Posts by J.G.Harston

It's easy to amend the US constitution. You just need a nation-wide political consensus, two-thirds of Congress, two-thirds of the Senate, and three-quarters of the States to vote for it.

Re: A couple of points

English (Traditional)

vs

English (Simplified)

Re: Doncha hate it...

The thing I really hate is when the documentation outright LIES. I don't call it "wrong", it's plain and simpel LYING.

Eg: (blah blah....) drop down, select 'Import All'

THERE IS NO "IMPORT ALL" OPTION!!!!11111!1!!!11!1

Several frustrated days of back and forth with the "further up" helpdesk... Oh, you have to have permission XYZ to do that.

WTF!?!!!??!?!?!?! First rule of interfaces: If an option is unavailable, MAKE IT VISIBLE SO YOU F*********ING WELL KNOW IT'S THERE BUT UNAVAILABEL!!!!!!!!

Re: Doncha hate it...

I aim to get instructions down to a single page of A4 so it doubles as a checklist you can tick off as you go (or fill in details, eg user's name, user's logon name, user's email address, etc), and anything that's too long to fit as an aide memoir is referenced to supplementary sheets. Once you've gone through it a few times ticking off while refering to the supplementary sheets, you only need them for occasional reminders.

So, eg:

Update A/D user details with (see D):

name, building, address, email address, change password:Yes

With D saying something like:

Start->Admin Tools->Active Directory Users and Devices->RunAs->your admin ID

View -> Turn Advanced Settings on

blah.thing.uk->North->Yorkshire->(site)->(user)->Menu:Properties

General: name, job title, site

Address: site address

Account: etc etc etc (I'm working from memory)

Most of the time once you're familiar the two lines in the checklist is enough, but every now and then you have a brain fart and think: where's the proxy address? WTH is it???? Check notes, ah! Dammit, need to bloody turn bloddy advanced bloddy view on.

Re: I've seen this

I would typically writte that as:

Prepare to cut the blue wire

First, blah blah blah

Then ensure blah blah blah

Then cut the blue wire

Re: Some even start with "remove equipment from box"

And yet bizarrely, they (mostly) never managed to struggle with ! " # $ % & ' ( ) etc

Re: The right to tell you what to do

As a UK citizen are you really unaware that Scotland, Northern Ireland and England&Wales each have their own seperate legal system and laws?

Re: Theocracy

'cos it's never actually been voted on. Which is the fundamental point of the *court* ruling, in that it should be in the realm of democratic choice, not court rulings.

Re: Canada

Banned by the constitution.

The consitituion bans states from preventing citizens from travelling to other states, and the constitution bans states from prosecuting people for engaging in legal actions in states where the action is legal.

Re: Canada

Emergency contraception (the "morning after pill") prevents implantation, it doesn't abort an implantation.

Re: Democracy

"Basically, the court said that health care is a state matter, not a federal matter."

Slight correction, basically the supreme court said that health care is a politician matter, not a court matter. The report even explicitly states that it could be federal politicians, not just state politicians.

"But when it comes to creating new rights, the Constitution directs the people to the various processes of democratic self-government contemplated by the Constitution—state legislation, state constitutional amendments, federal legislation, and federal constitutional amendments"

DOBBS, ETC, page 127.

"They did various ECONET servers in pizza box cases, but they were basically just Master Compacts badged and tweaked to act as ECONET file servers."

No they weren't, they are completely different machines, completely different motherboard, completely different boxes. You're close to comparing a printer with a radio just because they both have transisters inside.

Err.... you can resize filer windows, and I can't remember any time when you couldn't.

Re: Legal issues

Well, until he turned up in person with proof that has was the appointed LPA holder, the bank were unable to officially action the fact that his LPA had ceased. And once he had proved has was the LPA, the bank could officially recognise his Mum was dead and officially refuse to take any notice of what he was saying as his LPA was not longer active, and so officially ignore the information that his Mum was dead.

At some point the crowbar of common sense has to be wedged into the spirals of officialness.

So-and-so is fired and marched out of the building

I had a temporary position recoving the IT business processes after one of those. In this case reasonably simple things like "how to create a new user, how to allocate a phone, how to register them in the Spam system, what the naming convention is, what the server paths are". Yes, and crucially, where the passwords are stored. Everything was in the former IT's head, I spent four (half) weeks recovering them and Writing Them Down, and proofing them by implementing them a couple of dozen times and refining them.

And one thing many people seem to forget - ensuring all the documentation had the path to itself in the footer of the documents, so they were re-findable from a printout..

Like the person that downvoted me when I stated I wasn't going to throw away my £8,000 printer just because PC manufacturers couldn't be arsed to spend 15p on a Centronics connector.

Re: The Doctor

I was picturing more Dirk Gently.

Having been happily(ish) using Zoom for the last three years of lockup for parish council meetings, I'd got used to being able to set my display name appropriate for the meeting, eg "Myname (Chair)" or "MyName (Dibley PC)". I've just started a new (public sector) job and we use Teams for team meetings. I naturally started looking to try and find how to set my display to "Myname (Field Tech)", but got further and further lost trying to find how to do it. I eventually browsed online to find out, only to discover "Only the administartor can set up users' Teams display name when creating the user account".

WTcompleteF?

Am I being naive, but Sharepoint is... just a file server isn't it? It's just.... directories and files with a fancy user interface. That's what it looks like to me. Yet one of my colleagues has been enthusing about the five-day course he's just been on about how to use Sharepoint.

Re: Oh, how ironic

woosh?