* Posts by Terry 6

5587 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Jul 2009

UK government names suppliers on £3.5bn contact centre, shared services, and outsourcing framework

Terry 6 Silver badge

You know that thing....

....after an unmitigated disaster, total fiasco and massive waste of public money with untold numbers of lives being harmed. And they say that " lessons will be learned"?

I'm starting to think, that maybe, just possibly maybe, perhaps, it could be that they don't actually learn any lessons ?

Eh?

Hacking the computer with wirewraps and soldering irons: Just fix the issues as they come up, right?

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Computer O Level

Harsh? Back in those days doing all that and only getting a C sounds like something bordering on psychopathic by the exam board.

Live, die, copy-paste, repeat: Everything is recycled now, including ideas

Terry 6 Silver badge

TIVO

HDDs from inside them make useful backup drives. Stick em in a spare bay or USB HDD enclosure.

Woman sues McDonald's for $14 after cheeseburger ad did exactly what it's designed to

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: If you find a McD cheeseburger irresistible

This kind of food is cheap and tasty (read addictive). For families on a small budget, or with small kids (or both) it's an affordable and easy way to eat out.

It's fine us sneering - I'd prefer to eat only Michelin recommended grub if I could, but for many folks a Maccy D is a treat. Eating Out. No cooking, no washing up afterwards, in a bright cheerful place, rather than a small, crowded flat near the top of an inner city tower block.

Terry 6 Silver badge

The catch here....

Either Maccy D have to accept the complaint, because their advertising works, or defend it because their advertising doesn't work.

Interesting quandary.

Pi calculated to '62.8 trillion digits' with a pair of 32-core AMD Epyc chips, 1TB RAM, 510TB disk space

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Random numbers

Being locally CO2 neutral(ish) but performing a bloody pointless task doesn't do anything to help with global CO2 reduction.

It's like saying you're not quite in debt so it's OK to blow a few quid you don't have.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Two questions

Was thinking along those lines. As in how do they know how many they have? I assume the software must index it somehow.

Also, why did they stop there? Run out of storage/computing capacity/coffee?

Magna Carta mayhem: Protesters lay siege to Edinburgh Castle, citing obscure Latin text that has never applied in Scotland

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Sumption is wrong

The document's title is "Magna Carta", Fair enough.

But when referred to as an object or concept ( as it often is) it's the Magna Carta, or even a Magna Carta - if there was more than one.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: It was a lovely day for a coup

Gave you an upvote, but I think the reality is that Social Meeja gives fools support and reinforcements. Or to put it another way, once there was just one idiot per village, but now they're all on Facebook together.

Electrocution? All part of the service, sir!

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: "The power lead approached the PC..."

Years ago, before education services had corporate IT to install new kit (or indeed networks) I had to receive boxes and connect up new PCs. I was lucky, the first time I did this, to notice that there was a rocker switch with 110/240 positions -and it was worryingly open to accidental pressing- albeit with a bit of pressure, perhaps. It was OK, but after that I always checked new PCs. And on two or three occasions the rocker switch was set to 110. And one was just rather less firm than I'd have liked ( and more prominent). I've experienced the latter on a home PC too - and some other items as well if my memory serves me correctly.

It goes onto my mental list of *stuff that shouldn't ever happen but probably will*.

Q: Post-lockdown, where would I like to go? A: As far away from my own head as possible

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: New "Thing" at work

As an aside, it's funny how Customer Service Surveys never ask how good their Customer Service Survey was.

Breaking Bad or just a bad breakpoint? That feeling when your predecessor is BASIC

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Debug build on a live server?

It's several decades since my semi-amateur coding days. Even then I used two copies of the s/w. One for doing the testing and one that I'd only amend after I'd got the test version working.* These of course were not a on a server. Deployed to stand alone PCs.

*OK yes there were a couple of times when the amended version didn't run properly. I think I always was able to find the typo with a quick look.

LOL ;-) UK govt 2 pay £39m 4 txt msgs 4 less thn 2 yrs

Terry 6 Silver badge

You say that. But in parallel to this Dixons/DSG have just won a court case over their failure to protect public financial and identity data, having paid a chicken feed ICO fine. And anyone who's actually had any dealings with a large company when things go worng knows full well how they avoid any kind of accountability (or even contact). So there is true impunity. Whereas, despite those assertions, most public employees are fully accountable, doing a professional job like anyone else under and accountable to management like anyone else. It's a job. Like anyone else's.

And the mandarins who make these kinds of decisions come out of the same public school+Oxbridge bunch as their politician masters and a good many CEOs. Which route they take seems to be pretty random, and frequently interchangeable. Today's mandarin or Politician is tomorrow's Company Director, or vice versa.

As to that bit about their pensions - an irrelevance that simply identifies a general attitude to public servants. This seems like it's envy. The public servants take a pay and conditions contract like anyone else on recruitment. We can all apply for such jobs, but chose not to ( or were rejected).. Theirs includes a nice pension and decent job security, too, but pretty crap pay. TBH most of us wouldn't want to take that job, even the higher level roles, because we can earn a damned sight more in private employment.

On this most auspicious of days, we ask: How many sysadmins does it take to change a lightbulb?

Terry 6 Silver badge

First and only thought

What crap management systems they must have (had) there. Issues that surely go beyond misuse of IT staff.

What is your greatest weakness? The definitive list of the many kinds of interviewer you will meet in Hell

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Interesting previous interviews

There's always the risk, as an interviewer, that you are referencing a subject that the candidate knows tons about, but hasn't recognised that this is what you're asking about. Which might be a valid reason not to hire, but more likely means loss of a potentially knowledgeable/able candidate.

While perhaps being immodest about my strengths by saying this- I got caught by that as a young, almost qualified teacher interviewing for a first post, with the ILEA in 1981.

Interviewer: What can you tell me about the 1981 education act?

I waffled and said nothing of worth. Because The new 1981 Education Act was just the framework I'd been trained under. , To me it was just normality. I should have remembered that it was the 1981 Education Act, but just didn't connect the title to the actual substance. The interviewer didn't ask a probing question - so didn't ever find out that I knew that stuff really well. Didn't do me any harm in the long term and I still ended up working in a senior role within the ILEA until its abolition, but it was stupid interviewing ( by both of us tbh).

Terry 6 Silver badge

I had something of the sort, donkey' years ago. I can't remember much about it - not even where it was for. But someone from a similar education service to mine asked me if I was interested to moving to them. I said I was happy where I was, but I'd consider it. So they asked me to come along and discuss it with them. So I went. I expected a chat, with some inducement to join them ( and I guessed a proper paper application and an interview of some sort would follow to fill the HR requirements, of course). Instead I found myself in something that seemed more like an actual interview, with people I'd had no previous contact with and questions being aimed at me as if I was there to prove myself to them. And if my memory serves me correctly they were expecting me to start a lower grade or a probationary period ( or both). Though I remember very little of it almost 40 years later, I still have the "Why would they do that" surfacing through my fading consciousness from time to time. It just felt very strange.

After staring over the precipice once before, Kent County Council considers £500m in outsourcing again

Terry 6 Silver badge

There may well be some services that can be outsourced with a resultant saving. Small, specialist teams that don't justify a regular department, managers etc. might be a cheaper, more efficient solution. Otherwise the maths don't work - unless the outsourcer is paying staff well below the odds, cutting corners such as not letting staff clean the rooms properly, or failing to provide aspects of the service, ( starting with anything not explicitly in the contract, i.e.everything the council managers don't realise happens, or don't think important) to pay for its own shareholder value and promised savings. The fact that this includes services such as legal, which protect the council from loss of revenue, screwing up or harming the public etc. is lunacy.

BOFH: You say goodbye and I say halon

Terry 6 Silver badge

In real life I've been in many a meeting where it happens the other way around. A clear agreement is reached in about 5 minutes because choice X is clearly the best. Then the next 115 minutes is spent discussing the merits of all the other options until finally we all agree that X is the best choice.

The old New: Windows veteran explains that menu item

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: "stop moving stuff for the sake of moving it"

I just agreed with Bombastic Bob. What he wrote made sense to me! I'd go for a lie down to recover, but I worry that I'll wake up and amanfrommars will be starting to sound sensible to me too.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: It would be more useful if it allowed specifc templates

Yep, me too.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: "stop moving stuff for the sake of moving it"

we'd all still be using the Win3.1x Program Manager paradigm.

And that would be a bad thing because.........

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Always an important consideration

I kind of got the impression that if you let it Windows was looking for an excuse to search on the internet - and being of a cynical nature that this was because Microsoft wants to move everyone in to a cloud model with subscription software that lives on their cloud servers.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Absolutely. Irfanview by default, for me. Paint.net maybe for a bit of tinkering beyond Irfanview, possibly. And if I want to do something creative/sneaky it's Photoshop Elements. Because I want to use the software that gets my result as quickly and simply as possible.(And never have I felt the need to get full-fat Photoshop or The Gimp - but some people may need those- sometimes- and that would join the hierarchy, I'd assume).

Also... Not every programme provides every function as well as each other. If I just want to crop an image or remove a bit of red-eye then Irfanview is the one I find does that job best. If I'm carefully removing a person from one photo and placing it into another so that it looks realistic then it's Photoshop Elements.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: An idea

And again with the exam invigilation. getting the kids to save their document at the start, as soon as they have set up the header (name, exam number etc) in the documents folder is paramount. After that regular saves will be in the right place ( and ctrl-s is ok).

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Always an important consideration

Yes, the original 3 fingered salute was to escape a locked up/looped computer.

Terry 6 Silver badge
Flame

Re: Always an important consideration

That has been my regular rant about the START menu in the last years. Grouping programmes in it according to function is difficult and getting access is not obvious. Especially since it has two locations.

But if you have some seldom used software, particularly if the publisher thinks their own name is more important than something that identifies the function, it's going to be annoying and even difficult to find it in an alphabetic list of programmes. That useful little text to voice programme "!Balabolka" or some such name for example.

Add to the annoyance the programmes that can't be moved because they use a different system to create entries, like those inbuilt apps, or re-add themselves to the alphabetic list like Bitdefender, or even add a whole bloody folder with its own set of shortcuts inside like Dropbox. . I curse those publishers who think it's OK to include a shortcut for "<programme name> on the web"

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: While I agree,

Ctrl-s

I invigilate exams in my retirement. Getting the kids using PCs to save regularly is a major goal. Getting that to the use ctrl+s level is a definite win. It shouldn't be, because it shouldn't have to be, but there you go.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Always an important consideration

The thing about those 3 button short cuts, and ctrl+letter ones is that you need to learn about them, think it's worthwhile remembering them and remember to keep using them so that that you continue to remember them.

Most ordinary users are likely not to get to the first hurdle and will not have a clue about them, even if they've even heard of them. If they get told about one of them, there's a chance they'll go on to use it if it's useful. Maybe even learn another one at a later date. Asking them to learn more than one at a time is just heading into overload for people who are concentrating on doing their actual job.

Windows 11: What we like and don't like about Microsoft's operating system so far

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: 7th generatin intel core processors will not be powerful enough

It seems silly to me that an operating system , not the software that the computer uses it to run, but the OS that runs the software needs to have a more modern spec CPU than the software itself.

And if I'm not making my views clear enough. An OS is there to make programmes run on computers. Computers do not exist to run OSs they exist to run programmes. Within reason an OS needs to be able to run on the PCs people use. So stuff it. If at some point Win10 ceases to be viable on my big 4th gen i7 PC it'll be my excuse to get the family on 'nux.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Bells and broken whistle

Well, for a starter, because I don't have the freedom to do so. Even though ( I'm on El Reg after all) I am a tech enthusiast I don't have a spare machine to tinker with. I do need to use the PC for actually doing stuff.*

And that's a further barrier to ordinary people joining. It's also irrelevant. What's required is listening to ordinary users and finding out what they want in an OS and how they use theirs, rather than either relying of focus groups, who are often self-selecting, or as seems most often the case, MS deciding a direction and trying to herd us all that way.

*(I admit I've wondered whether I could try it in a VM).

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Bells and broken whistle

Anyone can join the insider build program. It's not restricted to techies and enthusiasts. There's no IT exam you have to sit before they allow you to join.

Sorry, but that is disingenuous to the point of incomprehension.

By definition, any one who chooses to sign up to that insider thing is not an ordinary user. It's practically a definition of "enthusiast" .

If you weren't an enthusiast why would you do it? The probability of anyone not a techie or an enthusiast choosing to sign up to something like that is vanishingly low, at best. It's irrelevant that they could, it's whether they would.

You * could* mortgage your home and buy a racehorse - you'd have to be very enthusiastic about horse racing to consider actually doing it though.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Bells and broken whistle

This "insider build" thing intrigues me.

To what extent are their wishes, feelings, use cases, preferences and expectations of an OS the same as those of a harassed school teacher, an architects clerk, a bank official, a GP, a chef, a......well for want of a better phrase - real people?

My supposition is that people who use "insider builds" are enthusiasts and techies. And the only reason for getting their opinion would be to run a mile in the opposite direction.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Power Users

If we think about it, the place where the settings are grouped is the control panel. If you change its name it's still the same object - but with an new name. If you change its layout it's the same thing, but with a new layout. If you keep the old layout and name but take out some of the contents and put them in a version with a new layout and name they're still the same thing - but now split into two for no good reason. If eventually you move the remainder of the content to the new design and dump the old one, what you have remains what it always was. It's still the bloody control panel. The function, a place where adjustment to settings can be found, is the same as it always was.

There has been no substantive change other than in name and layout.

The underlying reality is that Microsoft are unable to distinguish between substantive change and superficial change.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Sounds like they are purging all the crap they added with Windows 8

The narrative at the time (of Win 8) was all about a unified design. i.e your desktop, tablet, touch device and phone should all look the same. Not just the same in concept and colour schemes, the same with a blithe inability to comprehend that different function requires different form. Sort of like Honda saying that their cars, motorbikes and lawnmowers should all be the same design- with 3 wheels, air bags and a set of cutting blades on the front.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: "old WIndows"

In fact that whole barking mad Win 8 idea that important controls called "charms" should be concealed around the desktop, and would only appear when you didn't want them seems to indicate a company removed from reality.

Troll jailed for 5 years after swatting of Twitter handle owner ends in death

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: swatting

"SWAT" in this case doesn't actually refer to fly swats.

It's about setting a SWAT team on someone.....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWAT

Which in a country where shoot first and ask later ( if they survive) is a matter of course is pretty significant. Virtually the same as pulling the trigger yourself

Terry 6 Silver badge

Yep. 5 years doesn't seem much for the repeated use of harassment for criminal ends, resulting in a death.

(BTW can't believe you got an actual downvote)

Ad tech ruined the web – and PDF files are here to save it, allegedly

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: re-sizing and re-wrapping text

In fact, for most purposes an editable form should just be a text document with spaces to fill in stuff.

Only if it's something complex should there be anything more elaborate. ( With a special place to be reserved in Hell for the writers of anything with compulsory fields unless said information is of absolute necessity).

The lights go off, broadband drops out, the TV freezes … and nobody knows why (spooky music)

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Open Access street cabinets

That's lucky. Some years back some nut job managed to hit our parked cars and the VM cabinet. Long after the cars were repaired the VM cabinet was a wreck. Even now it sort of perches on its base, rather than being fitted.

As to why the doors aren't securely locked on these boxes???

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: ...they try to fob you off with jargon

OH yes. We had our boiler fitted by British Gas two years back.

During which they f*cked up the electrics, drilled the vent hole at too sharp an angle so that the drain leaked and made the pipe too short so that it didn't meet their own regulations. They also failed to provide the statutory commissioning document and were unable to locate the engineer's records to supply it a year later when the servicing engineer came ( our own, not BG!).

And yes, the fitters were all - no not subcontractors,- sub sub contractors.

Our services were performed by a Gas Safe engineer recommended by our plumber ( who was recommended to us too).

We had our house insulated recently, under the government's (untimely demised) Green Scheme*. We used a local company, who did use subbies, because that's pretty much how the scheme had to work, and hey we weren't paying the bulk of it. But these were also a local team of small builders. And they weren't going to get the work signed off and paid for unless the work was finished to the required standard. They did such a good job of it that we then brought them back to do some construction work we needed in the garden. It looks amazing.

*Being totally cynical about such things I was signed up to the scheme within hours of applications opening, having done all the preliminary work in advance and found contractors to request quotes which were arranged within days (and even then it wasn't easy -this time the chaos started almost from the first minute).. So that we were already accepted long before its final premature collapse into incompetence. For us it was too good to miss. The house needed this insulation. It also needed pointing. Our contribution was roughly what we'd have had to pay to get the house pointed, so to us there was effectively zero cost for the insulation work.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Supply pipe location

This seems to be a recurring theme, which seems to appear with tedious ( except for the victims) regularity. Customer service staff unable/unwilling to divert automated systems that were triggered in error. In many ways it's the same "The computer says..." problem that infected the Post Office and destroyed the lives of those poor postmaster.

Just because there's a computerised system all semblance of human initiative is dumped.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Shibboleet

No, wrong. They say that company policy is that they do not accept abuse or swearing and they hang up .Thereby ending the call well within the allocated time.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Shibboleet

This is target culture, isn't it. To keep their job/gain a bonus frontline staff need to complete each (say) 10 minute call within 7 minutes - on average. So anything that looks a bit tricky, i.e. when they actually need to do their jobs, is best ducked. Fob Off a Punter is the name of this game.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Supply pipe

This will always be a mystery to me. For about 25 years we and our neighbour had a shared supply and stopcock. Turn off one, turn off both.

OK fair do's, it was what it was. Bothered her, because she'd have liked a meter. And we had an internal stop tap fitted for emergencies.

Then they came to replace all the lead inlet pipes, and stop taps. And they dug down and there were two inlet pipes for our respective houses. So the only way it could have worked up to that time was that the two inlet pipes had both fed into one stopcock, then out again into our respective houses.

I can only assume is that several decades ago the fitters ran out of stopcocks ( or only had double ones on the van) and decided to double up.

LibreOffice 7.2 release candidate reveals effort to be Microsoft-compatible

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Surprised

The irony of that is that I used to give my team a set of menus in WORD that were tailored to the way we worked and the tasks we had - grouping together the menu items in ways that made sense to us. Moving or removing stuff that we would never need while making stuff we always used easier to find. No one had time to go looking for stuff because it wasn't in the menu where we would want it to be ( and most had no interest or patience for such stuff).. The Ribbon version of WORD's menus ( they are still menus- forget the marketing bullshit)- just makes it harder to find the items you need if you haven't used them in a while. You can't customise the core menus. You can only create a new version of them from scratch, manually adding all the items you need and then hiding the original.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Use early Microsoft formats where possible for interchange

I sometimes think that on El Reg commentards over-emphasise the activity of bigger and corporate users. Unsurprising, since bigger organisations employ entire departments to manage their systems. People who may well wash up on these shores. Whereas much of commerce and IT use actually goes on within and between small Companies or organisations that don't employ many IT staff and certainly few fully qualified experts. Maybe their entire IT system is run by one techie minded staff member who's done the odd course or has an A level ( or just a GCSE) in IT. Possibly even just some old guy who entered computing as an amateur 50 years ago and has grown up doing it as a side line ( I know I'm not the only one on here like that). Many of whom also read El reg and even comment, but we're not part of a team and are probably outnumbered significantly by the corporate and contract professionals. And these small organisations don't run by those kinds of rule. If a client needs to send a document we need to accept it, not fuss over the format. We don't get to pick and choose. In many cases the organisation would be grateful just to get sent stuff, never mind fussing about the format. You have a report, or a product request to send them? They'll bite your hand off to receive it if that means they get the business. PDF? They'd accept parchment carried by a pigeon as long as it got to them.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Reveal Codes RIP

And it does look as if Microsoft has retained its age old ( in computer terms) culture of deciding (often too late) what the future will look like (often wrongly) and forcing people to adopt it (often unsuccessfully).

They seem to be incapable of identifying which are genuine trends* or of having the confidence to then allow these to develop naturally.

In other words, they're slightly dim playground bullies.

*I'm sure their abject failure to recognise that the internet would become important is part of this. It seems to run through them as a trauma. So that even when they do have a good product they fuck it up by chasing shadows. But instead of sorting out the failure they repeat it, e.g. in the mobile phone fiasco.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Surprised

Which has reminded me of the WORD bug that made me first look for an alternative. If you had a table at the top of a first/single page you couldn't insert anything above it. Use case would be, maybe, you'd created a table on a single page then decided (or had just postponed until you'd got the actual table data sorted), to add a title or explanation above it.

There was a work around; insert a page break, this seemed to create a space above the table on the original page. Then you could do your typing and delete the page break. A bit of a malarkey and hard to explain to users. The alternative, not much better, was to remember to leave a space before you got started. Which would be good practice, but in every day life, I or my colleagues would have some data they desperately wanted to display or share and the first impulse would be to get it down on paper clearly, the niceties to be sorted out later.

I wonder if it's still a thing.

BOFH: But soft! What light through yonder filing cabinet breaks?

Terry 6 Silver badge

Too close to the truth

No, not the mining. But I know perfectly well that my bosses over the years wouldn't have known the difference between a new server and a good microwave oven.

Restoring your privacy costs money, which makes it a marker of class

Terry 6 Silver badge

Years ago ( pre smartphones) I used Google calendar to sync between the calendars on various PCs and some kind of digital Windows based assistant's diary that I relied on. Then google stopped the compatibility. So I stopped using their calendars.