Posts by Terry 6 5608 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Jul 2009
Interesting. beer with a whisky chaser was a well known tipple about 40 years+ ago.
F*cked if I know why anyone would, seems like a waste of both, and probably the drinker too.
There was even an adage
Beer on whisky very risky
Whisky on beer, never fear.
Which has all the truth of a politician's election promise.
"As we all know, the best way for Joe Public to upgrade his computer is to throw away all the software he ever bought and spend the next three months trawling nerdy community sites trying to persuade short-tempered dweebs to tell him what command-line bollocks he needs to type in so that it will let him print."
An example for consideration here is encryption software. Irrespective of algorithm used each programme only seems to read its own encrypted files (or maybe some forks).
So if one day you find that the software which reads a precious file has gone wrong and needs reinstalling you'd best pray that either you have a copy to install from or it's still available and compatible.
Because if that programme isn't still out there you're f*cked.
There are several promising sounding programmes that deserve a chance- but I'm not going to be the brave soul who uses them.
Incorrect. If cooking is what they do ( or any other business) then there are a host of other activities that are peripheral that they may/should/could not do for themselves. Like, in that example, such things as oven repair, flue cleaning, even pastry (though that serving a crap artificially coloured, synthetic,bought-in dessert after a good dinner thing is truly annoying)
Yes, in effect this is little different from a home user relying on an OSS programme that has annoyances/bugs/incompatibilities. So that even if the developers agree that this section isn't up to standard or whatever, it may never get sorted out. because it's their hobby, and what they want to be doing is writing new and interesting stuff, not going back and reviewing something they finished with a long time ago.
Except a home user isn't usually relying on it for their livelihood.
The moral of which is that if you want to use s/w to make money with you should damned well pay the developers for it, just like you would any other business expense.
In and out of the tech industry the inability to foresee demand for a good offer seems endemic. As with the previous Hoover comment.
I type this smugly, having just had my home insulated by the government Green Deal.
Because I knew it'd go pear shaped as the system wouldn't be able to cope. So I did my research and arranged my quotes, got the installers online and put in my application within a few days of it opening. Before it all went wrong, (which it did), and was closed early by the government (which it was).
What a brain dead, piss poor, lethally incompetent design!
"piss poor" yes. But the other bits, sadly no. From their POV this is sheer brilliance. They will be able to flog lots more packs of ink and/or single colours ( if they even make them available for that machine) that are marketed at a higher unit price than multi-packs.
And if you buy packs there will be a certain colour that never gets used ( I used to have surplus yellow). All good for the sales figure.
Printers, like razors, are traditionally flogged to make after-sales. They don't sell printers (or razors)- they may even make a loss on them, they sell ink/blades.
There's so much in that little story.
If the new contractor is charging less they're almost certainly cutting corners elsewhere - unless there's sound reason to think the previous company were taking the piss in some way (which is possible of course).
If the corners cut are in terms of how much actual work gets done then they aren't truly cheaper, they're just providing less.
If the staff are treated worse then there are intangible losses - extra stuff or just extra effort which the staff did out of loyalty or care, which means that the job won't be done so well, or as reliably.
If a new contract has been rewritten for the new company it will fail to include all sorts of items which a previous and long standing contractor had just incorporated into the schedule, or which they charged for at the standard contract hourly rate.
The won't know the building, the staff, the patterns of working or the specific areas that need extra attention ( or provide that attention) - all of which are key to the real-life job getting done. As opposed to the mythical job the bean counters contract for.
Anyone who's walked into a previously spotless conference room and discovered that suddenly there's dust in the corners and coffee rings on the tables can attest to this.(I've even had a colleague from an external organisation look round, at the start of a meeting, and say "You got new cleaners? "
And it wasn't a positive comment).
I did state that. But a default font is just that. A basic, lowest common denominator, font to use if you don't want to choose one before you get started. One, simple, general purpose start-up font. And once you have that you don't need other default fonts - ever. You just need fonts.
Beyond the basic You have to have a font to get started on a document, there is no point to such a thing.
Having a selection of good fonts, maybe even recommended ones for certain roles, is fine. But the idea of a special default font that has characteristics belong legibility and ubiquity ( for general use by the majority ofusers who simply aren't bothered) is pure nonsense
Not to mention the other road users behaving with total irrationality, random pedestrians and unexpected occurrences like trees falling into the road.Can the kit detect, identify and react appropriately to these things yet? Would it be able to realise that a nice colourful ball rolling/bouncing into the road may have a small child running after it?
It might be an old joke. But I know places (especially schools) where this goes on.
At least part of the management mindset behind this is that while administrative staff are expected to know and may even get training in using the tech, frontline staff who need to use the same tech are somehow not seen as needing to know how to use it- as if those reports, analyses and so on will write themselves.
On El Reg ( I would assume 100%) we use all the blockers and stuff. So there's no point being all smug about it.
Out in the real world (TM) they don't, sadly, mostly.
More worrying even than that, they buy stuff that presents itself to them on Facebook.
Really. People who wouldn't give a door-to-door salesman who they can see in front of them the time of day will trust all shorts of shit because it pops up in a social media feed from a hidden and anonymous source.
This very fact has shredded what little respect I had for the Human Species.
Fujitsu should be completely banned from any future Government contracts.
Sadly the precedent for this is not good. Otherwise Crapita* wouldn't have any work to be getting on with.
*Substitute name of failed incompetent outsourcer still getting tons of gov work, of your choice.
It's everywhere in the wonderful corporate internetted world...
They don't want to spend money on customer service, because the bean counter model of business is to try and charge as much as possible, while seeing actually providing the service they're charging for as an unfortunate and preferably avoidable cost centre. Starting with the cost of responding to their customers when the service fails to work as intended -- because they cut corners in its production and deployment. So they hide or remove phone numbers and email addresses. Instead there's a web page with a tab that says "Contact us" that leads to a page of FAQs that have no relevance to anything that anyone would care about. followed, possible only after you've clicked on one of these, by a link that says "Need more help". This takes you to a generic Help page. On that page, carefully hidden, will be a contact us link. Which, when discovered, leads to the FAQ page...
....
Jews for example have recently switched from being mainly Labour to Conservative voters - but I don't think that's related to Brexit, so much as Jeremy Corbyn
Or at least, like me, not bloody voting Labour while Corbyn's supporters and those who colluded with him are still in there. I'd supported labour for decades and campaigned for them until Corbyn. But the local Labour leadership in my borough, one with a lot of Jews, stayed in their party and fought to get Corbyn elected. Even when the LibDem's ex-labour candidate had a chance of getting the Tory MP out they worked hard to elect Corbyn.
I can't even look those people in the face any more.
It's important to separate the actual religious belief (faith) from the cultural belief that the religion carries. The cultural aspects will prevail even when the actual faith has long since faded.The Protestant Work Ethic can persist even in a confirmed atheist. Many lapsed or just descended from parent who were Catholics with no religious feeling remaining will still experience Catholic Guilt and so on.
Poor logic from that point of view. We were within the EU. Voting to leave is a vote to make a change Not voting is not stating a wish to change the status quo.So a minority vote to change was allowed to stand as a decision. It's why referendum votes on serious matters normally have a threshold:This is nothing new or previously unknown.
And yes. I would equally view a tiny majority in a future vote to rejoin with a significant percentage not voting as being highly dodgy. Especially it it were achieved by outrageous voter manipulation, dark propaganda campaigns and out and out lies.
Voters who actually wanted to leave were motivated to go out and vote Leave. Voter manipulation doesn't need to persuade voters into your camp- it merely needs to make them unsure so that they don't turn out to vote for the other one. Voters who didn't want to leave did not have the same degree of motivation, why would they, we were already in. All that was needed was to make the voters who wanted to retain the status quo but weren't too fussed feel unsure enough to stop them turning out.
In effect a minority of more highly motivated Leave voters was allowed to trump the larger combined group of {wanting to remain} and {willing to remain} voters because the willing group were made unsure by lying claims about Turkish Immigrants or money that we could give to the NHS ( or something about fish that no one understood but it sounded bad).
I wasn't born in the 1700s. I was at school through the 1960/70s. In Manchester. And within a week of starting high school I had this encounter. A bunch of lads cornered me and one asked;
"Are you a Catholic or a Protestant?"
"I'm Jewish"
"But are you Protestant Jewish or Catholic Jewish"....*
If anyone had told me this had happened to "someone (they) knew" I'd have put it down to being an urban myth. Only it happened to me, and I was sh** scared.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Decades later I think back and sort of reckon my local comprehensive school wasn't as comprehensive as it might have been where religion was concerned. There were the times when they wanted to start a fight with the nearby RC school for starters.
I have to agree. Much of the anger channelled into Brexit was anger at a status quo that still left these communities feeling stiffed.
And it's not to hard to see why.
The infrastructure that draws in money is still largely gathered in the South East. London often claims that it generates the wealth. It's more accurate to say that London is where the wealth generators want to be. With their public-school chums (and kids), stockbroker belt homes and country clubs. I remember back in the '80s going past a large massively expensive building, near Hyde Park. It was the HQ of the National Coal Board. About as far from an actual coal mine, or indeed their customers, as it was possible to be.
And decades along hardly anything has changed.
Because religious ( and that includes the cultural accretions) attitudes effect wider social attitudes. Whether this study in any way demonstrates this is a very different kettle of ball games. But the principle that it might is incontestable.
It is not the theology of Brexit ( though no doubt that might also be a thing). It's the cultural attitudes that the theology engenders. Like it says ( though it sounds like a stereotype to me) Protestants are habituated to resisting the influences of them European Catholics......
Not for Jews either. We don't proselytise. We don't believe other religions are damned. On the contrary. They are exempt from all the specific (and numerous) religious requirements that we place ourselves under.The basic Noahic principles of not killing/stealing and so one are sufficient. In fact, they are even good enough for ourselves at a pinch - as long as we remember the "No other gods bit".
I've had that one.
Manager; "You made such and such error in September"
Me; "No, we established at the time that I'd correctly followed the required procedure. There was an error downstream"
Manager; "But there was such and such consequence because of what you did.."
Me; "I did the only permitted thing"
Manager; "But you should have not done that"....
This is when you realise the difference between the good boss ("Stuff happens, don't make a habit of it") and the shit boss ("Heads are gonna roll and it won't be mine").
Life can still be good when the shit boss you report to is below the good one. Not so much the other way round but knowing which way round it runs tells you all you need to know about the organisation's culture, (And how long both bosses will likely stick around).
Sounds remarkably like today's stories abut the Church of England. In as much as it's not simply the discrimination, but the blatant, open, unapologetic (until caught at least), visible discrimination. As if even the social filter that stops people openly behaving in the racist way they might want to has been removed.
The impression I've had, from reading devs' comments and descriptions etc. and from one or two conversations, is that the devs want often want to produce a programme that's better than those around ( Or that's missing). But better is a YMMV sort of thing. Better to a software developer often seems to mean; faster, more efficient, more functions and so on. It seldom means; more intuitive, easier to remember, more obvious what to do next.
By the way
I hate the Ribbon. Not because of its intrinsic design ( I hate that too, to be fair) but because they made creating user menus that worked for a specific user/team much harder to do. I used to customise WORD to make finding the stuff they needed easier to find and move between for teams I managed so that items would be in the menus with items they'd use at the same time for the same job. And stuff in those menus that they'd never use in their job would be banished so that hey didn't have to waste time hunting for stuff.. i.e. a custom "edit" menu that contained what they needed to develop the particular observational reports we wrote all the time, so that they could amend the template accordingly.
I take that point. UI is very subjective. But usability may not be. And from that POV it's not uncommon for FOSS to have idiosyncratic layout etc. Sometimes with a very steep learning curve for no apparent reason. I never try to influence that. I might not try too hard to use it, but I don't try to change it.
My rule of thumb there is if it's a Windows programme that doesn't behave like other Windows programmes it has to be for a very good reason or worth the effort to learn. A key is it should be either familiar or intuitive. If I click on a button that seems to be needed to do something and something unexpected happens instead I'm going to be very cautious about it. Or if it has some strange default setting (like saving in an unexpected location) that also requires a complex procedure to get back to how I need it. I have one freeware (with paid pro version) graphics type programme, for example, that does a very simple job very well, but has numerous layout settings that don't readily translate to how it will appear on the page. But it does do that one job well, so I've worked out how to get a good approximation of what I need. I don't use it often. I sometimes use it, I don't recommend it to anyone else.
Usually though it's some simple thing, like a horizontal scroll bar that won't allow you scroll past a certain point until after you've tried to drag content into an inadequate space at the end of a row.
A few times over the years I've had interaction with the devs of open source s/w. I assumed they were volunteers and tried to be as polite, positive and grateful as I can. I was trying to make a positive contribution, to improve the uptake of the s/w among ordinary users.
In each case I was making a case about usability of some aspect of the s/w, based on my work with supporting some very intelligent and proactive users, some at least quite technically aware. In each case my comments were couched quite gently, even tentatively. ("It might be easier for users if.." that sort of thing.)
I'm not a developer, but I am a very technically aware user, and was the technical support for a lot of ordinary users. So my feedback ought to have been useful, and welcome. I tried always to be positive.
In each case the response was, at best unresponsive, at worst quite negative and even abrasive in tone.
I was not insulting their mothers or promoting a heretical view of their religion - but you'd be surprised to hear that if you were to judge by the responses.
In most of the cases my suggestion was (IMAO) perfectly logical and reasonable, based upon my experience actually using the s/w and the comments of others who'd tried it - often at my suggestion.
In most of the cases the responses made little sense - not being about actual use, nor about (which would be understandable) some extra complexity in the coding. But rather along the lines of "We want it this way" or "We don't want to".
In one fairly recent (and trivial) such case, it's impossible to tell if there have been any recent new add-ons for the application, which means users have no way to know that some new functionality has become available. A rather unusual state of affairs. The devs response was that they wouldn't identify these because they "wanted all add-ons treated equally". I tried to point out that leaving a new add-on unknown about wasn't treating it equally. But, well....
There seem to be two systems operating here.
Some people go online, book an appointment and are offered the second one with it.
I was sent a text telling me they were ready for me to book my appointment, which I did, to my local GP vaccination clinic. Then, in due course I received a text again telling me to book for my second jab (tomorrow - Wednesday morning as it goes). Probably this is because the local group were a couple of weeks ahead of the age schedule.
So, as far as I can work it out, if you use the NHS England route you book both together. If you go via the GP route it's one at a time.
The trusts, unlike school academy trusts, are normally NHS trusts. They were bunched together into these as a way of creating the "Internal Market". In effect creating an extra layer of administration and accounting. Trusts can and do run services in each other's areas.
Most of us here, I'm guessing, are thinking in terms of chancers and low level criminals trying to break into our accounts. If we're talking of targetted attacks by serious organised crime (or state machinery) that's a whole different level of security (though I'd always use some kind of non-dictionary component- can't be too careful)
Using w3w to provide 3 words isn't as good as it sounds. If you use a specific address/postcode you might as well just use that address/postcode as your p/w. If you generate it from a location you are stood in that gives a much wider more random choice. But then you have to find the precise location again.Even my little home has at least 9, arguably 16 possible locations. I could narrow it down to maybe 6 or 8. But what a faff. I guess if you base it on a specific part of the property that you can locate on a map it'd work, a garage say. As long as you can remember where on the property you used in 6 months or so time.
I know I used a location near mum's house- was it the garage, the shed, the garden, the back gate, the apple tree.....
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