Posts by Terry 6

Re: You get what you order

Yes dammit. In my comment about the abominable Scoot Airlines I'd like to name the good ones my daughter flew with and the brilliant travel agent we used. Can I remember? No.

Re: You get what you order

See my comment on Scoot Airlines. A really nasty bunch.

Re: I've had this oodles of times

This is about resolving issues. And so they will have been an authorised supplier that I'd bought stuff from. (Or just long enough ago that those rules didn't apply)

It may be that they got local authority approval by undercutting sensible prices, or by being rather, err, friendly with one of the high ups of course. We certainly had some supply contracts that were rather more pricey than you'd expect.

But the reality is that if I'd had crap service I'd not keep it to myself. Other senior frontline staff would hear about it pdq. And colleagues in other authorities when we had meetings. And anyone else I knew who bought tech stuff (luckily it happened infrequently enough for me not to become a bore about it).

Re: An incident like this..

And that's fine. And plenty of times level one has been what I needed. But sometimes they go through those steps and then just say they can't help anymore rather than going higher.

And sometimes you provide the evidence that it's not several of the possible issues ("I tried it in a couple of other PCs and it still didn't work") but they still insist on working though the level 1 script before referring it up. Or both of the above.

I won't touch Dell since I last bought a laptop from them about 4 years ago. I'd phoned and asked, specifically, would there be room in the chassis for me to slap in an extra hdd ( and the connectors). Oh, the customer support assured me, there would be. There wasn't. And they wouldn't accept any responsibility for mis-selling me the machine,

So when my Dell PC needed replacing last year I didn't get the new one from Dell. It had been a really good PC, but I don't trust Dell anymore. And the new PC, like the old one, is a bloody sight higher spec/more expensive than the laptop (I recommend Chiilblast- which is what I did get).

There are so many like that and worse. They respond not to what you've told them, but to some key words and/or what they expected you to tell them. They just don't fucking listen to what people actually say.

Re: You get what you order

We had something like this many years ago. It's still a sore point. A lad with his mates in the car came came screaming round the bend and knocked the side of our car,coming the other way. He admitted it was his fault, we exchanged details and since we had protected ncb we reported it to our insurance company and thought nothing of it. His insurers were happy to settle. Until he ( actually his dad) then denied admitting fault, because his ncb wasn't protected, and used legal insurance to take our insurance company to court. We were asked by our insurers to go as witnesses ( we were in the car after all). He had a mate as witness, who lied to the judge. And was caught out lying. But then the judge found against our insurer ( in effect against us, even though we had nothing to lose). He just said that he believed the lad and not us- and that was that. even after his witness had been caught lying, by that judge It was probably 25 years ago. And I'm still angry.

So these days we have a camera.

Re: You get what you order

Yes, sadly, as my boy gets older the cost of pet insurance gets higher until it's no longer cost effective. (Especially when he gets to the point where significant treatment would amount to cruelty). We won't renew next year, he's 14 and the renewal will be exorbitant.

This probably means that you should never let computer AIs generate advertisements

Aside from this specific awful incident. How much is a company's reputation worth? More, you'd have thought, than the cost of a senior staff member taking a couple of hours to making sure that nothing awful gets sent out by the "semi-automated systems". I don't know where the "semi" bit was.. It does sound rather like people trusting automated systems and not thinking for themselves. At any senior management level, neither the level who should have been doing this, nor the bosses above who should have been making sure that someone was doing this seem to have been doing any thinking.

Re: He changed his mind again on Official within hours

Yes. Tesla seems to have sold the concept to the (wealthy?) public. Which has made other electric cars feasible for mainstream companies.

Re: Thanks & kudos

Because Twitter (and FB etc.) shape public opinion. And public opinion leads to social changes. Lies that start on Twitter don't stay on Twitter. Especially if the liars are allowed to publish unchallenged.

Aaand....He has an account on Mastodon now, I think

Re: this comment has no value

There are plenty moving to Mastodon. A rather more complicated (IMHO) social network. Whether it will gain enough traction or the funding streams to survive the influx is a different kettle of ball games.

Re: Seeing back in time

Thanks, I think I understood that and it made sense.

But they won't

MS seem determined to push this "our way or no way" approach. Endlessly changing how Windows looks and feels, while removing the ability to tweak how it works to suit the users' patterns of , err, use.

The obvious example being that each successive version has made the start menu more and more muddled into just a general alphabetic list of unclassified stuff and less and less amenable to moving the stuff around in it or removing the cruft.

Re: Perhaps Next Year

Pretty much all. But they won't know of any alternative beyond the Apple machines.

Re: Or you could...

I'm getting less good at that too, in my 60s. I tend to make mistakes, especially when I take a quick look. Sometimes my eye catches the seconds hand instead of the minute hand. Sometimes I just get it wrong if I'm not concentrating.

So why should the under 30s, growing up with digital clocks everywhere, be secure in knowing how to use a clock-with-hands?

And why would they even have one? I recall here on El Reg commentards proudly announcing that they never wear a watch, because phone.

My watches are worn more as an ornament. One is a Warner Brothers Bugs Bunny Watch that has no numbers, and convex glass that makes telling the time accurately almost impossible anyway.

Re: Or you could...

know sun is a rare thing in the UK

Er, watch hands are a bit of an endangered species too.

Re: Ideally ...

I disagree. The only way to make this bite is to go for the individuals who perform the acts. The C suites need to be charged. So do the managers and coders. "Only obeying orders" has never been a defence. Yeah, go after the company ( i.e. the shareholders) too. But they're seldom the main agents.

Re: Prpgrammers Who Sold their Souls

Programmers and managers and business executives.There's a big gulf between being a hard-bitten capitalist and an out and out conman/crook.

All those people have decided to go to the Dark Side of cynically snatching money off members of the public. They knowingly implement strategies that serve no other purpose than to scam money off people, with deliberation. This is not something they just let happen. It's not inefficiency or incompetence or carelessness. It's deliberate.

The only difference between them and a street pick pocket is that they can get off without penalty if they're caught and they don't have to leave their cosy offices.

Re: The burden of untold riches

Maybe also there's the fear of becoming irrelevant. Of missing the boat and becoming a client of the new big company- or even fading away altogether.

I've said it before on here, but I do wonder how much Microsoft's failure to see the internet coming and having to run to catch up has created a culture of fear in the C suites. Not just MS but in all the others too. They could wake up one fine morning to find they've missed the boat.

Re: Failing/Falling upwards

In my experience of some of this stuff the inverse is also true. The big hats and the consultants will refuse to acknowledge any number of small, but important details during the planning meetings- especially if these points are raised by anyone actually working on the frontline.

Have you allocated storage space within the the play area for the play equipment? for example, will be fobbed off with a mixture of "We mustn't impinge on the integrity of the area, because it has also got to be used for {some kind of trendy activity that is far less significant but they're committed to providing it} and "We'll find a location for the play equipment". Which if it is even actually done, will be three floors above the play area, at the end of a long corridor with a sharp right turn just above the stairwell.

Or they'll amend the agreed plans by changing something that they don't see as significant. Oh yes we've taken out the floor to ceiling cupboard space. . Leaving users nowhere to store some valuable delicate equipment that needs to be well above the kids' height.

And so on.

Re: Failing/Falling upwards

Upvote for proven track record. But I'd guess it was less about brown envelopes and more about buddy systems (in the UK) All going to the same public (that's private to the Americans) schools, living in the same gated suburban estates, playing golf etc. AKA "People like us"

Re: Manual is optional,

The You Tube videos always seem to gloss over the specific complicated bit that you consulted them to find out about. Or it's not in clear focus, or some such.

Re: Confession

Oh God! The Horror. The Nightmare. The number of times a staff member had to call me because the internet wasn't working. They'd accidentally hit the key combination that turned it off. And it was seldom obvious. And not quite frequent enough for me to immediately remember it, at first.

Re: Manual is optional,

Without sending the lower level staff on the course themselves...?????

Re: Manual is optional,

Hmm. A bit like searching for a "how to" on Google. No I don't want a 20 minute You Tube video on how to remove a widget. I want a two line instruction that says that there's a small grub screw just underneath the handle...

Re: Manual is optional,

This is true.It went through the school systems a decade or so back. At one point some schools ( with the do-the-latest-thing-look-at-me type heads and senior staff) had kids wearing badges saying "I'm a visual learner" etc. But, the weakness in that became instantly obvious- as in how the fuck do you know that little Johnny is a so called visual learner? Let alone where on the scale he is, i.e. even advocates for that concept couldn't say that it was absolute every one - or almost everyone having just one learning style And in fact the whole idea turned out to be unscientific faddy bollocks any way, as previous post noted..

Re: Meh

I'd hazard a guess that the younger ones are just more prepared to admit to it. (I'm old and cynical)