It's literally just identifying overweight people and then leaning into the correlation between weight and obesity. If you're obese, chances are you either have diabetes or will soon.
My company used to title me: "System Architect". Yes, always singular, they're Germans and have no feel at all for English language.
Then HR bought a pricy scheme from some consultant, and now I'm suddenly an "Advanced System Engineer". And also mightily pissed off for not being a senior title.
It's like they roll dice around here. People went from being Data Analysts to being developers and vice versa. People were assigned titles that don't fit, purely so they could be outfited with certain benefits exclusively tied to those titles in a rigid scheme.
Leave it to HR to screw over any industry naming conventions and to make my future job applications great fun, when I will explain why I'm not really that thing that's actually on my CV.
> And also mightily pissed off for not being a senior title.
Not as pissed off as when you'll find out during salary negotiation that you're not an Advanced System Engineer after all, but an Advanced System Engineer.
Not OP, but in Germany it is quite typical to receive a letter that officially states what were your duties and titles. Some employers expect you send them the previous job letters as a sort of background check.
It is also easy to read between the lines in the letter to see if you did just the minimum or they were really happy with you. The fear of a bad letter can keep people accountable until they leave (best case) or be used as a threat by an unscrupulous employer (worst case).
This affects international jobs a bit less, in my experience.
That is slowly changing so. First because most employers are afraid of legal disputes and give roughly a 2 (based on the German grading system with 1 being the best 6 being the worst). The de-facto legal minimum, without hard reasons to deviate, is a 3.
The second reason, nobody is asking for those anymore it seems. The last couple of jobs I took, nobody asked for any of my letters.
Otherwise I agree, it takes some internal convincing to not care about them if your are used to them your whole life.
Im short, those letters suck. And almost everybody knows it.
Of course you can, until you meet someone like me who dislikes that very much. I think of my self as incredibly vindictive, and I act accordingly. So, think along the lines of - if you apply to a job that I am hiring for, and you try that nonsense with me, I will make sure you never get work anywhere near me. I will remember your name.
I also would not bet on me forgetting you, I do interview quite a few people, but negative experiences stick in my head like a sore thumb. So, I think your only options are pray that you don't meet me along the way, or someone like me. It'll be for the best for both of us, honestly.
Many years ago I went camping and snails entered the tent. They proceeded to eat the pages out of a book, rasping the top layer of paper off of pages while leaving the lower layers of the pages intact. It was one of those "The Reality of Dan Brown's Fiction"-style books which were all the rage back then, proving to me that snails will literally eat anything, no matter how little sustaining.
I cracked open (both out of curiosity and for recycling) my own 1999 Logitech QuickCam Express just a few days ago, then tossed away the parts. It was a decent webcam for the time, which was when Windows 98 was all the rage.
My desktop admittedly being a Windows system, I dabbled for a while trying to get the old drivers and software to work on Windows 11, alas, not a chance.
I liked the quirky thing especially for the physical visor that assured me nobody is watching me when the camera SHOULD be off, and saved me the masking tape (except for a single strip permanently glued to the inside of the visor, because for some odd reason, the thing was semi-translucent!)
I went out and bought a Trust webcam with Windows 11 support which astonishingly cost me less than three Euros (!!) new, at the bargain store. The Logitech, once upon a time, was more than ten times as much, not adjusted for inflation. Alas, the Logitech QuickCam had lower resolution, but still a better picture.
This was a very intreresting read, as I naively assumed that USB cameras had to follow some HID-like standard also for polling images off of it, like a scanner's TWAIN driver model back in the days. It was enlightening to read that they indeed seem to have had a unique encoding not shared with other cameras.
There definitely was a Mac mini-Din-8 serial port version as well. I believe it was the original, before there even was a version for PC/Windows: https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Connectix_QuickCam
SoundBlaster / Cambridge SoundWorks set of subwoofer and satellite speakers with long wires did this, too. Freaked me out when I suddenly heard voices inside my apartment at night. Turned out it had suddenly started to pick up a radio talk program.
Benchmark it once on each device. Then have a user-friendly slider.
"Do you want your security to be:"
a) "It only secures pr0n from my aunt" (1s for fetching a password)
b) "Not great, not terrible": (5s for fetching a password)
c) "Pretty Good Protectivity": (10s for fetching a password)
d) "The CIA haunts me and my name is Edward: (24 minutes for fetching a password)
Used to work for a software company in 2008 or some such. Back when IBM acquired the company, two remarkable things happened:
One, I heard Microsoft's Ballmer shout through a conference phone (MS had wanted to acquire it, too, but IBM prevailed).
Second, and within context here, I quickly excused myself from the all-hands and discovered that IBM had failed to get the ibm-whatever.com (or was it ibmwhatever.com? not sure) domain.
So I registered it. The next year, I would get loads of miss-guided and personal mail. I used to joke that I was now much better informed about product road-maps than when I was employed there.
My intention with the domain was to hand it over to IBM anyway, for a shirt and some pens or some such token. However, I was informed that much like the US government with terrorists, IBM does not negotiate, and would likely send me the lawyers instead of a shirt. So I caved to the suspected chilling effects proactively, and let the domain expire after a year.
I have recently bought a new PC, without a DVD drive, naturally. And tried to re-install my copy of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020.
This copy is a "pre order" DVD set I got off of eBay simply because it was a good price, but it's bound to my "Microsoft Account", the same account used in my Windows 11 install.
I spent a good part of an hour trying to get this to install. The Microsoft store (also slow as **) didn't let me do it; it doesn't know of this edition nor my license. I eventually discovered that there is a web page somewhere deep on Microsoft.com, which has a download button, which (after three time-outs) opens a secret link into Microsoft Store which ONLY THEN lets me reinstall the product from the Microsoft Store.
So I must admit I read that with great joy. Yeah Bill ... Karma!
Somewhat unrelated: The icing on the cake, naturally, is that even a full digital install of the DVD edition of MS Flight Sim "requires" the DVD #1 to be in the drive. But since people don't HAVE physical DVD drives in 2020 and upwards, I use an ISO image. You can in fact make an ISO image with just a few tiny files from DVD #1 without the huge data files, that's sufficient.
You'd think "oh yeah, copy protection" but there is NOTHING about this DVD image that is akin to any copy protection. It just wants these files as part of a drive (or mounted image), which I'm sure they could even detect the difference, as I'm even mounting it with built-in Windows Explorer functionality these days, without special software). I literally don't know why they would force me to present a (virtual) DVD if there is no other checks whatsoever. This makes no sense but to hurt customers.
Somewhat more unrelated: Microsoft still owes me 20 bucks. I once bought a PC with a Windows XP to Vista upgrade coupon. The web site let me select Vista 64 bit, so I gave that a try. Alas, the XP shipped with the PC was 32 bit, so they simply never carried out the order. I called their customer support, where I was nearly chastised in very broken, hard to understand language for selecting the 64 bit version from the drop-down menu. They never carried out the order, and didn't refund my twenty bucks for S&H. Thank God for alternative software distribution methods back then that rhyme with "Pi rate day".
Totally unrelated (really going of on a tangent of story telling now):
Another company that still owes me roughly 20 bucks is Dell. I once ordered a server from them, and discovered that they had a catalog error. Adding the biggest, meanest CPU would not add money to the bill, but subtract several thousand dollars from the total. So using that trick, for some giggles, I configured a server to be around 20 bucks total and ordered it. I pre-paid the total amount. I didn't expect to get the server, of course, but I expected them to contact me and refund my money. Never heard from them.
> I literally don't know why they would force me to present a (virtual) DVD if there is no other checks whatsoever. This makes no sense but to hurt customers.
This was very common back in the day. It’s a form of DRM: it prevents you from playing the game on two computers at once.
It used to be common to make your life easier (even if you weren’t sharing the disc) by downloading an unofficial ‘no-cd’ patch, which was a patched game executable that omitted the ‘disc present’ check.
Man, I used to download so many no-cd patches back in the days, but lumped it all in with "real" copy protection in my mind.
+2 for the trip down memory lane. -1 because now I need to drink before noon to forget about the horrors of fiddling with CD-ROM based games and their silly schemes. So yeah, +1 :)
"Arrest the witch!!"
AI to Diagnose Diabetes Based on Seconds-long Snippet of Voice:
"Uh. Interesting ...!"