Posts by Terry 6 5609 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Jul 2009
Fair point, but 25 years ago digital technology was still quite new, shiny and a bit of a novelty. More about surfing web sites than running businesses in "the cloud". The "digital" in the title was perceived in terms of Sky TV. The STEM bit was not really in politician's or the public's heads It was not seen as being the key to the entire nation's prosperity.
And we still get marketing emails from banks etc. with "Click here to view our wonderful latest offers" links.
And even ".....to go to your account..." sometimes- though after several years of them receiving complaints from all and sundry that is now rare.But the damage has been done in terms of training customers to click links rather than to not click links.
And this drive me nuts.
Microsoft saving us (the public*) from seeing anything too much like a computer file, less it confuses our poor little minds. So that we don't see "My virus download that will steal your life savings.txt.exe" as an executable.
So fucking stupid it leave me furious.
*Us the tech aware make bloody sure we can see file types
£120 up front is still a decent chunk of cash. Especially since much of the programme's functionality may never be used.
£0 is always zero.
And Office is only one of the many bits of software that home office users might need, but where paid versions come at a useful cost.
Indeed there are a number of programmes I use in the free versions because I can't justify the significant cost of buying the paid/annual version. The step up from free to the all bells and whistles paid is just too steep. FBackup is free. The paid version Backup4All is $50. Not a lot of money, I know. But still in the bracket where Mrs Terry6 is going to be saying "You paid £50 for what?"
Where there is an inexpensive paid version of a programme I need, with just a small additional bit of useful (to me) function I pay for it happily.
Yes and no. It's more precisely about saying "This person is so offensive that our ethnic minority students need to be protected". Whether or not those minorities say this themselves is a different question. So it's deeply patronising while failing to address where the line needs to be drawn. (Surely it does, but I'm doubtful it can).
Thing is, talking about "The Left" or indeed "The Right" is pretty much bollocks.These are various groups of extreme radicals, generally also far Left/Right sympathetic but not necessarily so and sometimes indistinguishable.They can have considerable overlap. It's not unusual to find groups from the far Left quoting antisemitic tropes from nazi web sites. for example. Or for supposedly Left wing labour union leaders to be very anti-immigration. Sometimes they share economic views even. Both can be extremely hostile to "Big Business". And so on.
It's worthwhile pointing out that the Pilgrim fathers weren't leaving Britain to to seek the freedom to practice their own religion. They were leaving to seek the freedom to prevent others practising theirs.
From "History Extra" other sources say much teh same thing, though.
"What did make life difficult for many Puritans was the hostility of their neighbours. In part they brought this on themselves, by criticising not only the religious beliefs of the majority population but also their prevailing moral standards and cultural preferences. They condemned the theatre, popular music and even contemporary styles of dress. Unsurprisingly, then, the word ‘Puritan’ became a term of abuse and the holier-than-thou Puritan was, for many years, a stock figure of fun.
The people who commission, design and build these projects don't have a clue what actually goes on in the various parts of these buildings, but, more to the point, aren't even aware that they don't know because they think they do know, based on a kind of stereotyped fantasy- probably derived from watching TV series. So they see no reason to consult users, and perhaps more pointedly, don't trust users because they assume that we're all after getting luxurious and unnecessary accommodation and equipment. (And of course some will be; that's life.). So when we say "We'll need 6 electric sockets along the front wall" if that even gets to anyone who can make decisions it'll be knocked back by someone who thinks that all you need to do is plug in a PC, and a double socket in the corner will do. Until you need a charging cabinet for a set of laptops, a projector, screen, amplifier and a fan all on at the same time.
Well, another of my favourites was the beautiful staffroom, built in the loft of a still fairly new school. It was beautiful, with lots of light from the window in the south facing roof. So much so, in fact that for large parts of the year it was too hot to go into, and too bright to see if you did go into it. But then decades earlier, the first purpose built comprehensive school, Kidbrooke in South London, was built with big, glass south facing walls. From April to October you couldn't even touch the tables some days. The architects of that one also managed to get away with having a main central stairway that opened into relatively narrow corridors. So hundreds of kids all trying to go down the same stairs into the same narrow corridor at the same time......
But the artist's impression from before it was built was on proud display. And it had looked glorious
I can cope with a zip failing after a while. It seriously pisses me off when they are a nightmare to zip up almost as soon as you get them. The ones where the solid bit won't go into the track until you've jiggled it enough.. Or the zipper just doesn't want to move up. Is it so difficult to make them so that they just work?
This holds equally for all future planning. A barely adequate design this year will be an expensive retrofit in 3,5,.... however many years into the still near future.
And add in to that the "well within budget" fixture that will need a shed load of unbudgetted for maintenance within a few years.
My favourite has to be a school with big south facing windows and cunning external blinds for when the sun was shining. By cunning I of course mean bloody stupid. Because the blinds were operated with cords. And said cords would wear and stiffen up, or just plain snap. And costed an arm and a leg to get replaced, two floors up, from the outside!
But of course the people who signed these things off will be long gone and since no one ever holds the designers to account when this stuff is being planned because it looks so beautiful on the artists' impression no one questions the practicality. Which of course is why front-line staff are kept away from this planning stage. They might ask the awkward questions. e.g. "You've planned this so that there needs to be a computer and a camera controlling the entrance, where is the budget to buy the computer and the camera?"
I doubt whether there will be any El Reg readers expressing surprise to hear of a secure educational establishment opening without the secured entrance because there was no budget for the security hardware, so skilled staff had to be diverted to watch the door*
And imho the chief skill of an architect is to BS the client.
*Might not have been those particular items- it's a few years ago now and since they didn't have them I can't remember exactly what they were meant to be
Well yes. This was a municipal (but contracted out) centre. Tech placed in that container would be reused where possible and recycled or used for parts if not. But our HDDs were pretty much only used for sensitive data, reports on or about kids' needs and backgrounds, with identification. And no chance is too small in those circumstances. As close to total destruction as I could manage.And then placed into metal recycling along with the old cans,cookers and car parts.
When I recycled old education service PCs I used to remove the HDDs. Because they'd contained sensitive information. Yes I'd reformatted then and overwritten them a couple of times - and so it's improbable that anyone would have tried hard enough to be able to get the data off them, but still....
And then I damaged them as much as I could- breaking anything breakable with the tools to hand and leaving them in a puddle of water for a week or two at least, before taking them to the metal recycling skip ( not the computer and electronics skip).
But, 1) The Powers That Be did not have any kind of protocol for disposal of old HDDs and 2) the recycling centre asked the higher ups why they kept getting PCs didn't have HDDs in them ( apparently I wasn't the only education manager taking precautions unilaterally).
Apropos of which,some DVD stored video footage of my kids from 15 or so years back is proving quite hard to play back, let alone copy to my HDD. I bought a USB DVD reader/writer for just such a purpose, but some of the videos just don't play nicely anymore. I'm fairly sure it's not the reader, as it's not all the discs. I am reasonably sure that the (probably cheap) 15 year old discs are starting to deteriorate.
It's the just that is the issue there. As part of a local authority teaching team we had to use a chunk of our limited budget to get our lap tops Y2K tested. Even though they were standalone machines, no networking and not system critical in any way.
But paying for the test was compulsory. For all of them And that was just us. I'm sure the same waste of money was replicated in lots of places. Everything had to be certified. There was no risk assessment element.
I stopped using HP printers ( and anything else) years ago when a software update killed the one I had. The update uninstalled the drivers, but then couldn't install the new ones, because one .dll was still in place and the new install fell over when it got to it. Nothing would remove that .dll. I spent hours running HP's insanely Byzantine multi-level uninstall routines repeatedly. I've never seen anything like it before or since. No other set of printer drivers have been so bloody big and complicated, with so many files and libraries tied on.. And it wasn't even a Multi function jobby, just a colour inkjet printer. Nothing could get rid of that sodding .dll. And nothing would make the installation routine ignore it. even though it was the same version number anyway!!!
Sacramento gets hot at the best of times. So forty odd degrees doesn't seem all that improbable from time to time, even had we not got climate change to factor in. And the UK had 40+ temperatures a few weeks back ( hard as it is to think so now).
So not being able to function at 45 degrees in Sacramento seems sadly like very poor planning.
If computer users need to take thinking time away from doing their job to work out where to find or how to activate a function they need to use, then the OS or programme design is sub-optimal.
(High on my list btw is having a menu item greyed out, with no hint as to why it's greyed out.)
Agreed. I know an awful lot of single screen, PC or laptop, users and they're representative of vast numbers of others. Almost every teacher, for starters. And NHS clinical staff (speech therapists etc.). And most small business users. And of course home office users. Most people don't work in corporate environments, and come to that, even the ones I do know mostly use a single screen in the office and a laptop when wfh. Many don't have space for anything else either.
Never mind security. There's a bug in Windows that has been there since at least Win 7. It means if you choose your own Recycle Bin icons they won't change when you empty/add a file until you refresh the desktop/reboot.. Until you edit the registry and add ,s at the end of the path to each icon. And if you change teh icon you have to do it again.
Why it needs that ,s and what it tells the OS is beyond my knowledge.It just does and is well documented.But what really beggars belief is that it's never been fixed. In all these years.
For me it's not about individual aesthetic- it's about individual working pattern. Some people use two or three programmes regularly and don't even need a start menu. It's just a couple of icons on the desktop ( or even type part of the name into a space.)
Some use a range of well known big packages and may well go to a publisher's start menu folder and select the one they need e.g. Microsoft Office/Word
Some of us, though, use a wide range of programmes, mostly each one infrequently, because we don't perform the same tasks week in week out, and maybe use less well known, or just several, programme publishers' offerings. We need a Start menu that can be arranged by function. One week maybe I'm creating training materials and need some graphics software to work with images and add simple text. Another week I might be setting up an assessment pack and need some DTP and WP software. Next month I may be editing a video of some interactions and need editing s/w. And for each of these or many other activities some software is better than others for some aspects. Like Irfanview for selecting and cropping a photo. Photoshop Elements for editing an image/creating a composite or Paint.net to make a new image or image component. And so on. And an alphabetic list of unhelpfully named programmes mixed with unhelpfully named publishers folders is a nightmare when I'm trying to find the programme that I'd last used six months ago to perform a specific function.
The customer wanted a system set up.
He set it up.
It did what they asked.
Then they decided to use it in a totally different way ( automated emails ) without thinking through how it worked and the implications of that change.
If there was any error, it would be in not making sure the parameters for the functionality were engraved in foot high letters on the wall of the server room.
Quote " ...But the automated process misconfigured the emails, so the required info was missing "
Yup. They have have adverts that are designed to make you think that having a smart meter will mean you use less leccy. It's bullshit of course. The meter will certainly show you when you are using most power. But if anyone wants to reduce how much they're using they already know damn well that this means turning off stuff.
Yeah, I think in degrees C ( and I'm age 65). But I know that 20c is 68f.
And the conversion C to F is pretty simple.
(C x2)- 10% then add 32. Backwards is harder if you want to be accurate.
Always the core of the second programme I used to write when learning about a new computer language - in my youth, when I used to play those games.
("Hello world" of course is the first).
The one time I got caught speeding and had to do the awareness course still rankles with me. Yes I was speeding. Not madly but I was guilty.
However, it was at night, say 10pm, after coming off a major A road onto a quiet road through emptiness on the way into a nearby town. The speed posting isn't particularly obvious, and it looks like a road where 60 would be the limit, not the 30 it is, but there is one camera about half way, tucked round a slight bend so that it wasn't visible. All the locals knew it was there and know to slow just before they get there, then they zoom off again. I'd never noticed it before ( or been fast enough to trigger it) and I don't go there at night usually But that night I got caught. It rankles because I was going much slower ( about 40 to 45mph) than the locals do, I could see them disappear into the distance ahead of me. So in effect it wasn't serving to catch speeders. It was serving to catch non-locals.
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