Getting further ot, but RE: Sr. Server Engineer (Vintage Systems) at Living Computer, Museum,

Of late the negativity in CCTALK has reached somewhat epic proportions - and people are coming across in a rather poor light. Many posters seem to be permanently stuck in the stone age and appear to hate anything produced in the last 30 years. This post is a perfect example : "Outhouse" and "Weird" - hate to tell you but both of those particular products have been the business standard for quite a few years now and a lot of roles are advertised that require the applicants to be proficient in their uses. Nor should users of the products be denigrated as useless or idiots because they use them - claiming such only proves that YOU are the foolish one. These are the tools of the trade now (and despite the haters who seem to think they are "rubbish") are rather powerful ones - especially Outlook. I have a fondness for Commodore 8 bit machines and have for a long time, but you won't ever find me holding them up as the paragon of computing experience or denigrating users of modern equipment/software in the false belief that the tools of the trade were better 30 years ago! Were I a newbie looking for info on older machines and had I stumbled across this thread first I doubt I'd want to jump in and participate for fear of the angst I'd face from the stone age "things were better" people here. And to drag this back on topic, in my role (Genesys engineer), when I'm hiring people that piece of paper that states they are a certified Genesys professional has great importance - I would not hire someone if (a) they didn't have it, or (b) they weren't embarked on the certification process without some indication that they would come out the other end with the relevant qualifications. There are times when a piece of paper is extremely important to some roles because it shows dedication to achieving the relevant learning for a particular role. Going backwards - we may all love and be passionate about our old machines and may have learnt skills to keep our hobby alive, but those skills (ie soldering, coding in a dead language etc) don't nec. translate into something useful in today's computer related job market and people should not be put down or denigrated because they don't have them. Cheers, Lance (yes - written in Outlook) -----Original Message----- From: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Fred Cisin Sent: Wednesday, 5 October 2011 6:44 AM To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Subject: Re: Getting further ot, but RE: Sr. Server Engineer (Vintage Systems) at Living Computer, Museum, Think of a rigid requirement of a specific mail program, or other largely interchangeable tool, as an asshole/not-asshole filter of employERs. My employer (a community college system) uses Outhouse, and more than once a week IT/helpdesk has to try again to explain phishing, and begging people to not open attachments. People who pass on urban legends, as "TRUE", get thanked by their colleagues, debunkers get chastised for "being mean". Last week was the "cell phone DO NOT CALL". There is a concerted effort to AVOID compliance with the state mandate of teaching "information competency". Yesterday, we received a > MB email that consisted of a single sentence. BUT, it was tilted a few degrees, and the signature was a different color. One of our top administators, to send out that single sentence, had created a Weird document, printed it out, SCANNED that, and sent it out as an attachment to an email with a Subject: line of "FYI", and a message body (other than the attachment), of "Open the attachment." BTW, many years ago, they employed substantial additional temporary staff to do scanning when they changed the OFFICIAL word processor from WordPervert to Weird. They tried to fire one of my colleagues for being a hoarder, and retrieving working computer hardware from college dumpsters (including an 11/70, which was no longer in his office). They gave him 2 hours to get what he could out of his [admittedly JAM-PACKED] office and then dumpstered everything else that he hadn't stuffed into his car, including NorthstarS, Sol, and a few more S100 machines. I don't think that I can manage to avoid getting fired [for doing my job] for another 3.64 semesters. Thursday, I gave copies to a student who requested them, of the Grand Jury investigation into our administration and the Accreditation Commissions' report when they placed our accreditation "on probation". -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com