Posts by Terry 6

Re: Oh the pain!

This is actually the norm. There will be a "Help" page which won't offer help, but will have some meaningless drivel and a button labelled "Get Help" or "Contact us" .

Which opens a page on "FAQs" none of which are either helpful or frequently asked, since they're almost all blindingly obvious. But no contact details or anything like that. At the bottom there will be a "Need more help" button. Which, yes you've got it. Takes you back to the Help page.

Each stage is crafted to sound like the next one will give you access to support. None of them do.

These are deliberate "dark patterns" designed to get rid of annoying customers with their annoying questions about their rubbish product.

Re: turn around three times and punch yourself in the face

Hmm. Maybe. Or maybe other things. Like job protection. Someone (maybe distributed among the office staff) is getting paid to print stuff from one place and copy/scan it to another. Or familiarity. It's been a well known, simple process for staff who really "don't want to start doing new stuff at my time of life".

Re: Oh the pain!

how about websites with 'help' options - none of which remotely deal with the problem in hand

I want to believe in Hell. Because I want to be able to believe that there is a special place for the people who perpetrate this.

Re: Employee-originated and funded

My late grandfather (b end of 19th C and a WW! veteran) became an upholsterer. His retirement gift was an American rocking chair. Not those little things on porches you see in films. A big solid thing with a spring rocker.

Re: Acronym-Ignorant

That's a big kettle of ball games there.

In the USA and UK the Behaviourist and Market Economy alliance have made mechanical decoding skills the measure and method for the teaching of reading. aka "Phonics". Decades of research about what readers actually do, like Margaret Clarke's Young Fluent Readers (1976) to the Goodmans in the 80s we've known that sounding out words wasn't the main part of how we read.But complicated, sophisticated reading models don't make for easily measurable, easy to programme, easy to understand, marketable teaching methods that politicians can latch on to and promote as a solution to the "falling standards" that people have been complaining about since at least the 17th or 18thC.*

*Sorry, I can't member which 17thC philosopher wrote about falling educational standards, it was 4 decades ago that I read that stuff.It might have been Locke in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. But then again it might not. The passing of the years does that to us all.

Re: @Phones Sheridan

I was just wondering how removing much our better then EU minimum requirements is a benefit of Leaving.And indeed how much reduced requirementsfor safety is a benefit, or would be thought of one when people get injured.

Re: @Phones Sheridan

Ah, but our agreement with the Asian Bloc will increase our GDP by 0.008%. Which is well worth sacrificing our open access to our closest market, isn't it?

Disgusted isn't interested in the reality. S/he is determinedly anti-EU to the point of total avoidance of evidence. Hence the use of that word "federalist" which even the Leave campaign didn't make anything of. A bit on the European Army idea was batted out, but that's as far as it went. TBH we should treat DisgusedofTunbridgeWells in the troll feeding category. And which s/he may very well be. Since the name itself is usually an ironic apocryphal reference to that kind of viewpoint. Not one that you'd expect a holder of such views to use for themselves.

My guess, equal part immigration and idiotic EUphobe myths over numerous years.(straight cucumber level bollocks). With a leavening of other myths, like fishing rights- which have, as predicted, bit the fishermen where it hurts, And the lies on the side of a bus. Possibly the biggest lie was in interpreting the vote. A tiny majority of those who voted was to leave.(2% either way). Those who were uncertain did not vote for the change. A small minority of the nation actively voted for a change* The Leave voices immediately claimed that as consent and rushed us into the next step, before anyone had opportunity to question that...Which is why places that allow votes for constitutional change usually have a threshold.

*And as the courts made clear the only reason they couldn't overturn the vote because of the shenanigans in the campaigning was that it was only ever framed as "advisory" until after it happened

And rhetorical language or irony are subtleties that seem beyond you. I understood Wolftone's point perfectly.

Yup

"driving ongoing tooling/ process innovation, continuously exploring industry improvements; "

None of that or the rest of the quoted statement adds up to anything that does something.

Re: Mission Critical, even when switched off

Been thinking about this. I use a FOSS encryption tool or two as required. But I won't use one which isn't well supported with plenty of download sites and I always keep a copy of the installer somewhere, too.

Because there is no interoperability between any programmes, even if they use the same encryption method. So the software becomes a risk- the risk of not being able to access the data- should the programme not be available any more.

This, surely is a barrier to new programmes. They do appear, but personally I wouldn't use them until I'm reasonably sure of them. I had thought about encrypting two copies, if it ever came to it, with two different programmes, should I be needing to secure something seriously important to toke away from home, for example.

Mostly rely on Vera btw.

If the only tool you have is a hammer....

Spreadsheets are great for certain tasks, but they're not databases or the other various things they can be made to stand in for, And IMHO beyond a certain (perhaps subjective) level of complexity they can't be trusted. The level of complexity is the point where the user no longer knows what's going on and can see if something is screwy.

But too often ordinary users have leant how to use a spreadsheet and it's their automatic go to. Especially if the employer doesn't want to spend money on a proper toolkit/training.

Re: Other Choices

I would disagree. Apart from petrol heads car buyers just choose to buy a Ford/Toyota/Honda/.. And within that a model size, HR-V CR-V Jazz etc. Then the level of luxury they can afford.

What they don't do is think about the engine type. or the braking system or the exhaust.

In computer terms - Do we go Apple Microsoft or 'Nux. Laptop desktop or tablet Then maybe 500gb SSD or 1tb

But not which Linux, which version of which Linux, which fork of which version of Linux, which flavour of which fork of which version of Linux. Which cat that ate the rat that lived in the fork...

Re: "Too Much Choice"

Disingenuous. That's like saying all the ice creams are made of sugar and cream.

The user experience is what matters.

Oh. and while I'm at it, saying the "Year of Linux...25 years ago" is equally disingenuous. It doesn't matter what you use, or I use. What matters is what the generality use on their desktops. It might have been your year of Linux etc. But that's all.

Re: Other Choices

Almost everyone's daily experience is of a desktop, running Windows.The server is just a remote place that files come and go to- if they even are aware of it.

Yes there's 'nux buried inside their phone, which is to them just a phone and they probably don't even think of Android or iOS as being an operating system. It's more of a brand.

Which (branding aside) is what an OS should be. The more invisible the better. Windows fails that majestically, because of MS's Prima Donna behaviour and general incompetence. Maybe MacOs does it better, I don't know enough about that, but Mac users do seem comfortable.

Re: Two sided

Err. No. You'd be surprised how little people know about how to use Windows, or iOs etc. Supporting work colleagues is an eye opener. Most people just know what ehy need to know to do what they need to do. Showing someone how to use ctrl+C and ctrl+V when it happens to become relevant to their workflow can make their day.

Herself has had an iPhone for years. And barely touched upon controlling it. I've just started using one this year. So now I'm showing her how to do more stuff. But in fairness, for these years she's done what she needs to do, somehow. Never once though had she swiped from the top right corner, for example.

And she uses the big Windows machine, in her own log-in, to do what she needs to do. If she needs something new or different she'll find out how (like making a "Doodle Poll" ) or ask me to set something up.(Like putting her Brownies group's waiting list, which was passed to her in an old exercise book when she took the role, into a spreadsheet that does conditional formatting by ages).

Re: work around or move on

This too is a valid point.

My use of Libre Office fits with that

But.Linux..there are an awful lot of forks, distros etc etc.

Re: Other Choices

And that's a fair point. Whether this is immutable, if Windows becomes horrible enough and Linux becomes usable enough only history will tell.

Re: "Too Much Choice"

You've actually illustrated the opposite point. Baskin Robbins 31 flavours are all displayed clearly in front of the customer. They are pretty much all totally familiar and easy to understand, they will all taste nice, which ever the customer chooses within the customers' range of acceptable flavours. Mint is mint, strawberry is strawberry. And most customers will often still choose one of the good old standards.

With OSes there are fewer flavours; Windows, MacOs iOs, Android and a big bowl labelled Linux that contains hundreds of different flavours with weird names that mostly don't relate to anything at all.

( I chose Mint).

Re: work around or move on

It's not a plane or even a car. It's a way to make computers run programmes that people need to do their jobs, run their lives or play a few games.

And it isn't hard. Not if people don't make it hard for everyone else.

A better way round is like with cameras- point and shoot being good enough for most people. though there are lots of makes, they all pretty much work the same way. And if you want something more sophisticated you can make the extra effort to get that and learn how to use it in a more sophisticated way, and so on up to DSLR

And that's before you throw in the hundreds of jargon terms and fork names and so on. Many of then scattered through this thread. Which is fine and relevant here,maybe.

And then there's saying to/about ordinary users;

Do they want to "learn"? Or do they just want it to work, without all that messy, annoying, hard "learning"?

I mean, who wants to learn to use Google and how to cut and paste."

Well actually, yes, almost everybody on the planet wants an OS that just works. And all they do want to learn is stuff like how to cut and paste,which is rightly pretty standard. And they only want to learn how to do it once. Because they just want to do stuff that helps them to feed the family.

My view fwiw is that you don't need a learner gateway distro and then the rest of the big stuff. We need a standard forever distro that just sits in the background an makes software run and then there's the sophisticated landscape of distros, forks, systemds, command lines,and so forth for IT pros, coders and hobbyists.

NB. The profoundest FOSS/'nux advocates are often also the ones who most want to see Microsoft die.But seem to be doing all they can to keep people using WINDOWS.

Re: work around or move on

And bugs don't get fixed,usability issues don't get changed, quirks don't get removed because the devs aren't interested in that, it's too boring or something, and anyway they like the way that it does such and such, even though productive workers find it a total PITA.

Re: Short, shameful confession

That sounds like the ones we had to use, at school. I can't remember much about those days, half a century ago, but I'm pretty sure that we used a thick, soft pencil, sent our stack of cards off ( to Manchester Uni) and waited for them to come back with errors, then tried again. The fun was in trying to create a major loop in the programme that wouldn't get picked up. The intention was to try and bring the computer to a halt as the loop value grew too big.

Sadly I can't remember any details- I might not have even known some, like what language ( if any - since it was of course all in numeric code, because that's what eh cards were, not these high level wordy things they use nowadays) we were using. I guess it must have had a name, to us it was just code.

I remember when I was a kid the drop leaf table starting to bang and clatter, very spooky. It was an earth tremor to the West of Manchester. It was about 50 years ago, and I don't remember noticing one since.