US, but here in the UK buying site licensing typically reduces the cost by 50-80% (depending on how many licenses you're buying).
One of the reasons it's not always as easy as you'd think to push OpenOffice is because if you're resigned to spending £thousands per person per year in salary, an extra £120 per person in software licensing really isn't a big deal.
I only ever hear bad things about recruitment agents. I really don't know why more companies don't advertise directly. It can't be that much hassle to take a few phone calls and read a few emails.
Oh if you only knew..... Finding staff is easy. Finding good staff is damn difficult. I've been on both sides of the interview desk and the last vacancy we advertised got something like 70 responses from all over the world, most of whom were so blatantly underqualified I wondered if they'd read the ad at all.
Furthermore, most if not all of the responses were from people who were actively looking for work - yet someone who's good at their job, happy in it but could be persuaded to move on frequently isn't paying much attention to vacancy ads.
FWIW, I don't much like recruitment agencies because from an employers perspective, they're basically a very expensive variant on grep(1). But that, unfortunately, appears to be the world we're living in right now.
Sounds like a more formalised version of this comment:
http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=219158&cid=17788090
You should have sent a PDF instead and avoid all the problems.
Complete waste of time if you're going through an agency. Even if it's for a specific vacancy, they'll demand it in doc format so they can stick it in their database.
(Having said that, I've never had any success through agencies...)
I'm not trying to say "wah wah it uses more space". I'm trying find out whether it's worth complaining about :)
One important thing to bear in mind is that VMS systems were seldom bought as general purpose servers.
Quite often you'd run a specific application on them which basically dealt with most, if not all of the IT-related aspects of the business. So realistically, you wouldn't be storing that many files (except those that the application itself used) anyway.
A major benefit is that VMS (and the hardware it runs on) is generally as solid as a rock. It's getting rather long in the tooth these days, of course, but I wouldn't be surprised if you told me of a VMS system which hadn't been reset since before Windows NT came out. Historically, it's been popular with companies that need to know that the system will still be running when they open up tomorrow - think banks.
Do you have any numbers on how much space was used on extra versions for a "typical" distribution of files and usage patterns? TANSTAAFL and all that ;)
Of course it did take up space and you had to do some maintenance to reclaim that, but ATEOTD if you've bought a disk with N capacity and you only use N/2, it follows that the rest of it is essentially wasted. Might as well do something useful with it.
Because such a product wouldn't need to be updated every year or require monthly subscriptions.
Which funnily enough is just how mainframe software is managed.
Guess what? We don't have viruses on mainframes, we have an IBM guarantee (since 1981) of security and integrity.
Most organisations that are big enough to run a mainframe almost certainly depend so heavily on it that they're unlikely to begrudge IBM the annual maintenance fees.
Are you kidding? The list of "good" programs will change constantly. You'd very nearly need hourly updates to get this working.
Or you automatically allow anything that has a valid digital signature from a select list of signatories.
Which is fine. Though the cost to switch is way to high. I dont have a couple thousand of dollars laying around at the moment to get a mac, software I need, and to replace the external hardware (scanners, printers, etc) I have which are not compatible with the MAC.
Switching may be easy but it ain't cheap :-)
Horses for courses though, isn't it?
I've never bought hardware which isn't cross-platform compatible because IME Windows-only hardware is almost always cheap, nasty garbage, and I don't know about you but I can get on just fine with a mac mini.
And if the answer to that is "yes", then we should be asking the question: Why can't these vendors make a product that only allows my "good" programs to execute and nothing else?
Because such a product wouldn't need to be updated every year or require monthly subscriptions.
I have different Anti virus product on each of my machines at home. I figure the gap of what they won't detect is smaller then what just having one product will detect.
[....]
So far with Avast, AVG, (mind you one virus product per computer only) ZoneAlarm, FireFox, and some basic sense I haven't been hit.
I bought a Mac.
May I recommend the Norton Removal Tool
It shouldn't need to exist in the first place, of course - the uninstall should work - but IME it works pretty well.
All he said was "That piece of halibut was good enough for Jehovah".
I do not know much about RAID, but if the read error occurred during rebuild, wouldn't just that sector/cluster be lost and not the entire array?
Well, there's two problems there.
First, there's no such thing as one error. Once you start to see errors, they generally multiply like rabbits on viagra.
Second, where has that error occurred? If it's in the middle of a 2GB data file which forms part of the backing store for your accounts database, there's a strong chance you'll have to recover the whole database. Even if your DBMS can repair the file corruption, how exactly are you going to explain to the finance director that one or more transactions in the accounts system may no longer be correct and you're not sure which transaction it is or how many are affected?
So, I did read roughly 100 times 4TB. That is 400TB = 3.2 * 10^15 bits with 0 errors. That does not take into account normal read from the disks, which should be substantially more.
Nor does it take into account the invisible sector remapping that any reasonably modern drive will do.
IANAL but I don't see why Apple can't turn around and say "Fine, you can run OS X on whatever you choose but don't expect us to make it easy" - and then make it difficult.
You can't use the DMCA to lock out 3rd party's as Lexmark, Garage door opener makers and other have learned much less to define a court ruling.
No, but you can use TPM and you can pull some random stunt which identifies the computer as being a Mac and then patent that stunt so nobody else can clone it.
Assuming you're holding data that would get you in significantly more legal trouble if it were revealed than if it were to remain concealed, would it not make more sense to avoid using a computer of your own altogether for anything dubious?
You'd be able to spot a person wearing normal clothes in the open air (JUST) but you'd have a hard job telling *how many* people were in that blob of pixels and you'd have no chance at telling *who* they were and if they were adequately camoflauged... no chance.
So initial identification can be done by people on the ground; once that's done the spy satellite does the following. Just like any police show involving helicopters.