Posts by Terry 6 5608 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Jul 2009
But where ever you look, the metrics adopted are the easy to measure ones.
It starts before school age. Out kids are measured on "Phonics" rather than actual ability to read, and Phonics is the go to teaching method forced on to schools- because it's easy to understand, market,monetise and measure.
The beancounters' icy hands are in control before our kids even get to age 5.
I'd heard about bank note copy protection years ago.
It left me with rather mixed feelings. One one hand, yes anything that stops criminals getting away with stuff is a good idea.
But on the other hand. I don't like the idea of government agencies having a hand in deciding what we are allowed to scan/copy. I know there's a hell of a difference between the detecting of wavy lines and of specific images or lists of phrases. But even so......
...when you are thinking about your own pay packet. Not so much on a national let alone international scale. A single hospital can be over 500 million. And that's a relatively simple sort of build, by comparison.
And a major bridge, e.g. (found online) using updated cash values -Bay Bridge (original): Oakland-San Francisco, 8.25 miles, opened in 1936, around $2 billion dollars at current values. Took three years and seven months. i.e the telescope cost the same as a handful of bridges.
In all the various stories about "manglement" there is a certain very common thread. The difference between managers who listen to frontline staff and make decisions based on information coming up, and those who make decisions based on wishes and demand frontline staff implement them.
The Hive controls our boiler/thermostat, but also monitors it.
And that's all I use it for. And we have a ring doorbell. Which is really quite useful to us.
I'd like some other home automation stuff that works with either of these, excluding stuff that can spy on us or gather more detailed information than how hot we keep our house. But they all seem to have proprietary software that means you have to use their hub, even if it's supposedly Hive compatible (like the fancy light bulbs). And they're also bloody expensive for what they are.Keeping users trapped in their walled patio means they can charge what they like.
price reduction, driver freedom regarding hours
These are surely to be grouped in the set of {Things that sound virtuous if you don't look too closely}
Price reduction is another way of saying drivers have to do more journeys, work longer hours and/or cut corners/take risks to make a living. Freedom regarding hours is a nonsense, since they already have that, but actually have to work more of them (see above) to make living.
Nothing exists unless it has a minimum of one independent backup. That is the absolute minimum, for the simplest of systems, before you can say you have any data. Less than that and you just have a hope that your data is there.
This was true when I was semi-professionally supporting educational colleagues 30 odd years ago before we were given proper IT support. And it's still true now. Maybe it always will be, cloud or no cloud.
It has to be that, doesn't it. The clever security experts doing the planning probably thought they were above thinking about toilets and the bean counters controlling the overall build wouldn't want to spend the money on two separate sets of toilets unless the security experts specifically demanded it, is my guess.
Last week I tried to turn off the data sharing permissions in my Samsung TV. There are hundreds of sites receiving information.. So many that they are grouped alphabetically A-G H-K etc.
And each one has to be turned off individually, sometimes with two or more permissions.There's no "stop all" button. But there is an "allow all" (why would you) option that would be easy to hit by accident, should you turn off the permissions.
I've complained to Samsung UK nd made it clear that I do not give my permission. They have a month, then I'll complain formally to the ICO (ICO's advice when I spoke to them).
I have no doubt it won't make the blindest bit of difference. Unless lots of people do the same, which won't happen because most viewers won't even know, let alone care.
I only found out when my TV guide started putting an advert across the page - and I went in search of a way to stop it.
NB. Will never buy another Samsung TV, or indeed anything else.
Outlook calendar on my phone speaks to the Thunderbird calendar on my PC(s).With the aid of the TB add-on TBSync.
And that's the only thing that really concerns me. I need my calendar, on my desktop, to be with me when I'm out and about using my phone. Emails to a lesser extent. But I do need to know where I'm going next. And be able to add new events in as they come up, knowing they'll appear on my PC for when I'm at my desk. (And not by using Google!)
Within education we have a subset of this problem too. There are newly qualified teachers who come into the profession with a game plan for promotion to headship. They aren't too interested in actually teaching . So they jump on to every new bandwagon that comes along. The successful ones also have the knack of knowing when to jump ship to a new best thing.
They frequently become crap headteachers because they understand f* all about the learning process or indeed about managing relationships in a working team, they've never been team players. And they carry on jumping from one new best thing to the next, so schools are in constant turmoil. Also frequently the inspectors love them- because they're doing what the inspectors want to see, it being the new best thing.......
Yes, the problem with "common sense" instructions is that they may only make such sense to the individual who has an overview. To anyone simply following procedures from start to finish, if it isn't written it doesn't exist.
In this story, to me alarm bells rang as soon as I read that he was getting out the procedures. Which meant he was being asked to perform a mission critical task he'd never previously used, without supervision, and without a read through to understand what it was all about (apparently).
A manager who does not understand what he is managing is a disaster waiting to happen.
In management circles there is a belief that management is a profession in its own right. So, explicitly they don't need to know anything about what-ever-it-is that the people they manage are doing. I know this because a well regarded management consultant we used to have meetings with told us so with pride.
My late father otoh worked his way up from a machinist to managing a factory and could do anything from the accounts to quality control. I know which I'd trust to run a business
3 bedroom apartment in Rio would set you back half a million today. In the 80s a million would have gone a lot further..But this is hardly a mansion. Next you'd have to make the cash buy. safely. Then on top of that you'd need protection. Including paying off the police, I'd assume. Add normal day to day living costs for the rest of your life, with no pension, no NHS, so you'd better not get ill .£4m ( the value of £1m in today's values) isn't going to get you that much luxury living for maybe several decades.
We had an IBM school computer ( say 1972ish) which was an experiment they tried. It looked pretty much the same as the big red IBM tills in a local supermarket (Tesco?). Programming was done in numbers. Codes for <add the contents of cell xy to the contents of cell AB and place the result in cell mH)>
Which was fun. But it's OS was a long list of numbers that had to be typed in. And could get dumped/lost somehow.
Otherwise we had special pencils and a stack of cards- which got sent off to Manchester Uni, and came back a week or so later with our errors, to be corrected and sent off again.
I assume that trunk is from the storage container. An actual trunk is pretty large. Think sea voyage in the 19thC or before. And you can imagine one strapped to the back of a carriage. "Boot" of a car is less understandable- even in the UK - it's just a term we use.
Bin has always been a storage location. "Rubbish bin" merely a subset. As opposed to say, the bread bin or the parts bin etc.
That's the problem with abbreviations becoming the word itself. If you lose context you lose meaning. And if two words have the same contraction, there is always the risk that at some point there will be a misunderstanding.
As the baddie (forget his name) in Going Postal says "It's not about being the best company. It's about being the only company".
Actually, reading ( or watching the Sky TV production * of) Going Postal demonstrates quite a lot of this stuff.
*Not to be confused with the ghastly recent BBC/BBC USA attempt at a Discworld adaptation - which seems, quite rightly, to have sunk into oblivion
I would say that for a certain type of manager short term recruitment is more important than long term retention. Because it's all about the spin they can put on it. Real business success is less important than apparent. Until the profits start to look too dodgy and shareholders get wary.
he just told departments to reduce their numbers
In local authorities there is a twist to this. It seems to depend on how popular the department is with the higher ups how much they are told to cut. Though the outcome, that the people who do the jobs that actually need to be done are the first to go, seems to be the same.
There's an interesting aspect to that. £30 doesn't sound too much for a programme. But paying that every year, as a subscription. No.
I want software that is like a politician. Once it's bought it stays bought.
This is often the problem with free versions. I have the free version of various programmes. I'd happily pay a few quid for a slightly better version. But I'll be damned if I'll pay it over and over again every month for eternity. So I stay on the free versions.
All I want in these circumstance is to have a bit of extra something-or-other. Not for it to be all singing all dancing. Like a Proton mail client that allows me to import my other email accounts. But not the other bits particularly, and certainly not for 4 quid a month.. Every month, forever.
Over the next 20 years* that's going to be around 1000 quid. 1000 quid For an email client. When I can perfectly well use the free version of this, or even get the little bit of functionality I want but don't need from FOSS.
*If I should live so long.
Does k-9 have a calendar? I can't see one mentioned.
Will the new TB for Android bring its calendar with?
Currently I have TB on my PCs. And use Outlook.com on my Android phone. The TBSync add-on n the PCs keeps my emails and my calendar in sync And it's the calendar that's the deal breaker.
I still don't get how so many email systems don't have one.
I switched to TB from MS Outlook as soon as it integrated the calendar.
Do other people not have calendar/diary software? Or do the not want it synced across their devices?
Or does every one <shudder> just rely on Google?
This is one of my "I don't understand why this happens" issues. And for once seems to apply only to IT (Go on, find some other places). The organisation pays someone to do an IT job. They don't comprehend what they're being told, which is fair enough in at least some cases, but they neither try to understand, nor accept what they're told. Doing either would be rational - though understanding is surely better than tame acceptance.
Doing neither is not rational. It's saying "There's a problem, I don't understand the problem, I don't understand the person who can resolve the problem so I'm going to ignore the problem".
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