Posts by J.G.Harston

"I'm sure one of the problems is individuals building their own little empires"

Gawd. In a previous life I've had: Education renting out council housing because the houses used to be school caretaker's houses; parks run by housing because they demolished some houses to make the park; roads maintained by parks & leisure because the road cuts across the park. This grass verse is cut by highways, but this grass verge is cut by parks, but this one by education, this one by housing, and this one by somebody else. Any attempt to tidy it up is stymied because each department won't let go of its responibility without being paid to let go of it.

Re: It was only after the implementation began that they revealed that they couldn't.

There's also attacks from certain members of the public on how DARE you spend money on bloodsucking public sector workers. We regularly see one person in our area harping on that most of the council's budget is spent on wages. WELL DUH! The person who cuts the grass costs more than the lawn mower, what do you ****ing expect?

Re: Plus ca change....

At least 9D serial and 9D joystick are the opposite gender, so it's physically impossible to plug the wrong one in.

Re: Check the power supply

"turned on the cooker .... she had then gone outside"

This is something I just cannot understand. How on earth do people manage to be ALIVE while simultaneously missing such an huge part of their brain?

You never ever EVER *EVER* walk away from a turned-on cooker. You don't need /teaching/ that, it's as obvious as breathing.

Nothing describes British government procedures better than an expirable indefinite status.

Re: stocks and flows

No, if the processing stalls the number of aylum seekers *increases*. The number of people granted asylum, yes, drops to zero, but because of that the number of *applicants* gets longer and longer because nobody's being removed from the queueue.

If it is raining, and you block the drains, does the level of water in the back yard drop or rise?

Replying to myself, but see what's just happened with having one single identical system controlling all of the UK airspace.

But rationalise on which one? Pick the wrong one, and the whole country goes down. Governments have such great history in picking winners, don't they?

Re: Easy win but challenging keep.

maybe if your decision ...resulted in jail time

Thing is, you can just abscond to Israel, can't you Shirley?

Re: Easy win but challenging keep.

Civil Service is BY DEFINITION *CENTRAL* government. It is BY DEFINITION *NOT* local government.

Re: Snafu.

Even worse with local government pay scales. I was emailed a job vacancy three times over the summer:

Role: Senior Business Support Officer

Hours 37 hours per week

As a Senior Business Support Officer, you will have a wide range of responsibilities, playing a crucial role in providing day-to-day supervision and support to Business Support staff, ensuring efficient and effective financial, business process, document production, and excellent customer services support to both internal and external customers of Children's Services.

blah blah blah ... £11.59 per hour.

For the benefit of overseas readers, that's a smidgen over minimum wage.

Re: Easy win but challenging keep.

Part of the problem is that local government isn't Civil Service, it's local government. Which is simultaneously starved of funding and the abilty to raise funding, and given ever more and more responsibilty with no maneuvering room.

But local councillors aren't elected through competency, but through political beauty contests.

Re: I'll Miss It

I've just checked and it's happy with CR line endings as well. LF,CR confuses it a bit though.

Re: shutdown, sun workstation

I got into the habit of terminating programs with sync(); exit(return);

Re: My Documents redirected

Agree, user profiles should ****ing well stay on the server, that's the entire point of having servers.

The *users* should roam, not their data.

Re: Do you know any storage jokes?

I've done Hardknott (and Wryenose) once in each direction. It's a combination of challenge and beauty. I found my little automatic made it easier to traverse as I could go into twin-pedal mode without running out of feet. One day I'll have to try in a manual car.

Re: No local storage allowed ?

On one project I was on we descended on Vehicle Testing and upgraded all the PCs, with a new organisation-wide policy of disabled USB ports. Naturally, we killed the business stone dead as none of the vehicle testing equipment that plugged into the USB ports was usable.

Re: Sounds familiar

Essentially you've asked: How hard would it be to ensure car manufacturers stop people driving the wrong way down a road?

Re: Outlook...

I once set up an office system like that - on startup the PCs would rebuild the user profiles with a tidy desktop and start menu, and defined links to applications and data areas.

A few weeks later I visted the site and found that somebody had complained that their mess kept vanishing and they'd dug into the settings and disabled it. Attempting to use any of the PCs was a horror of scattered random garbage.

Re: Not a screen saver, but...

Does anybody remember the Dynix library catalogue system? If you worked out the exact sequence of queries you could get it to emit loads of weird Star Trek references.