* Posts by Terry 6

5589 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Jul 2009

While we fire the boss, can you lock him out of the network?

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Likewise ...

In your "two flaws" part of the comment you underplay the main flaw in that argument. i.e. that you will piss off *any* customer who needs to interact with you.

Also, in many cases, currently what helps the exisiting crap companies to retain their customers is that they're all at it so there's seldom any point changing.

They all seem to do it........

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 leads to the FAQ page...

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: The customer is always right ...

This is also a bit like the "I pay your wages" claim.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: employee of the year

" It can certainly be a right royal pain in the ars3 with all the "counselling" and "training opportunities" and "performance plans""

I've suffered that.

Some years back we had a totally useless *specialist* teacher in a part of our service, who was just wasting the life chances of the kids he was supposedly supporting. Time after time he'd survived disciplinaries, with all the mentoring and support and targets to meet.

As far as I'd seen of him his teaching was to just pull out a set of materials that he'd been using year in year out since forever.and take the kids through them- not in any way matched to the kids' actual needs

The various managers started disciplinary proceedings, set what they thought were targets- which of course he met, because they were all performative. The managers involved were all of the exteachers-who-wanted-to-get away-from-teaching types. So had no idea what targets were meaningful

Targets set, targets met, Nothing changed. Rinse and repeat. For about 10-15 years!!!.

One year I was appointed his "mentor"- which is why I knew his targets were just shit.

Next time round I was the manager prosecuting. I've always taught and refused to join that office-bound type, even as a deputy head. I was always a teacher first and foremost.

So my targets were all about the quality of teaching and lesson planning with relevance to the target child. Rather than generic "Do planning" "record outcomes".

I specified that he had to demonstrate how his "planning" referred to the specific documented needs of the specific children on his case load*. That his "outcomes" measured how the child's learning had changed with regard to the defined needs. And so forth.

He was gone within two weeks ( some deal supported by the union, but with no pay-off or anything) - because I had him bang to rights. No bullying, nothing underhand. I just specified what his job was meant to be. What he was being paid to do. And what the schools/families of those kids had a right to expect. Because he just didn't have the skills or willingness to meet those professional targets (despite years of regular and expensive training!)..

*You'd have thought this was obvious, wouldn't you?? That's mangers for you, though.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Likewise ...

": The US news is only about US,"

That would be an improvement.

Having visited my cousins in the US ans stayed in their home a few times, you'd be amazed how little national news there is. Most of it is very local, as far as I could see,

And of course, this is the nation that thinks "football" defaults to meaning the version only they play ( and even they play the proper version outside the big arenas).

And who have a World Series in a sport than no one from any other country plays in against them.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Likewise ...

I'm guessing USA. It's a chain they have.

But also, my experience of Mastodon, in particular, is that posts which don't state their (relevant) location generally end to be USA.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Likewise ...

Even hospitals can refuse treatment to a dangerous/violent patient.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Working for Untrustworthy Companies

Ah yes. Reference here the company bosses/owners that don't report and pay forward National Insurance obligations (while deducting them from staff). Leaving a nasty mess for (ex)employees when the company goes belly-up. My late father was a manager ( and victim) in one such. The insolvency company kept him on for several months to help resolve the tangles.

Eben Upton on Sinclair, Acorn, and the Raspberry Pi

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: The tube

Yep, as a young adult I had the Electron. And lots of fun third party add-ons. (Watford Electronics pops into my head)

On it I learnt to programme in BASIC then assembler, with a bit of LISP thrown in.

And with that I could write some decent and useful programmes ( and modify a few pretty poor ones- particualrly educational software.- to make them usable in the classroom).

Oh, and I recently taught myself the basics of Python. But almost half a century on from my Acorn days I wasn't able to create anything useful and gave up. Partly because, in my mid-sixties I don't have the flexibility of thought. But also because these days writing programmes appears to be more about creating a script for calling up the right modules.

Why we update... Data-thief malware exploits SmartScreen on unpatched Windows PCs

Terry 6 Silver badge

.cpl

s it downloads and opens a .cpl file, which is a Windows control panel item.

I'm pretty sure I was reading of dangers posed by .cpl files decades ago.

Surely there is some way these could have been sandboxed or limited in function by now?

BOFH: Nice air conditioning system. Would be a shame if anything happened to it

Terry 6 Silver badge

Not the bog roll itself, as such. But anything that can be reused. The bean counters seem to relish the idea that they can keep selling you something you've already bought.

So once someone invents an AI toilet roll dispenser...........

How governments become addicted to suppliers like Fujitsu

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Corruption

As to that, it's probably the inevitable end of any "Tell Sid" sell off. The rosy ideal of the Great British Public all owning shares in a sold off company- particularly one sold off at a significant discount- was always a fairy tale.

Because why would they not take the money and run when it's offered.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Corruption

Part of the stupidity is that no one can remember which is which.Because it was a totally artificial separation.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: at the mercy of the big contractors

it's run by a horrible wasteful and inefficient 'public' institutions,

This was a carefully constructed myth created for the purpose of undermining and privatising public services./ Give a dog a bad name etc.

It's not public bodies that are dumping sewage into our rivers.

Many publicly owned and local authority service were run pretty well for the time.

Council housing was far better maintained than many of the current "Housing Association" properties seem to be.

There were, undoubtedly, good reasons for wanting the privatising of some services, like say British Gas, the GPO Telecoms or - topically-the Post Office, that were underfunded, underperforming and poorly managed. But no real evidence to say that the privatisation would actually solve the problems that they had..Rather than simply shaking them up from what was simply a rather Edwardian Age bureaucracy..

It certainly doesn't seem to have much good for the railways, or, as noted above, water.

eBay to cough up $3M after cyber-stalking couple who dared criticize the souk

Terry 6 Silver badge

Humanity

These were supposedly respectable, educated, executives. High ranking etc. but they seem to have thought it OK to behave in a thuggish and criminal manner.

It's hard to believe that this is purely an EBay thing.

It sort of makes me despair of humanity.

Not even poor Notepad is safe from Microsoft's AI obsession

Terry 6 Silver badge
FAIL

Missing the point....again

Notepad was simple. It was meant to be simple.. Its whole purpose was to be simple.

Its value was in its simplicity.

Simple

UK PM promises faster justice for Post Office Horizon victims

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Project management by those ignorant of IT systems?

HMG (and hence us) should not covering the costs incurred by either the Royal Mail......

Problem there is that the Post Office is responsible here and it isn't owned by Royal Mail. And saddling it with even more debt won't help anyone, least of all the postmasters that are still doing the job in the (remaining ) Post Offices.

And if it was, we'd be paying it anyway. Because the Post Office and Royal Mail are both public services event though the Royal Mail was privatised.

And it's individuals who committed these criminal acts. Not their staff or franchisees.

Fining public services always means robbing the public to account to the public. Because the fine takes money away from our services.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Justice should include prosecutions

That is the point. They did the deed and they should get the consequences.So far they've benefitted from the general air of impunity for the Great and the (not so) Good that seems to be endemic in the UK. Until scandal means that the Greater and (er) Gooder start to panic.

(Think PPE contracts)

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: No Justice

And even then they could ignore it.

God knows why this petition site was chosen - but in the end the only thing that makes a difference is publicity. Which is why the TV series has the politicians scurrying for cover.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: How is Fujitsu not in the dock?

That's a fair point. But only if the Fujitsu parent was ignorant of the workings of their new ICL acquisition.

There's room for wriggle there.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Justice should include prosecutions

@ elsergiovolador

You seem to be arguing something that has no argument - we all know and agree that the Post Office executive should be locked up for a very long time.

So your points don't seem to make any sense.

1) That's what many of the victims were told . That it couldn't be the software because no one else had this problem.Which reduced their opportunity to defend themselves

2) No one has been suggesting the Post Office executives were particularly trying to save the Post Office's reputation, rather than their own - though if they had been it still wouldn't change anything and more to the point no one is saying it would. So while undoubtedly protecting their cushy salaries, bonuses and future lucrative directorships of major companies, the Post Office executives weren't directly benefitting financially from the Fujitsu contract ( as far as we know). Only after they knew it was a sack of shit and still forced it on to their victims were they benefitting by the cover-up.

3) Fujitsu had sold a crap product to the Post Office. But the Post Office bosses weren't selling anything. They were knowingly imposing a crap product they'd bought not selling it.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: No Justice

I don't often do public online petitions. Because there are too many on issues that range from the significant to the trivial - so they can be safely ignored by the government (even when there are enough signatures to rate parliamentary scrutiny)

Like with complaining to a company on Social Media it ceased to be of value when it became common place and the organisations in the cross hairs found ways to dodge the bullets.

But I've signed this one.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Remote Access

Vindictiveness by the Post Office yes. But the judges, at worst, can only be accused of naïvety I think.

Naïvety because they trusted the Post Office to give honest evidence. But it's not a judge's job to be an expert on anything other than the law.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: The possibilities are infinite

That's one of the aspects that's very clearly known.

The Post Office deliberately chose to ignore the fact that the Horizon system was a pile of horse shit.

Terry 6 Silver badge

are still allowed to bid for government contracts

That's a well trodden path. The road to success in UK government contracts seems to be fail spectacularly, walk away with billions of public cash, and then do it again. And again.

This applies corporately and individually or any combination..

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: The Crown Prosecution Service bares equal culpability

Yes, this is a big part of the scandal. The Post Office were/are allowed to investigate and prosecute their own cases. Police force, "expert witnesses" (with the aid of totally independent (!) Fujitsu ) and prosecutor.

Terry 6 Silver badge
Black Helicopters

Re: Justice should include prosecutions

No. They were protecting themselves having laid their reputations on this software. They would not admit that it may have been a massively expensive failure on their watch. They'd rather wreck the lives of hundreds of loyal and honest postmasters and postmistresses. They'd rather lie and deceive than accept responsibility.

Note: The victims were told that They were the only one this has happened to, so it couldn't possibly have been the software.

CEO arranged his own cybersecurity, with predictable results

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Keepass

In Onenote you can encrypt pages.Which gives you a place to keep a secure list of passwords.

Terry 6 Silver badge
Flame

Re: Customers are the security liability

Yet it still fucking happens!!!!!!!

(See previous - I still get them pretty often).

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Customers are the security liability

This pisses me off so much. Banks, insurance (and energy ) marketing departments that send out emails with a "Click here to go to your account's log in page where you can enter your password and stuff into those oh so convenient boxes".

Genuine ( usually) emails from the bank's email address ( or worse from an entity representing the company) that do as they say they will. But seem tailor made to train users to click on unsafe links!

‘I needed antihistamine tablets every time I opened the computers’

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: These stories are crazy

It's the server rack in a public area that sounds ridiculous.

Airports are big, busy places. And people will stuff rubbish anywhere- especially if there aren't any actual bins around ( or close by).

Why would anyone wilfully place any kind of kit in a public area like that? It sounds like taking sloppiness to a whole new level of irresponsibility.

Superuser mostly helped IT, until a BSOD saw him invent a farcical fix

Terry 6 Silver badge
Devil

Re: Management material

Oh yes. We had a management consultant of the of the "If he's that good why isn't he managing a major company" variety ( The managerial equivalent of people who sell courses on how to get rich - but why then do they need to sell courses.....).

Said consultant thought that "Management is a profession in its own right and you don't need to know anything about the business". Nice chap. very enjoyable afternoons away from the job. And it was useful talking to him about specific staff issues. But I wouldn't have let him manage an ice-cream machine in winter. Let alone a bunch ot truculent, experienced, highly trained specialist teachers.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Management material

Absolutely not a joke. In education ( in the UK at least, don't know about Japan) it's a career path.

I long ago lost count of the number of ambitious (don't really want to be) teachers and exteachers-turned-advisors who arrived in a school, launched a shiny new panacea then buggered off to bigger and better things leaving the actual teachers to clear up the mess.

There was even one such who actually stayed with the same authority, moving on ever upwards, who could look a room full of experienced teachers in the eye and without a hint of a blush explain why the latest new thing was brilliant and the old thing was obviously rubbish from the start, even though a few weeks previously she'd spent her days actively promoting said rubbish and explaining why the programme previous to it had been obviously rubbish, even though...... (rinse and repeat scheme after scheme).

BOFH: The Christmas party was so good, an independent inquiry is required

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: I guess the truth hurts.

There used to be simple database programmes in the 80s and 90s that came on the front of computer magazines, or could be bought for a few quid. These did pretty much all that an ordinary office worker or business owner in a small company would need to store and sort simple information, like the details of a few hundred customers. Something like; Company Name>>Address>>Phone number>>Contact name>> main area of business>>Purchases. With just enough data management tools to be able to, say, sort out which customers were in the local postcode area, or which ones had previously bought a Mk 3 widget polisher. And even which customers in a given postcode area had already bought a Mk 3 widget polisher!

Relational databases take far too much time and complexity to even learn how to use, or to set up. And no small business can afford to buy in an expert to create something far too big and clunky for their needs, if it can be made to work at all. So of course they use Excel. Can't blame them either.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: I guess the truth hurts.

I do, or it's LibreOffice equivalent.

As examples;

A mileage form and timesheet. Both were issued as paper forms.

I recreated both into spreadsheets as templates, but then they did all the repeated maths for me. i.e. One added up all the short distances I had to travel and the other counted all the half days by my ticking a box next to the date ( 3.5hrs am 3.0hrs pm) + odd hours I worked, to give a daily and running/final total. With the added bonus of filling in most of the dates. At the end I can just save ( as a PDF these days) and email it in without bothering my scanner.

Or a simple exam time calculator with spaces for Start Time and Duration, then formulae that calculated the end time and additional 25% extra time - which I then sent to my mobile phone. Saves effort doing time calculations and making errors.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: I guess the truth hurts.

I frequently wish people would just use a fucking table in WORD/Writer or whatever.

It's far more suitable for most common uses.

Terry 6 Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: I guess the truth hurts.

I wish people would use it like that though!

'The computer was sitting in a puddle of mud, with water up to the motherboard'

Terry 6 Silver badge

I used to drive past there every morning, for a few years. Even outside the stink, while I was stuck in the inevitable traffic jam, was pretty appalling.

CLIs are simply wizard at character building. Let’s not keep them to ourselves

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: GUIs were and are intended to demystify the computer

I have to reluctantly agree that I think you may be right. While I use the right click ( in Windows) a lot. I've seen so many users that only ever click the right button by accident and then get confused/worried when strange unexpected menus appear.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Yes. There's a small irony embedded here too.

In Windows you can change the icons for the recycle bin to your own custom icons. It's been around for a long time. Through various versions- since 7 at least - maybe even Vista..

And they've never fixed the bug that stops it working properly.

The workaround has been known for years. You have to edit the registry and add a ,s to the icons' paths.

https://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/24761-recycle-bin-fix-custom-icons-not-refreshing.html

Maybe it's fixed in 11. Maybe they supply flying pigs too.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: GUIs were and are intended to demystify the computer

press the button, and then keep it held so that the menu would stay visible until you reached the item you wished to select, and then you released the button to select that option

Have they done away with that, then? Always IMHO a stupid design*. I hated it when I needed to use a Mac- a few decades back. In fact it's the main, perhaps only, reason that I refused to use one at work, when I was at a site that had some.

*Apple fans at the time seemed to delight in it, yet apparently now it's......gone?

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Intuitive GUI? My arse.

Which happens to be no different to the button that starts my car. And it's not hard to figure out that the button you use to "start" something is the same button you use to end it. It's what we do all the time irl.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: What's best - GUI or command line?

Absolutely. I'm not a coder. I haven't written a serious programme in 40 years ( and then not many). I want to be able to do everything I need in GUI..

But sometimes you just can't.

How to deorbit the Chromebook... and repurpose it for innovators

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: It's the storage, Luke

it's a 'human-condition' problem to want to store everything--photos, videos, files you are certain you'll ....

No it is not. Some humans, under some circumstances maybe. Others just the opposite.

Some people want to horde everything, equipment, emails, whatever,. Some nothing. Most of us somewhere between. ( I admit I tend more to the "If in doubt chuck it out" end)

We used to have battles over this sort of thing when I was working. Any times we had a skip I'd chuck any old stuff that we hadn't used within memory. And a member of staff would try to retrieve it because "We might need it some day".

My tests were to ask "When, in what circumstances,do you think we might need it. And, "If it was to become useful again would you remember we had it and where to find it"?

And without a definitive answer to each of these, out it goes.

I'm much the same at home. That old plastic jug, we never use- goes. And so on.

With (non-legally required) files my rule was and is, " Could I envisage serious regret without it?"

So most emails and the saved copies of letters are dumped within a short time of the end of their usefulness. Family photos, however, mostly get the full backup treatment- but even there I'll thin out some. Like if I happen to see a really crap photo that is like lots of others and doesn't serve to carry a memory it will go.Especially from the cloud backup locations.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Re-purposing Already Happening

That's a different kettle of fish.

It's the rather condescending "dolls" house that's the problem.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Re-purposing Already Happening

Girls-dolls house-2023?

Really?

Bank's datacenter died after travelling back in time to 1970

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Remember those batteries

*It does seem sometimes that as a rule of thumb, any component that a manufacturer thinks won't be noticed will be designed* sub-par.

Or redesigned. I had a film camera camera when I was a kid. Dad took it on holiday at if broke so he wanted to replace it. The original one had vanished from the shops, only version we could find was a rebadged one in Dixons. Absolutely identical to look at. Same price or thereabouts. Similar name. Apparently only the badge was different. 'Cept it never worked properly. The film would slip and frames overlap ( I didn't tell dad, he'd have been so upset).

When I took it apart it was obvious why. The original toothed wheel had been shiny steel. This one had lots of nylon parts instead.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Yearly tasks....

Even quarterly. Our mattress is meant to be turned 4 times a year. So, solstice and equinox days.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Yearly tasks....

specially when the responsible person leaves the company

Or even more likely, has moved on to new project/office/department/building ( multiple layers of likely movement iow) and left their old tasks to the new person, who may not even realise, or have been told about, every single detail- because the outgoing person has a squillion small asks that popped up on their diary from time to time Especially if there has been more than one change. There is absolutely no way that a hand-over will contain every detail of the outgoing person's year, or indeed the significance of the ones that are included.

BOFH: Just because we've had record revenues doesn't mean you get a Xmas bonus

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: In the glorious past

One of the common facets of private enterprise and public/government services is that when savings need to be made a lot of expensive people are employed to, err.... save money.

Scribbling limits in free version of Evernote set to test users' patience

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: $130 per year?

Interestingly Macrium Free (back up imaging s/w) is stopping updates from January. Only the paid version will be continued. I'll probably just keep using it, as is.

I've recommended it over the years. Can't now.

It seems a bit spiteful since I doubt that the free tier users will convert to the paid version. That's £60 for the home edition, but only gives "minor updates for this version only" i.e. once they bring out a new version it's as dead as the free one. Or £37 a year after the first "Black Friday half price" year, which, to be fair, isn't that expensive as such.