Posts by Toc-H-Lamp 18 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Mar 2017
My sister was plagued with calls for a local, quite upmarket, restaurant after an ad appeared in the paper with the wrong number. For the first week she politely told them it was a wrong number and gave them the correct one having informed the restaurant of the mistake. When the same ad went in, with the same mistake the following week she merrily took bookings for tables for 10, all vegans etc. The number was corrected in the following week’s ad.
We had a new call management system installed and running in early October around 2008. By the 13th of of the month it was falling over consistently. This system was reliant on Microsoft VBA which had accepted the 1st of the October as the 10th of January but couldn’t convert the 13th of of October to the 10th of the 13th month. 2 guys flew in from the states and were struggling to make sense of it, it was working fine on their test server (based in the US), but fell over locally. I happened to be sat in the room they were working in and when I mentioned date formats they poo pooed the idea, so I kept schtum. Two days later they finally got their heads around date formats and how differently configured systems handle date conversions "seamlessly" (ie, completely invisible to the user).
When I read the tales of Arthur and his knights of the round table a few years ago I was put in mind of a bunch of hells angels riding around having punch ups and being given free rein to tax the serfs for whatever they wanted. Why a country would be proud of this as a heritage I couldn't work out.
I told eon to go back to sending paper bills. Their system used to email me the fact that a bill was waiting to be read and i had to log in to their absolutely crap system to view it. I'm sure the password was reset after x weeks of me not logging in and my billing cycle was x+1.
Back in the eighties AI was dubbed fuzzy logic. It was incorporated into various systems but the main difference was that is was quite limited in it's scope. A story used to abound that the military had trained a system to recognise hostile shapes such as tanks and troop carriers and was showing it off to the bigwigs. A battlefield was littered with buses cars tanks and troop carriers. The system did nothing until it rained when it blew everything away. They then noticed all the hostile pictures were taken in the rain. No idea if it was true but it brightened may a dull training course. Fuzzy logic for fuzzy thinkers maybe.
I worked in support for a large copier sales / support company many years ago. A year or so after we launched our first analogue colour copier I took a call from someone at the national forensics laboratory asking how a counterfeit could be detected if it had been made on any of our devices. I replied, in all honesty, that it wouldn't look anything like the original and would be dripping in silicon oil. He seemed quite happy with this response and and far as I am aware it was never tested in court.
And very disappointed. I bought it for the size of screen (reading music on smaller screens is a real eye strain) but must admit I expected the OS to be more than the My First Computer crud that is IOS10. Zero access to the file system means each app has to have it's own copy of a file. So, I struggle to get a PDF onto the damn thing, then I have to import it into the sheet music app. That's the same file, now in two different apps. Updating/version control, forget it. If I use email and want to send a bunch of files (say, PDFs to the rest of the band) I have to send a separate email for each file. I can attach as many pictures as I like, but if it's not a picture I have to "Export" each one from the PDF app, and it creates a new mail each time.
iOS, should be spelt POS.
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