Posts by Kevin Johnston

Re: Ok, put it another way...

My wife thought I was mad when I suggested 12 double sockets when our Kitchen/Breakfast room was rebuilt. It was just under a year before she was looking for extra sockets

Most of that hideousness came from Enterprises which set their 'look and feel' in version 4 and never updated it (same happened with Admin processes). I have shown people two systems sat side by side, one with Outlook 2013 out of the box and one with Notes V9 also out of the box. They basically both look and perform the same way for email and as mentioned above it is way simpler to make changes on the Notes side than the Outlook side.

Re: So then people rely even more on the system, what if it fails?

Actually I have to disagree...Automation assumes that you have put in place rules/filters to cover all potential situations and this is where it always fails. The net effect of automation in cases like this is that 60% of your staff see no difference but the people working on the edges in research, security, customer support etc have to be excluded or else they spend half their day explaining why the have triggered an alert.

My wife is a nurse and for a while was working on Sexual Health, on a daily basis her account was locked because 'the system' had identified her as accessing inappropriate materials/websites.

Net effect, automation reduced her effectiveness by a big margin plus it required significant investment from support to keep clearing the alerts. This tends to be the case on all 'Edge' workers

If you dig around I am sure you will find the answer

Re: It's a sound salvation.

Pah...Amateur

I casually mentioned to my young daughter (aged 5?6?) that the inventor of the flip-flop was a Frenchman called Phillippe Philloppe. It was only last year she discovered from her University classmates that this was not the case.

My name is still Mud

Re: But...

Fully agree here. Many many moons ago I worked on Flight simulators and we had a perfect example of this when the Lockheed Chief Test pilot came to evaluate the work on our first C130 Sim. He sat in the cockpit and went through some basic procedures and reached up to the overhead panel and immediately failed the build.

Apparently the drawings for the overhead panels were wrong and everyone on the shopfloor at Lockheed knew that and they fitted the panels where they should be and not where the drawing said.

Re: Or...

As they are likely to have a good catalogue for phrase matching you could try offering mp3 files for the phrase in Klingon or Esperanto just to really test the system

What you mean possibly how they came to sell off their own offices to a Bermuda-based investment copmany and then lease them back to save tax? That sort of standard?

Re: Doctor, doctor

Quoted by many (but the one I remember is Billy Connolly)...

There is no pleasure so guilty that it is worth giving up for an extra 6 years in a Nursing Home

The Greater Good

Re: PETA... yeah... right...

Should that not be People for the Expedited Termination of Animals?

Re: Now draw me a nice picture of Jupiter....

Quite, what that should have been was a comment about the angle of the sunlight and how that affects the heat build-up.

I valued it at almost £80. I compared buying unlocked plus a SIM-only contract against the same phone/bundle from the various networks the unlocked route was cheaper by £80 through Carphone Warehouse.

Fully agree and people are sick of me banging on about this. In schools now they are so bubble-wrapping everything that children do not learn to evaluate risks which means they become adults and enter an environment where simple everyday events are trying to kill you (or have you kill yourself)

The same thing is happening in healthcare. People are so germ'o'phobic that children are no longer building a proper immune system and instead we are weeding out all the weak bugs and just leaving the superbugs by overusing anti-bacterials

Meh, too much of a bind doing it that way

Been reading the Looking Glass series from Travis Taylor by any chance?

Re: Poor users

Or more to the point, they were not poor until they spent all their money on Nest hardware

Re: Consent

As mentioned in the previous comments, personalised Ads tend to be for products/services already purchased so they would be late to the party and getting no money anyway. Again as mentioned above, non-personalised is far more likely to include things you may be looking to buy in the near future

So on balance, the less personalised they are the more likely they are to be successful. Hang on, that can't be right as it is the opposite of how Google are selling their services....I'm so confused

To be fair, the track names they entered were exactly what was on the CD cover but that is because they ripped it from a CD they got from a friend of a mate of a cousin who worked in Taiwan for a few months and had 'contacts'.

Re: Surely there's a joke about

Was just coming in with a similar observation. This is a story just pulsating with opportunities for schoolboy humour (or an entire show for an alt.comedian)

Re: Killing cortana . .

It's the Rampancy, I predicted this a looooong time ago when they first used the name in Windows10

Re: the disgusting smell of jet fuel

Used to go to Bembridge Airshow on the Isle of Wight (the airfield is the home of the Pilatus Britten-Norman Islander) and we had a Vulcan a few times...

Gear down, flaps down, full chat at what appeared to be 100 feet up....FEEL the sound. Sadly after shattering windows in nearby towns the display got sanitised.

Never seen Weekend at Bernie's?

I got a MiFi (?) unit from 3 and that has a 100GB per month allowance and has both wifi and an ethernet port....That what you were looking for?

Re: The judge is an idiot!

Was coming here to make much the same comment. They cannot claim both the Journalist protection and also the 'Common Carrier' protection so one way or other they will get hammered out of this.

Re: Coinbase doesn't allow credit card purchases.

Perhaps this is the cause of the muddied water and why Chase are blaming Coinbase. If the initial purchases were not being correctly identified by Coinbase, when they corrected their systems it flagged transactions as a currency purchase. It does seem odd though that if they have blocked all those other credit cards they should allow the cards from Chase to be used.

Or it could be this is yet another popcorn moment from the US Legal system

Re: Password managers and SSO...

and people look at me oddly when they realise I don't use our SSO product. Since I have Admin rights on some systems I figured it better if I struggle to remember my password once in a while rather that have someone get hold of my AD login credentials and be me on all those systems with no extra effort.

Re: Disinformation

You have missed the more probable reason

The backlog of phones is because the case each phone relates to is not significant enough to put any effort into (or to get them onto the 'must crack this phone' list) but collectively they help the cause for needing more powers. The repeated reference to this HUUUGE list is intended to bat away rational arguments from the people who see no need for those extra powers 'because terrrism/think of the children/pro-Trump/anti-Trump/furriners'*

*delete to select flavour of the day

Re: No, it's not AI

My hatred of DRLs comes from the almost standard practise of having lights on the front and an illuminated dashboard but absolutely nothing showing at the back. I have come far too close to far too many who haven't realised that daylight has faded and that they should now be using real lights.

If I remember my maths lessons correctly, if they have not selected the correct definition of average then well over half the UK consumers could be getting less than that awesome 34.6Mbit/s

"As for brand specific laptop docking stations... just don't go there."

Actually, and yes I do have the soapy flannel ready to wash my mouth out, Dell are very good here with the docking stations (port replicators for the picky) working on whole families of laptops and sometimes into new families too.

Pteh...a bubble went up my nose

Re: This is a perfect example of the press stating that correlation means causation...

I am reminded of a wonderful series on TV, 'Live and Loves of a She-Devil'...some amazing acting (despite Mr Waterman) and there was a scene which predicted this report.

A judge believed that peanut butter made people evil because everyone who was found guilty had eaten peanut butter in the period leading up to their trial. In almost every instance that was because they were on remand and it was served in the prison/remand centre they were held in.

Re: Finance figures are a bit scary

But who is surprised by this? It is exactly the same model which allows those high-end mobiles to command prices now up to a thousand squids/bucks. Very few people would pay that up front but using 'easy terms' they are happy to pay all that plus more to get it for less that a couple of hundred a month with free calls thrown in 'for nuffink'.

It was at least 10 years ago now that I looked at the lease option for a car and when I went through the numbers, in essence I paid for the car over 4 years and then just handed it back...such a bargain.

It rather destroys the purpose of a CV to sell yourself if you use the same words as everyone else.

So a prospective employer gets 25 CVs through the door for a role and 22 of them are almost identical, anyone care to guess which round file they are going into?

Let's just say that recent activity by the US to trample over non-US legal systems (not just Love but also the Ireland Microsoft mails, Mr DotCom and suchlike) do little to endear them to citizens of other sovereign nations. US Law does NOT rule the world despite the beliefs of certain politicians/TLSs and Hollywood and once you are within the borders of another sovereign country you have to play by their rules (diplomatic immunity excepted)