Serious Techy Business Thread

Yeah as a UX person by trade, I would not be too quick to judge. On iOS, it is pretty common/standard to have the advance button in the top navbar to the right. "Done" also seems weird if changes are not applied but discarded. Why not "Cancel". But I don't know the UI, it might be perfectly fine as it is. Because, as, again, a UX person by trade, people can really be fucking stupid. I'm trained to never blame the user, but sometimes it's simply not possible.

Anyone know how to do an eDiscovery compliance search on Microsoft365 for messages with no subject?
Or failing that, by Document ID

I've looked at Go a few times and every time I'm left scratching my head wondering why anyone would want to use it.

The advanced ediscovery gives you significantly more granular data about the files youre searching for but, yeah, its very pricey.

Do they have any common criteria like hasattachments=true or sent externally or something?

Oooh, are you hunting down industrial espionage?

In my case it was because Java runs like shit in certain contexts but diving fully into C with a bunch of engineers that'd never done memory management would be insanity.

It's better to burn out than it is to Rust.

(disclaimer: I know fuck all about Rust or Go)

Rust was still relatively untested at the time. Like a full proof official AWS SDK. Plus it has an aggressive learning curve.

I keep meaning to find time to do a microservice in it on the sly to see what happens.

Go does have a lot of flaws but has some nice features at the same time. The way they've abused pointers though. And the obsession with convention first ick.


Terraform is its own fucking insane problem, and not really a go thing. Honestly want to move it all over to the AWS CDK. As getting terraform to loop or do if statements is so unintuitive.

We are coming out of AWS and moving a lot of resources from Azure into GCP. It means I'll be busy as I'm the only person that currently works in GCP. Big restructure currently happening and some sre's are for the chop, so it's not a good place to be at the moment.

In case you haven't seen, fun one for the Sec Techs out there...

www.welivesecurity.com/2023/03/01/blacklotus-uefi-bootkit-myth-confirmed/



Can even be leveraged against systems that have had the CVE patch applied, yay!

Do the majority here generally work in internal IT departments?

We're more of a supplier. Something that is coming up lately is our flat rate unlimited (well, UK office hours) support contract. Most of our customers use this fairly, but a handful just take the piss and think they can use us as their personal IT department. Just this week we had someone demanding (and getting really pissy) about wanting us to remote in to their server and apply patches and set up SQL maintenance plans that are barely tangentially related to our product. We also get daily calls about installing printers and setting up sharing - simply because our product can print stuff.

Are we missing a trick with enforcing a fair use policy, or reviewing support costs on a case by case basis each year or something like that? I'll admit, my gut feeling is that we have to suck it.

I'm internal IT, we try and do as much as we can ourselves, it's always a quicker response time and it saves the support company we use getting clogged up with pointless stuff (+ they sometimes change passwords which then creates me other problems on phones and other devices. Grrrr) So we fix as much as we can ourselves, failing that we diagnose as much as we can and then pass it to the support company.

We have contracts with them for patch management and firewall support - because the first is too much of a time waster to do ourselves, and the second because it's good to have someone double check we haven't had a brain fart when we request a port to be opened on the firewall.

The bit that will interest you though is another lump of cash we give them up front, which is basically a retainer. It's used for doing stuff that isn't covered by their support contract, stuff that would be a time waster for us to do, stuff that would be a pain in the arse or you would rather drop on someone else. In a nutshell: things outside the support agreement that are billable.

Yeah, you need to move to service hours. Even if they buy more than they ever need, it will make people think twice to burn an hour installing a printer.

All of our vendors sell us support as a block of hours (I just renewed a block for 100 hours which includes tech support and a warm body to do upgrades as needed). I genuinely cant think of a single product we have that is supported by an unlimited hour contract.

We are having the same. A block of support hours isn’t worth much if you seemingly have one person supporting (temperamental) enterprise software.