Posts by Terry 6 5609 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Jul 2009
It's only a can of worms of the C suite suits fail to be interested in providing the product that they claim to be selling. Once the product becomes the share value rather than goods and services the company is meant to be providing it becomes a simple case of customer manipulation.
So for example, VM supply me with a brilliantly fast broadband service and a hub adequate for my household. The fixed phone costs nothing and their (sim only) mobile phone contract is the best value for my needs.
But it's not a good hub and their email service is a dismal Spam attractor. Their customer service is limited to "We'll book and engineer" even when the problem is a fault in their own systems - because they don't ever admit that they have a fault until they're forced to, even to their own staff. And their web site is clearly run by their marketing dept. because it's sole purpose appears to be to direct you into their spiders web where they can sell you more stuff. Actual useful information is hard to find - even information about what you could buy, because they'd rather sell you what they want to sell instead of what you want to buy.
"Only sales and customer retention makes money."
This only makes sense if you compartmentalise a company's work. i.e treat the whole as less than the sum of its parts.
In effect selling the product is seen as making money - but making the product is seen as losing money.
Marketing then becomes a way of making the public pay the same, or greater, for a product that not as good as it should be.
It's what happens when beancounters become executives and shares become short term gaming chips for corporate traders..
This is another issue. Banks' marketing depts have a history of sending emails with clickable links of the "Click here to log in and see our latest rates" variety. One month I got one such email from them within days of receiving one from their security dept, warning all customers never to click links in emails to log in!
Why is there no icon for despair?
(Which, to be fair, was also the response of their customer service person when I phoned to complain about this- a sense of despair, but knowing that the most they could do was pass this up the line).
In another thread* Google's use of automated decision making is covered.
In this one we must assume a human chose to pursue this matter against a valid security training company.
But the outcome is broadly the same- a bloody stupid decision is made without any sense of human common-sense, case-by-case, judgement.
I had joked in that thread that maybe there weren't any humans and they were really being run by computer.
But I'm starting to think it wasn't a joke.
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* https://www.theregister.com/2021/02/08/terraria_developer_cancels_stadia_port/
From this it would appear that Google has completely given control of it's own business to automated systems. To the point that not even large, business critical clients can get problems sorted out by a human with authority.
Maybe there isn't anyone. Maybe the CEO (Pichai Sundararajan apparently) and the rest of the C suities and senior management are simply holograms of a big central computer. Maybe there is no human control of Alphabet at all - just a massive subterranean network of interlinked circuits.......
I wonder how much of he siloing and stuff is partly due to senior managers (c-suite types) having come up through the fashionable "management is a unique skill and you don't need to know anything about the product" system. It seems to foster a view that sees the whole as just being a sum of the parts- to be assembled elsewhere - which may be true for some things, such as say a car. But is useless when the product is a one-off and the parts need to be fitted together during the process.
Exactly. Most (for UK and for equivalent elsewhere) users consider the internet to==.com, or .co.uk at a pinch..
They might have to deal with a .gov.uk .org.uk or .edu.uk from time to time, but treat these as special cases if they even notice and don't just get to them via a link.
But the internet is all one big .com to most people.
(I have no qualification, just a thought).
But wouldn't a generic tld (other than very specific ones such as a .porn if that exists) be a bit of a no no for marketing people?
They need to differentiate their brand, so unless they can afford to own and keep, say .flowers for themselves they're going to feel happier with a generic [company-name].com address. Indeed it would probably cause confusion with customers. Bunch-of-daffs.flowers is not particularly different from bouquet-of-roses.flowers etc etc. They're all going to be read by the punters something-or-other.flowers. Especially if there was any significant number of companies wanting a 'flowers tld. How many variations could there be that still utilised the .flowers bit?
I'm sure there are still. But since it's hard to imagine anyone needing to do feet-inch multiples any more, hardly of relevance. I assume anyone using these measures- for whatever reason- will have learnt that specific skill, just as when I briefly worked in casino I knew the odds multiplication tables. Of no utility outside gaming.
You miss the point. I did not ever state not being taught the tables, nor using a calculator instead. You seem to be responding to some other view. I referred to the 12x table and high stakes rote learning. A very different set of issues.
12x12 has little or no 21stC utility and was made compulsory by politicians because that's how it used to be. Learning.12x12 owed its existence to the premetric measuring and money. What used to be called "reckoning". Knowing how many inches in 13 shillings. The 12x table is an arbitrary place to stop otherwise.
Tables to 10x10 are essential- at which point your breaking down into smaller chunks is the required skill (5x10 add 5x2 == 5x12).. We work in base 10, not base 12.
Also, learning the stuff is best achieved without high stakes testing. There is a world of difference between checking the kids know this stuff and using it as a target to measure school performance. That just means it becomes a must instead of a should. We generally recall better when not under a guillotine.
Sadly, and imo, stupidly the 11 to 12x table are mandatory in the UK. And part of the high stakes assessment, so that massive pressure is put on the kids to learn this stuff- with the concomitant reduction in the ability to learn it.
Not because it's much ( if at all) needed, but because the idiots who decide these things want to go back to the Good Old Days. Which means 12x table, rote learning and lots of useless testing.
Late 8os or thereabouts I bought my first flat in hackney.
It had been previously had the owner's aged mother upstairs and he'd created an internal stairway. Now converted back to two separate flats.
I came to change the light fittings and carefully isolated the ring.
All was fine until I came to do the hallway. Having done a couple of other rooms I could have been forgiven for not checking this one was safe.
Luckily my inner paranoid was feeling frisky that evening. Checked, glowed.
This one was still very much live.
He'd wired it so that it worked the light upstairs or something ( can't remember the details) as well as the hall, and used the upstairs supply. Luckily there was a taped off wire for my supply in there. I can't remember what I did with the upstairs supply.
Exactly. In my case the front door is within 2m of the pavement. Having an external camera/bell means that I have some visual control of space so that no one decides to nip through and smash their way in. It also means that I can speak to a delivery person before they dump/ not deliver a parcel and b****r off without waiting the few moments for me to get to the door. Or at least see where the parcel is.
And if it isn't online, they can still just knock on the window.
A friend is in a wheel chair. Her use case is the same as yours.
Think how many departments, each providing how many services to how many types of users under how many pieces of legislation with how many mandatory safeguards because of how many potentially explosive risks. (Perhaps literally where national security or certain kinds of licensing become involved).
This is true. I campaigned against Labour ( as a LibDem).
But that's history.
What we have is a bunch that are far to the right of any One Nation Tories, and more pointedly, aren't really Tories either. They're all about snouts in the national trough and show very little interest in actual politics beyond furthering their own ends.
Looking for the joke icon in Meerkat's comment.
Unless it wasn't meant as irony.
But that's hard to believe, since "The left" has no connection to this story at all.
A few side comments on the Godawful incompetence of the current govt. but you don't have to be on the Left to cringe at their awfulness.
Ditto a good few pointing at the so called "Tax payers Alliance"'s disingenuous targetting at just certain kinds of governmental expenditure/waste but not other more egregious ones. But again no need to be on the left.
Unless the Left here is defined as being anyone slightly less vicious than Attilla the Hun.
A fair point. But using the/any Govt's. website need a lot of secure checking and double checking. It's massively complex ( i.e. big and interconnected) and has to be government level secure with the highest thinkable level of protection.. And it's forever changing as legislation changes the kind of interactions required and the details of those transactions.
OTOH try using, say, VirginMedia's quite ordinary, quite small by comparison, web site - that one ought to be dead simple to log in and navigate. Is it Hell.
Precisely this.
The whole quote;
"Taxpayers will be livid at this totally avoidable largesse. With the tax burden at a 50-year high, Brits expect their taxes to be spent on frontline services, not bungling bureaucrats. Ministers and civil servants must be relentless at eradicating wasteful spending like this."
is full of bullshit.
"Livid" compared to what we think about millions dying due to poor Covid response, hardly. Compared to our feelings about crap PPE bought from govt's pals. Definitely not.
"Largesse". No Civil servants will be getting any extra pay for this - even if a few more will be employed, rather than being on the dole. Compared to the "Largesse" paid to all the assorted govt. cronies £10m over 10 years is too small to be considered as even peanuts.
"bungling bureacrats". Does this idiot imagine that the people who are working on this at a low grade are the same ones who omitted this web link ? Or is this just an attempt to stigmatise hard working, lowly civil servants, as a matter of principle? (And no I'm not a civil servant)
"relentless at wasting..... like this. . How much would it cost to search out small drops of wastefulnesses in any organisation? A bloody sight more than they could save - whether public or private- I'd warrant. And in the meantime the really big buckets of waste, like HS2, failed PPE, duplicated governmental departments etc etc will be given the nod, because rich people can make money off the back of those.
Yes. This and points above (Warm Braw) all rely on the fucking chair not being several stages below a half-wit who will a) be the one who hasn't submitted their agenda items, b) doesn't keep people to the agenda, such as it is, c) talks for ages about stuff that even they didn't want on the agenda and d) asks if there's any other business- even though we'd all agreed at the previous meeting(s) that we wouldn't have an AOB section.
Whereas, after about 30 years of doing no coding I'm teaching myself Python. And the quality of the books and online guides supposedly teaching beginners is truly shocking.
Things like instructions how to use a command that don't explain what they do, how they fit in with other commands or why you'd need to use it. Or using undefined terms to define a new term.. And of course examples of code with variable names that sound like they might be commands. The list goes on.
Yes, in discussion with academics ( we did a lot of post-grad training) it became apparent to me that promotion and even job security was related totally to the number of papers pushed into journals and not the quality of the paper; or indeed the journal as far as I can make out.
A further downside of this was that we were regularly sent research papers and even subscribed to a journal or two of reading research. But in the last few years of my working the quality of papers and the insight they provided to how kids actually acquired reading had shrunk to a point below negligible. There were any number of comparative studies of minor mechanical skills learning across different cultures/nationalities etc but fuck all about what was happening inside the heads of our kids.when they were doing less well/better than others. It was very obvious that the research was based on two factors;
1) research grants for studying anything to do with teaching phonics were far more available than actually looking at the ( considerable) evidence that phonics isn't the panacea the politicians and businesses claimed and
2) Most of the research was based on doing surveys and sums rather than forming and testing hypotheses - the Psychology, which requires scientific method, thought and creativity and has a risk of a null outcome, had been replaced with something more like Anthropology, which is about observation and recording and always has a positive result because no testable predictions are made.So there's always something to publish at the end of it.
Two sides here
As a peripatetic literacy difficulties teacher I spent my years in and out of various schools' classrooms, working with the kids referred.
In one a retired teacher I knew had come back after a few years to cover a class or something. Doing the register in a class that had kids she'd never taught she kept saying "I taught your mum/dad/aunty". The kids were in awe.
But also, since non-readers often in turn have children with reading difficulties, it was a matter of pride that when I retired/got made redundant in the cuts, not one single referral to my service was the child of one of my earlier referrals.I never had to say "I taught your dad".
100% this. Many years back I studied at Bradford, not one of the top unis. But many of my lecturers were very young and very enthusiastic. Later they went on to much more prestigious roles (one being the highest paid uni VC until the newspapers got wind of her salary!). But I got a good education that's stood me in good stead for around 40+ years
Yup, I send my phone pictured to the main PC, where there's a backup routine that even paranoics think is a bit extreme*. But I have to force myself to go through and remove the obvious crap/duplicated/unnecessary ones.
This, though, for me and I'm guessing most others is not simply reluctance to remove pictures "just in case" so much as reluctance to face this chore when there are five times more photos of five times more subjects than I could possibly ever want to see.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------* Everything from when the kids were young was already backed up to a set of DVDs -or two.
The entire photos' partition (including the early stuff and scans of old paper photos).is now backed up to a second HDD's partition, reserved for photos, then to an external HDD which is regularly swapped so that there is always another drive with the pictures on. A further copy is on a 32gb USB pen drive, which is not stored in our house.
Then, Since Windows' screen saver routine can't access more than one designated folder I've made a selection of the most important or interesting pictures and saved these to a single folder on the (underused) C: drive- which is regularly imaged to another internal HDD's "images" partition, and also to the external HDD's "images" partitions.
And then I back up most of the pictures to the various free "cloud" storage, (dropbox,Onedrive, Google and so forth) from time to time.
Can't beat a good false analogy to start the week.
An operating system is a way of making computers work. There aren't different kinds of OS people except by preference.
(Left handers grow up knowing the world isn't built for them and how to make adjustments. Further more, they can require a fair number of adjustments if they so wish. Schools are required to modify teaching accordingly, though whether they do is a different matter. The late and unlamented Cyril Burt did a lot of really good work on that, before he went over to the Dark Side.)
And if an operating system is developed that is too complex/unwieldy/unfriendly for everyday users that's a failure of vision if the developers ever want to see the Year of Linux..If they don't they should at least leave the route clear for those who do - and stop moaning about Microsoft if you've picked up the ball and walked off the field.
That'd be brilliant for me. I have a Lenovo Thinkpad 2 in 1. I'd love to use it as a 'Nux box, with a lightweight distro, Windows is too heavy for it really. But getting it to boot with the right drivers was a nightmare. Especially getting the screen to function in tablet mode. Maybe there is no distro/selection of drivers that will give full functionality. Online discussions of this matter seemed to conclude at that.
I gave up
This is a fair point. One I wouldn't argue with.
Some 'nix users and developers will have a use case for an OS that is not amenable to non-techie or simply non-interested people.
However, such Distros are not kept as a separate category of software - but are listed with all the other distros. Frequently 'nux advocates will point new users to more consumer distros in a sniffy "Use this until you can take the proper stuff" sort of way. Like it's the gateway drug to true Linux addiction.
Which is unhelpful.
Maybe it's time that developers stopped forking broadly similar distros (I've never understood why there are so many - and that's not too helpful either btw ) and instead forked between Consumer Linux and Techie Linux, with distinct identities. Who knows, then it might really become "The Year of Linux" that we keep hearing about. Mint is pretty close.
In a sense, of course, that's what we have with Android, too. God help us.
And if too few of the volunteer devs who produce the OS are interested in the consumer version it can wither on the vine and leave the techies to use their OS of choice.
With respect, who the f*** wants to install an operating system on the basis that with more experience they'll be able to install another operating system.
It's an Operating System . The clue's in the words.
Otherwise what this turns into is Linux is for deep down grags, and Windows is for people who actually do stuff with computers.
I've dabbled in using 'nux distros of one kind or another for years.
But that "hair shirt" approach is never far below the surface. There's always something that doesn't "just work". And then there's always someone who will say " Ah you just need to use the command line; type sudo string of incomprehensible characters and all will be resolved". And you're never far from someone who sneers at any distro which doesn't require a postgraduate diploma in Advanced Witchcraft either. Mint- you don't want to be using Mint lad. Real Men use Cyberfloggernix. It's command line only and you can only enter data by typing ascii character numbers in Hex
The point about an OS is that it shouldn't get in the way of using the box with the programmes inside to do stuff that needs doing.
The software and entertainment industries create a lot of moral panic with this one.
Every pirated copy is posed as a lost sale at an income loss equal to the total retail value of those copies.
But in reality there is little validity to that argument. A great many, maybe most, pirated copies would never have been purchased instead. On the other hand some retail purchases may well have only been made knowing that they can be shared with mates as a quid pro quo. Certainly true of music CDs.
It's not a zero sum game. The industry only loses money when it loses sales.
It's illegal. It may annoy them. But whether the loss to the producers is anything like as big as they claim is a different kettle of ball games.
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