* Posts by Terry 6

5589 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Jul 2009

Microsoft might have just pulled support for very old PCs in Windows 11 24H2

Terry 6 Silver badge

I'd go with that. Started using it on my laptop a few weeks ago.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Linux's moment

I read that, and all I see is a curmudgeonly comment that boils down to "change is bad."

Then you aren't seeing anything.

In short, for your benefit, the Ribbon turned a simple task that was a useful time and cognitive effort saver for the 10 or so highly skilled people I managed and who quite rightly begrudged every second spent away from their substantive professional roles to be sat at a computer, into a complex task that ceased to be practical.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Linux's moment

No. With the previous system I rearranged the WORD menus for my staff that had stuff in the menu where, in their workflow/world view, they'd want and expect to find it, because to them certain items naturally went together, For example, a few things fitting into Formatting, which Microsoft hadn't originally put there. .

Once the cursed ribbon arrived it all became much more time consuming. Too much so to be practical. I couldn't just move things into a different menu any more. Now you have to create a complete new custom version of that menu putting in all the original items that you wanted to retain and adding copies of the ones you wanted to transfer, and then completely hide the original menu. For example, if some item isn't considered part of the formatting menu options then I no longer can just add it in, I'd have to create a new menu, from scratch- if I could even remember what was in the original.

This is because the ribbon embodies Microsoft's belief that everyone has to work they way they think we should.

'Crash test dummy' smashed VIP demo by offering a helping hand

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Ouch

I can cope with patronising. I can't cope with totally missing steps.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Ouch

A PS. After speaking to TAPO about 4 times it turns out that;

1) Neither of the hub-chimes will work as chimes via the WiFi because the bell can only accept one hub,even though one is "compatible" with the bell. I guess you use it instead of the better one it already comes with.

2) Both hub-chimes can be made to work as stand-alone chimers (which is a bit of an overkill if the WiFi part can't be used)

3)To do this you have to set up a script, called an "automation", in the app, which is totally undocumented.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Ouch

Not anywhere like at that level, but, we mistakenly assumed that the Tapo (TP-Link) extra chimes we bought for our new Tapo doorbell ( having exited Ring sharpish) would actually ring. Apparently not. They don't specify in the doorbell documentation that there's a specific model chime you need and so I assumed that any of their chimes would work.

I only worked it out I need a different chimer with some very careful reading of the specifications of both models, after Tapo support had sent me instructions on how to connect my chimer to my doorbell, but which actually referenced the other model, but not the one I'd told them I had.

Tapo are possibly one of the poorest communicating companies I've ever dealt with. It's not that they don't communicate. They do. They're very quick to answer the phone or get back when you email them. Fair play to them on that. It's like they have no clue that the user doesn't already know what they know. They give incomplete or ambiguous instructions (like in this case which chimer the door bell links with) in initial set-up or direct support ( we have a few other Tapo bits so I'm used to puzzling out what you actually need to do to get them working). And they don't seem to notice key details in what you send them if you ask for help. not helped by the first line support struggling to understand the purpose, i.e. that a doorbell might need an extra chime or two, round the house, so it needs to communicate with the extra chimers. When I phoned I specified that I had the H100 chime, Then they sent instructions to install the chime. These were a series of steps, but they weren't a full explanation, there were vague bits and ambiguities, which made following them difficult, so that I didn't realise at first that they might be only for a different (H200) device. Which is when I went back and looked at the tiny print in the descriptions of the chimes. H200 had my doorbell in the middle o some tiny print, and H100 didn't.

Windows 10 users report app gremlins after Microsoft update

Terry 6 Silver badge

An addendum...A few days after the above.

Ring. Just increased subscription for storing door camera recordings by just shy of 50%

Terry 6 Silver badge

"Support" in terms of any of the big tech companies is an elastic term anyway.

Anything you buy from any of them could become scrap tomorrow. And the more your tech relies on the mother ship the less likely you'll be to get full use out of it.

Smart speakers anyone?

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: time to start investigating linux installs :)

And that is a fair point. Comments in this context are restricted to those who still want a computer. Possibly a diminishing number since a smartphone does indeed fulfil all they ever needed a home PC for.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: time to start investigating linux installs :)

I agree, except for this bit..

"(especially home users)"

Because home users may well, if they can afford it, upgrade for the new shiny Win 11, eventually. When anyone they know has caught it.

But the squillions of small businesses round the world, with a creaking Win 10 (or older) machine won't "upgrade" till they've had every last byte squeezed out of their investment.

Terry 6 Silver badge

No of course not. You need to connect it to your.........

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Alternatives

Think the word "private" would have to be given some careful definition there.

5G network slicing finally shown to be more than pipe dream

Terry 6 Silver badge

Charging

Why does my (purely non-technical in these matters) nose start to twitch with the suspicion that this will evolve into Enterprise, Premium and Pleb services with charge bands to match?

Developer's default setting created turbulence in the flight simulator

Terry 6 Silver badge

Err

" Thankfully there was no damage to either the machine or Shirley – but he didn't mention the incident to the boss."

I'm no engineer, but Shirley, when they put this kit together someone would have calculated or at least estimated the maximum possible exerted force and the maximum mechanism tolerable, force-- and made sure that one was a margin less than the other.

BOFH: Looks like you're writing an email. Fancy telling your colleague to #$%^ off?

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: "coloured pencil office"

There's so much to ponder in all of those kinds of comments.

For a start. Avocados used to be exotic. A long time ago. They're commonplace these days and have been for a long long time. They are also healthy. And readily available (if you can get one of the damned things in the short gap between hard and brown)

So when people make comments about avocado eating they are rather displaying their own lack of awareness of the world.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: cleaning alcohol

Being a beancounter is not so much different from many other soul destroying ways to earn a crust and probably starts off as just a normal career.

But somewhere over the last decade or three they've become the coachdrivers and not the horses.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Another one bites the dust

Never mind the BOFH.

AI is clearly going to be the time wasting,expensive and useless buzzword based clusterfuck of the next year or two.

We put salt in our tea so you don't have to

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Tea

2 Boiling fresh water still is needed for black tea

and

1 You can get plastic-free teabags- we have these for guests* because I don't want the plastic in my compost bin and th environment

*Since I'm usually the only tea drinker during the week I have one of those mugs with a removable stainless steel insert that holds the tea leaves. Like a kind of mini-teapot. But we don't have guests fussy enough to only drink proper leaf tea.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Some will insist that milk must be added after the tea

helps prevent your best porcelain getting stained.

Originally, breaking through heat shock.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Reboiling water isn't great for tea.

Warming the pot might be useful, but I'm not convinced and using freshly boiled water is more important IMHO. If you do want to, hot tap water poured in and out is surely warm enough.

I let Ceylon tea steep for 2-3 minutes, Darljeeling 3-5 minutes. (Waitrose own brand leaf tea)

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Pointless if potless

Re: Don't the Colonials have kettles?

Apparently not. In many/most homes.

One person's shortcut was another's long road to panic

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Oops!

I suspect that an awful lot of techie minded people doing moderately techie side jobs would not know or not realise the power of those things. In effect, that such a link, unless otherwise excluded, actually does act as if the relevant folder is inside the one you are working on.

Standards-obsessed boss ignored one, and suffered all night for his sin

Terry 6 Silver badge

You can't leave the story there. No repercussions? No attempted explanations?

Terry 6 Silver badge

Not dissimilar to my mileage claims when I was travelling between schools. The precise and detailed claim form required a list of each location I visited, with the reading off the milometer at start and end of each individual journey, the number of miles to the next stop the readings there, and then the next and then.....etc. and the totals. Which didn't vary by more than a mile or two each week and might have equalled about £10 a week or £400/pa

Each stop probably required 2 or three minutes of my time recording the numbers. So about an hour a week ( not including copying and forwarding the bloody thing to finance ) 30 or 40 hours in a year, at a senior teacher's hourly rate must have wasted around £1000 per teacher. If we'd been allowed to just claim what we knew was our mileage and we had all, each and every single one of us fiddled our mileage by adding a mile or two a day it would still have been more than 50% cheaper than the cost of that admin. Except we were already a sunk cost - that 40 hours a year didn't come out of their budget, but our teaching time. Each one of us could have supported an extra kid or two. And of course some staff members didn't bother to claim- which saved the authority a few hundred quid a year.

Terry 6 Silver badge

My assumption was more that the same equivalent students know they can earn sack loads of cash going into "financial services".

Terry 6 Silver badge

as as the university's engineering department was in decline due to no new staff being appointed.

I know correlation isn't causation, but still....

Virgin Media comes top of the flops for customer complaints

Terry 6 Silver badge

Yep

I frequently use the (hands free) landline, when I'm sitting on the sofa and making a call.

Advantages to using the landline;

1) Sound quality is better

2) I can find the bloody thing immediately and I have handsets dotted round the house (yes I know some people never put their mobiles down, let alone cover then up with a pile of papers/leave then in another room).

3)They're less fiddly to hold

4) I can play on my mobile/send texts/look at social media/read the news/etc while I'm on hold on the landline - but not the converse

Advantages to using a mobile.......?

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Been here since, well Telewest

I will be off to another vendor

Nah. You phone the "I'm going to leave you" number and get a better offer.

Terry 6 Silver badge

VM and O2 (combined or individually) seem to be in that category of companies that are great when things are working well. But shit if things aren't going according to plan.

They aren't alone in this. Far from it. The pattern is familiar. You may get great service for years. Most people will get great service for years.

But one day, some people will find that something has gone wrong.

And then they find that the company hasn't the foggiest idea how to resolve it. You'll struggle to get through, then the front line staff will insist on going through a totally irrelevant script, then they'll put you on hold to the wrong department, who'll pass you onto another wrong department, who'll promise a call back, but no one will.

Because the culture it totally about sales, but they have no sense of customer service.

Support staff are poorly trained and even worse informed. In VM's case the front line staff often seem to be the last people to hear about a wider problem, offering to send out an engineer to your home to solve a problem that is keeping half the bloody town off-line.

DPD chatbot blasts courier company, swears, and dabbles in awful poetry

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: In training, you learn for life

This sounds in line with their response when customers get delivered some item other than what was ordered ( a high value item being replaced with a dummy article of appropriate weight).

According to the BBC's "Rip Off Britain" today Amazon ask them to return the false delivery item. Then Amazon contact customer to say that they can't refund them because they haven't returned the correct item that they've already been told the customer did not receive!

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: In training, you learn for life

That's up there with the "We are experiencing exceptional levels of calls" that is played permanently.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: In training, you learn for life

they can't be bothered to walk twenty steps up to my front door.

Or under such tight time schedules that shaving a few seconds is essential to their livelihood.

Junior techie had leverage, but didn’t appreciate the gravity of the situation

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Responsibility

In that context, the blame had been deflected away from the idiot who authorised installing the racking, but did not specify the big heavy bolts that fastened it to the wall.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: "if the kids select it"

Hmm. I've never come across that with science before. Rationing by grades, possibly. Discouraging kids from doing triple if they aren't planning to go to sciences in 6th form, certainly- my youngest (top grades in GCSEs and A*A*A in the subjects she did do at A level ( the one she only got an A in turned into a First class degree last year)) was advised that there was no value to doing triple. Better to get two As than risk overstretching for 3 Bs- or whatever numbers they give them in the latest iteration.

But it is rationing. A shortage of suitably qualified science teachers and possibly lab space, too, I assume.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Responsibility

Absolutely. If there are racks designed to hold heavy stuff then it's OK to put heavy stuff in them. If this included high racks the natural, reasonable assumption is they they are fixed to enable storing heavy stuff. At which point all the comments implying that said minion is an idiot are just plainly wrong and unfair.

It is not reasonable to expect anyone to suspect that the big high racks full of expensive kit aren't securely bolted to a solid wall

Terry 6 Silver badge

This is certainly Prf Baron-Cohen's view. His assessment materials are designed on that assumption.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: You can't train out stupid

I disagree. Said minion may well have simply trusted his superiors to have built strong secure storage, so that big heavy devices can be slotted into them safely..

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Responsibility

Or maybe that they just don't know that the places where they want to put heavy stuff aren't built and secured to take heavy stuff. Like, secured to a strong wall with big bolts.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Human Nature

No it fucking isn't. A single "Combined Science" GCSE if the kids select it, means that they get a single grade for their three science exams.They do less total science in single than double or triple science- which give two or three GCSEs respectively, so is a good option for those that aren't very motivated to it. But they still do exams for each section. Physics, Chemistry, Biology.. And the level for kids doing triple let alone choosing three single sciences is extremely high.They're mostly the ones who will want to do it at A level and university.

Terry 6 Silver badge

On the spectrum, or feeling insecure or uncertain. Or over-anxious. Or just too keen to do stuff right - I know that sounds illogical, an oxymoron even, but if you are so keen to do stuff right you become thinking/initiative avoidant- you just do exactly as you are told.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Responsibility

Not a "minion" but someone who was very junior and lacked experience and possibly skills.

This is not a "He should have known better" issue ( though a bit of common sense sounds like it's missing), but a failure to manage the training and development of a junior staff member.

Had said "minion" installed a bloody heavy device before? - Apparently not.

Did his boss make sure that the "minion" knew what he was about? -clearly not.

Were there risks attached to moving and lifting something that heavy? Bloody obviously there would be.

Can the "minion" be blamed. No! It's not his job to know what he doesn't know. It's his boss's job to know what the "minion" needs to know and bloody well make sure that he did.

40 years since Elite became the most fun you could have with 22 kilobytes

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: The good old days

I so loved my Electron (bought cheaply as sales had dropped off) with its assortment of add-ons I accumulated..

Teaching myself to code in the 6502 assembler. I have no idea how I did what I did, almost half a century almost ago. 'Cept that it involved a lot of not going to sleep when I should have.

Eben Upton on Sinclair, Acorn, and the Raspberry Pi

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: The glory days of UK IT

I seem to remember a story in one of the PC magazines about UK computer pricing in the late 70s/early 80s.

What they were saying was that the US computer industry tried to kick start sales by offering UK resellers really low prices, to make their machines more affordable and sell at higher volumes. The UK resellers simply pocketed this extra subsidy and kept on flogging their kit at the same higher prices*

*This is not unique to the computer industry. When I was a kid my dad worked for a couple of clothing manufacturers and other family members were managers for some large manufacturing companies. Each of them had stories of bosses that would rather sell a thousand units with £10 unit/profit than 10,000 with a £5 unit profit. The idea that they could make ten quid on each sale being almost a point of principle. They refused to sell for less. I even witnessed this once. The boss wouldn't listen to a group of managers trying to persuade him to drop the price a bit, saying that no the units could fetch £x so that's what he was going to sell them for. Even though they could have sold many times more at a still decent margin, but were struggling to shift the number of units they were producing.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Backwards

When in teh early '70s I got interested in computers at school we were writing in hexcodes and addressing memory locations, and so forth. We had an IBM school computer ( which resembled and was probably based on their cash registers). Coding was lists of numbers that meant, "Place the x value into cell 027, place the y value into cell 127. Add the contents of 027 to .... 127 and place the result into 227...."

And we had stacks of cards that we marked with special pencils that we then went off to the University of Manchester computer centre, who returned them with our errors a week later.

But we, the few who were doing this, persisted because we wanted to. And may well have gone into this as a profession ( some I know about did.)

Which is very different from hauling hundred of reluctant kids through compulsory "coding" lessons.

In my opinion today's coding curriculum is just the modern era's equivalent of when my generation of working class lads were required to do "shop". i.e. woodwork and metal work lessons, ready for when we left school at 16 to go and work in Ferranti or Connoly's cables- down the road, or become joiners and plumbers. It was making the school a training ground for proles.

In reality few needed that skill then and even fewer will ever need coding skills now.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Backwards

That's nonsense. Even the GCSE computer science required the kids to know their way around computer hardware, data structures, programme design and coding.

In the A level they, as a basic minimum, need to be able to write and test a programme to solve an exam challenge.

Post Office boss unable to say when biz knew Horizon could be remotely altered

Terry 6 Silver badge

I suspect ( have always suspected since the story first appeared) that within the PO there was always some element of a culture of mistrusting their sub-postmasters and assuming that each and every one would fiddle the books if given an opportunity. I suspected it because I've seen bosses who automatically mistrust their underlings. - My assumption being that this was "projection" by the way.

In other words, that the PO's senior leaders ( mostly toffs of course) just assumed that their staff/agents (mostly working class ordinary folk) were all at it and Horizon was just confirming their assumption.

Researchers confirm what we already knew: Google results really are getting worse

Terry 6 Silver badge

Probably teh opposie is true- Googles' comment

Google's response

This particular study looked narrowly at product review content, and it doesn’t reflect the overall quality and helpfulness of Search for the billions of queries we see every day," a Google spokesperson told The Register post-publication.

Probably means the opposite of what they imply.

Simply because review sites are already trying to flog something, or at least helping us to buy stuff ( theoretically).

But searches for stuff we want to find out about, rather than buy, are probably even less likely to appear.

And indeed my impression of Google now is that it's pretty crap when you want to find out about something, rather than just buy one.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Qwant search engine

Thanks. Done that.

The 'nothing-happened' Y2K bug – how the IT industry worked overtime to save world's computers

Terry 6 Silver badge

Part of the problem....

Alongside the good work done by techies to ensure that nothing went wrong in system critical/important computer networks and stuff there were another bunch of Y2K people doing very nicely out of unthinking, unnecessary work without any risk assessment..

For us it meant we had to use our meagre budget to have all our work laptops Y2K tested. All of which were standalone machines doing little more than running WORD to write reports and create teaching resources. The worst case scenario would have been that they failed to boot in January- at which point the work could still have been done.

Indeed to save money we hid a few away. A year or so later when we no longer had laptops I needed a basic computer to take with me somewhere - so I grabbed one of these out of its storage- and after charging it worked perfectly. Of course it did. Because the Y2K bug had no relevance to getting it to boot, it wasn't connected to any networks and WORD wasn't affected in any noticeable way.

China’s gambling crackdown spawned wave of illegal online casinos and crypto-crime in Asia

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it

Precisely. The American Prohibition Era must surely have demonstrated the inevitability oi crime benefitting from bans.And law enforcement is probably the most vulnerable aspect where the criminality can be located to any territory. Overwhelmed and under paid police forces soon become agents of organised crime.A corrupt government does seem to help too, though.