Rigor or rigour?

Do you speak French or English?

It's rigour in English too. It's rigor in American. Americans do not speak English and I don't know why they insist that they do.

>It's rigour in English too. It's rigor in American. Americans do not speak English and I don't know why they insist that they do.

Rigor is also a British English word. One with a completely different meaning.

(A sudden feeling of cold with shivering at the onset of a fever, or short for rigor mortis)

In French, it is spelled rigueur , so no, he doesn't speak French.

(or at least, he wasn't referring to French)

No matter the vehement attempts by the Reg staff to turn it into an American rag, going so far as to adopt the American style-guide, there is only ONE correct spelling of course.

> there is only ONE correct spelling of course.

C O U R S E ✓

water course, race course, course of bricks, ...

and, of course, coarse hair

Wordle..!!!

Depends which side of the pond you hail from, old bean. Both are correct in describing a condition of strictness or stiffness.

My experience in similar environments is that "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing."

The easiest to support were the totally clueless (about computers, IT etc) and usually used a (classic) mac so macwrite and eudora were about the limit. The really clever you either never encountered, or when you did, the trick was to extract what the problem actually was, rather what they thought was causing the problem (signs and symptoms not diagnoses.)

Those with just enough knowledge were forged in IT hell - inveterate fiddlers every one. Where the two former classes of user would leave things well enough alone the fiddlers would change things like BIOS settings (and forget to mention this or just plain forgot), edit boot configuration files, remove large files (/vmunix), change network configuration - setting their workstation address to the default router or local (recursive) DNS server were favourites - the diabolical ingenuity of these self inflicted breakages were breathtaking. [Unfortunately there were never any unsealed exterior windows :( ]

That reminds me of a "web developer" i came across one day...

Complained she had no internet on her laptop. checked the wifi (we recently deployed new access points), ip settings, the whole shebang, eventually found the proxy set to 127.0.0.1...

My guess is she was running a local web server for development, but she had absolutely no clue about it (and i strangely couldn't find any web server software on the PC!)

Also i've never seen someone do that before, why not use a custom port like everyone else?

eventually "just to be safe" i re-imaged the PC (okay maybe it was a little bit out of spite as she was being a real dick about it!)

I'd like to think the helpdesk told her to change the proxy to 127.0.0.1 the last time she contacted them :D

> a little bit out of spite

You can always throw the "unknown which other settings were broken by the user" argument - especially if the user self does not know.

The exact argument i used!

Another one, i call it the nuclear option, is "Well, if you didn't change anything, it must've been malware!" followed by an "investigation" and re-image.

Especially if it's stuff like weird DNS or proxy settings, which can be an indicator of MITM attacks.

Gotta be careful though, if your company has good cybersecurity protocols this might cause more trouble than it's worth...

Local proxies have loads of uses on web development adjacent work. And I can see why you wouldn't find it if you were looking for web server software instead.

Burp and zap for example - I'm from security world so they're the big two I can name off hand but they're handy tools for debugging too (though I suspect Devs can name better examples for that space)

Also in this example both Java based so don't have to be "installed" per se.

I can definitely see how that needs occurred. Particularly if they didn't really understand exactly what they were doing

I dunno, I've worked with a couple of totally clueless users before. One was so frightened of her PC that she'd call for support for excessively simple message prompts (up to and including "Do you want to save your progress?"). The first of these I "solved" by literally asking her verbally the question that the message asked, and when she replied "yes" I recommended that she click "yes". After the third call for that same message I got a little less sympathetic. I get that some people really don't understand how computers work, but in an office job that heavily relies on use of a computer a certain amount of computer literacy really is a basic requirement for the job.

Another would run into occasional issues (like claiming her email wasn't working, when the actual problem was that she couldn't find Outlook to open it), but would stand over my shoulder and give advice / make recommendations all the while. The phrase "If you knew how to solve it, you wouldn't have needed me" or something like it might have passed my lips after one half-hour session of this (hardware issue that time round).

They might not produce the most complex problems, but they can be difficult to support in their own ways.

A real computer wiz will never raise a support ticket even if the machine is totally bricked. They will find a way to fix it or die trying before surrendering and asking for help from anyone. The nightmare are those that think they are wiz kids but actually aren’t.

Like Declan, I used to do IT support in a University computing department. Many of the lecturers and post grads were a pain to work with. There was one lecturer who kept apologising for bothering us, but in almost all cases, here queries were sensible or something was genuinely broken, so never had an issue with her and we got on fine. Likewise, the secretaries in the office were always reasonable to deal with and we got on well; partly because I'd figured out fairly early that the 3 groups who kept that place running were the secretaries, caretakers and IT staff...

"Have you worked with a supposed expert who turned out to be anything but?"

I can probably tell by any given answer if the party answering has ever actually worked for a professional organization.

But to answer the question for myself, yes. Daily, for almost all of my professional life. One in three or better of so-called "professionals" in the corporate world has clearly been promoted well above their level of incompetence.

look at our policians.,

Or, even better, the Covid enquiry where it was pointed out that a lot of those who were dealing with covid had degrees in History - and they were involved in making decisions.

Well they do say, that if you don't know history, you are bound to repeat it...

A shame that so many people became history as a result.

I study information sciences but do a lot of CS courses as well. Every description is spot-on!

They sure do know a lot about computers, but the OS user level is often a different story...

For information sciences i can provide tech support to my windows-using friends when they struggle a bit (git seems to be particularly recalcitrant).

Some CS students would rather use some custom linux distro where they created their own kernel-level email client and expectedly spend most of the time working on group projects struggling with their own computer!

They sure do know a lot about computers, but the OS user level is often a different story...

Computing Science isn't IT. In my own university they were, until recently, two entirely separate departments: computer science in the maths faculty and IT in the engineering faculty. Expecting a computer scientist to know about the workings of a particular OS is like expecting a statistician to know about horse breeding or a polymer chemist to know about clothes design.

Also, computer science isn't what I and my peers in our teens and all the adults around us called what we were doing "computing" - designing and building computer hardware and software, actually *creating* stuff. I spent several years on a "Computing Science" course at university wondering bemusedly when we'd actually get to do some actual "computing" as I'd been doing for six years before, not realising that we actually *were* doing "computing", but that was the wrong term for what I thought I was doing.

The average intelligence of a person is constant. The smartest are also the dumbest to even things out.

Over the years I've discovered that the more educated a person is in any one field, the more likely they are to think they know more than anybody else in all other fields.

I'm sure you can guess why I no longer do work for Doctors, Lawyers or Politicians.

It always bothers me when people with university degrees are ignorant like that...

You're one of the lucky people who knows how to search for, read, and critically judge them too. even if the article isn't in your own research field, you should generally be able to interpret them quite well.

Instead, they seemingly forget what critical thinking is and work based on assumptions...

Ah but that is because the entire school system is there to stuff your head full of data and details, not to teach you critical thought.

I do agree, but in theory academics should be different. the entire point of university degrees is to teach you critical thinking, and then have you apply that in your specific field with the tools they teach you (models, frameworks, etc.).

Having been through a few different Bachelors, and talking with some other friends, it does vary wildly. Even some masters will act like you're in high school and give you a bunch of stuff to remember by heart...

My experience is that the further you go up the educational tree, the more you realise how little you know.

It's those who know it all that know very little. There are exceptions to this...... some experts really are experts. Generally, they don't mention it in conversation.

I'm sure you can guess why I no longer do work for Doctors, Lawyers or Politicians.

Doctors and Lawyers I can understand, but when have Politicians ever been educated?

They are a special case. They are not educated or knowledgeable in anything but ass-kissing and lying, but they still think they know everything!

But also in the UK they are often ( indeed mainly in the case of the present government) from expensive "public" (i.e. very expensive private - for the Americans amongst us) schools where they are taught that in effect they've learnt all that they need to know.

Over the years I've discovered that the more educated a person is in any one field, the more likely they are to think they know more than anybody else in all other fields.

In my experience the worst groups for his are physicists and computer programmers.

I was the network manager in a large hospital and was asked to look at a problem in the heart unit. Not really my job, but I was nearest. It was a simple problem and in only a few minutes the PC was doing its thing again.

The surgeon who used the PC was obviously impressed and said things like how clever I was to understand computers. I replied that ! was was pretty shaky on heart surgery though!

Having worked in a lot of aspects of computing and dealing with users, it really does depend on the attitude of the person experiencing the problem.

Some I never minded dealing with because they took the opportunity to learn what the problem was. They took the time to understand that it wasn't always IT's fault. I would rarely hear from that sort of person about the same problem again.

Other times, as soon as you knew who was calling, you'd sigh and prepare for another round of patiently listening for the umpteenth time about a problem you'd already tried to explain (and provided explicit written instructions for).

Then you'd always get that odd call where you think to yourself "Why did anyone let you near a computer".

We were all there at one time or another - I remember when I was just starting in IT and we had a problem, I asked the support guy at the time to tell me what the problem was and how to solve it. The next time it happened, I asked if I could fix the problem under his supervision. All times after that, I'd just call him, tell him I was fixing it, and just cracked on. He'd get his callout, and I'd get my work done quicker.

Usually any email sent to a non existing address comes back with "return to sender, address unknown", so he should have noticed it. UNLESS it was the time where catchall mailboxes were still used.

OR he received the bounce message but assumed it was someone else's problem and deleted it.

I woud put money on it ( and I don't gamble).

Emacs and Lisp scripts? Fantastic!

The part I liked was that the only thing actually wrong was a simple typo.

The part I didn’t like was that the only thing actually wrong was that the email script wasn’t able to handle undeliverable messages (that’s really poor). Tsk.

I administered an academic email system. The head of one department was notorious for terrible spelling, punctuation and all manner of other sins. Everybody knew that was just how he was.

In those days it was expected that postmaster would redirect email that had the wrong delivery address, and I chortled to myself when, one day, I received a bounce from email that he sent. Other than the address, it was perfect.

Almost as bad as sending helpdesk emails to the wrong address. Had an irate site manager complaining that their IT issues are not being attended to and that the staff have been raising issues to no avail. So, I ask around to whom these issues were raised. One of the staff points across the store to someone. I retort: Him? The cleaner?

Yes, he reported the IT issues to the cleaner belonging to a 3rd party contractor.

At one place I worked, I was a support specialist in my field (HPC and UNIX support), but a mere user of the desktop services, although this place was enlightened enough to have Linux workstations for those who wanted them. Because it was Linux (Scientific Linux IIRC), and I used Linux on my own personal systems as well, I was pretty well versed, and probably knew as much as most of the resident Linux desktop support specialists.

When I first got it, it bugged me that the resolution on my workstation did not match the provided screen, and the required resolution was not listed as available. Having done this before, I worked out the correct mode lines for the X11 config file, but could not put them in (no permissions - merely a user, not even able to change the startup to allow me to use a local config file).

I logged a ticket, and the support person who came around to look said to me after checking and editing my change into the file that it was nice to actually talk to a 'user' who knew what they were doing, and proceeded to make the same change for other users with the same setup (quite why it had not been fixed before, I don't know).

But often, I have had to beat it through the head of L1 support people when they looked at tickets that I raised to actually get them to listen and take note of the diagnosis that I had done. In most circumstances I turned out to be correct (I used to be an L2 support specialist at a major UNIX supplier so know how to diagnose problems, and also knew how to present the problems further into a support organisation), but they had to be correct because they were 'support' and I was a 'user' so what did I know! It's always been a personal bugbear of mine when I have had to 'escalate' a problem to someone who knew less than me.

I was very glad that I always had good relationships with our support guys. So it there was a problem with one of our devices that I hadn't been able to resolve by myself I could just call them directly and they'd either talk me though how to resolve it or come along to the site and I'd log the call while they were fixing it. So when the front line support tried the old "have you turned it on and off again" I could just say "X is alrady working on the problem".

Raising a support ticket that depends on you manually typing in an email address seems a bit flaky to me. Or have I forgotten how user unfriendly things were back then?

I think maybe you missed the part about the complainer using their own, hand-knitted, LISP-based email client?