Posts by Kerry Hoskin
48 posts • joined Thursday 21st June 2007 13:07 GMT
Posted in Help-desk hell
low printer toner
One that always sticks in my mind was one that one of our boffins (I work in a research Lab) came out with. We have a shared printer on each floor of the lab, the boffin came in and said the printer was low on toner on the 3rd floor and could we change it. Normally we don’t we just ask the user to give the toner a shake and it’s good for a few more hundred pages, anyway I said to the boffin “ok could you give it a shake, and got the classic answer “what the printer?” Now these printers are HP Laserjet 4300DTN (extra paper trays) so weigh in at around 30kg!
not a surprise
After the the fiasco of its own updater being classed as a virus a couple of months back.
Re: Who the hell let Chirgwin write for the Register?
I'd never use the word psychology and science in the same sentance
Re: don't have a telly then
And that is really likely is it? I think not. As I said I don’t like paying the bleedy thing but if you want to watch TV you have to have one, pay up or don’t have a telly. It’s what £12’ish per month ( 2 packets of 20 fegs) Be interesting to know the personal circumstances of the “TV license” 74
Re: I'm all for the licence fee
actually Sky do produce quite a lot of their own content and the majority is actually really good
Apple invented NFC
it'll be called iTouch and Apple will of course try and take credit for inventing the whole NFC technology don't you know
news for you mate, I'm not in the Union so won't be going on strike, not all of us in the public sector are loony lefty pinkos. And on the issue of the strike, not very good timing this announcement, how to piss off public sector workers even more than they are already! I wonder how many will volunteer to cover boarder agency staff now!?
More news for you too, try comparing rates of pay within the professions in the civil service with the private sector (including us in IT) Think you’ll find private sector professionals do very nicely compared to their civil service colleagues. Bet your bolloxs that an HEO or SEO lawyer, accountant or IT Pro won’t be getting as good a package as a lawyer in law firm or an accountant or one of us in a private sector company. We might get a good pension but do we get other perks? health care, ermmm no, do we get nice bonuses, ermmmm no, do we get a company car ermmmm no, do we ever get large pay awards, errrmmmmm no, do we get decent expense allowances ermmmmm no, do we actually get much in the way of perks, ermmmm no. And how about career progression, my wife works for a large corporate (3M) in the past 6 years she’s had 2 promotions, I’ve had 1 in 14 yr’s and had to go through hoops to get that!
jobs going too
well this is the thing public sector job losses are also expected to hit over 700,000. I live in Cornwall so don't want to move (lived in the village all my life, one of the few these days!), but unless you want to work in a gift shop or a care home you need to commute to Plymouth for a better job, and the commute is 1.5 hours.
thanks
So after my pay freeze for 2yrs I'll be getting 1% for 2yr's then taking account of my increased pension contributions from April 2012 I think it'll work out that I won't have a pay rise for something like 5 yrs. And of course us civil service workers always had such BIG pay rises when the country was doing well, I don’t think I have EVER in 14yrs had a pay rise of over 3.5%.
Of course the pub beer garden next to my house full of p*ss heads drinking nearly all day, will still be full all year round while I go to work at 7am and get home at 7pm. The only difference is they’ll have their “pay rise” of 5.2%
Posted in Ice Cream Sandwich
fugly
it looks like it’s been thrown together by a 6 yr old it if fugly! As many a comment has said Win7.5 is the only OS that is doing something different. Love it or hate it (and I love it) it is totally different to android or iOS
Posted in Smart TV shootout
skyplayer
we've got a Panasonic in the bedroom and iplayer is pretty good. I just wish you could get Skyplayer on it
iHeat
watch out manufactures of hand warmers Apple’s lawyers will be after you soon
Posted in Ten... colour laser printers
Solid Ink
we only have Xerox wax printers on site, always had them from the days of the 8200, we now have 3 8560's. Always found them to be cheap to run (you'll need to program the power saving to suit your needs) and very easy to use, no big toners in multiple colours to store, just a few small boxes of ink and the maintance kits are also small. Print quality beats lasers in to the ground. We use papercut to bill our users per page.
it is on a card
it is avaliable on a card BarclayCard paypass has been around for a few years. I'd use it if I could find any shops that take it!
why?
iOS wasn't fully featured on release
old school
I prefered the old format to, give me 4 or 6 part episodes like the old school Dr Who
Is Wantmore for real?!
Is this clown for real? Now I don’t doubt that new Labour tried to Billy bullshit IT projects, as they did with everything else, but what is he going on about!? On one hand wanting more open source and a move from MS products and on the other wanting more Apple toys to be used, Apple being the most insular and proprietary IT (gadget) company going.
Our CEO is a bit of a MAC fanboi so we recently priced up a lease agreement for some MAC’s it worked out at £300 PER UNIT more expensive than the DELL Optiplex’s we normally lease and still £180 per unit more expensive than an equivalent spec DELL, as the lowest spec MAC’s were over spec for our normal requirements. And this doesn’t take in to account duplicating our software estate, extra staff training, support costs, loads more extra work integrating the bleedy things and the fact that the support is shite, back to base rather than one site and only 1yr access to their support services.
I think Mr Wantmore YOU were part of the problem and STILL are!
planning
We've just finished renovating my parents old house, its an old house circa 1820's and we totally gutted it, the only things left were the roof, four walls and windows. We spent a considerable sum on the heating/hot water system, it was actually our single biggest expense costing us around £20k. We're in a small village in Cornwall, so no mains gas, so we've got an oil boiler 90 odd % efficient, a pretty decent wood burner 82% efficient all plumbed in to one of these babies http://www.jaspi.co.uk/thermalstorage.html a 700l thermal store. We've done basically everything we can to save on energy, we've changed all our downlighters to LED (we have nearly 30 and at £20+ for 50w equivalents its not cheap!) we spent a lot on top notch efficient Siemens appliances, we've stuck over £3k worth of insulation in the house, the walls are solid stone so we've battened them all off and filled them with 50mm celotex and we've got more than enough insulation in the loft. We've got underfloor heating in the main downstairs living space, again more efficient than rads, and rads upstairs.
Now the thermal store has plenty more inputs and we have already put the coils in for solar thermal, BUT as we live in a fecking conservation area I have to get planning permission to put the panels up, and I can see us being knocked back on this as we have plenty of fecking moaners in the village. We're in a really good location SE facing large roof area, etc and in the summer it should provide most if not all of our hot water. So I'm minded just to put them up anyway, or I can put them on a frame in the garden, and if I'm told to move them I'll stick them in the garage over the winter and them bring them out again the next spring! If the government are serious about renewables they need to sort the planning out, we're already at a major disadvantage living where we do, energy wise with oil at 60p/l (I was paying 18p/l 6 years ago)
Time this country woke up, if the attitudes that are around now were around in the Victorian era we'd have feck all in this country as nothing would ever get built!.
Posted in Cornish pasties awarded protected status
mmmmmm
I think I might have to have a Rowes for my lunch, trouble is I have already had one this week, but I can feel a large steak coming on!
Posted in Cornish pasties awarded protected status
nope
nope they're Cornish, based in Callington, but to call them a pasty is a travesty to decent pasties everywhere. If you want a decent pasty and are down in Cornwall try Rowes they have a few bakeries they also one Plymouth and I think in Exeter.
same with us
we have a dev job going in our lab, so far loadsssssssss of appliaction form requests from non EU nationals, they won't get the job as they haven't got a work permit, total waste of time for our HR department
grants
totally agree, or bring back a proper grant to those doing properly accredited BEng or B.Sc degrees. If you want to do a BA in Media Studies you're on your own!
Posted in Isilon may stay on Seattle scene
hope so!
we're looking at putting in 1Pb of Isilon storage here next year and I wouldn't want EMC mucking around with it! Everything we seem to buy gets taken over by EMC, We've got Legato Networker,bought by EMC, DataDomain DD box, bought by EMC and now Isilon, grrrrrr
Posted in Just how special are Power Users?
no more power users
Agreed, I work in scientific computing in a lab, so we support about 250’ish PC’s and maybe 50 or so Linux Workstations. Very few of the boffins need anything out of the ordinary to do their work, with the exception of the modelling group, remote sensing group who are all doing big number crunching, and a few dev teams, no one else needs anything beefy to run office, Minitab, sigmaplot, etc. Our stock PC is DELL optiplex 760, Win7, 2Gb ram, which is perfectly good enough for 90% of the labs staff, costs us about £17 per PC per month. Gone are the days of users spending £1k on a desktop PC, thankfully.
Posted in Just how special are Power Users?
ideas of grandeur
We used to have big problems with “power” users, or those with ideas of grandeur buying whatever they fancied. But over time we have reeled them in. We now lease all our kit so everyone gets the same, if you want anything better your budget has to pay, and it only gets connect to our LAN if its from our preferred supplier, DELL in our case. We’ve found that the only ones that will pay for better kit are the ones that really need it such as modellers, who tend to go for workstations running Linux, they then run a VM on that workstation running windows for using office, etc.
We’re using the same tactic to reduce laptop purchases, as we used to have lots of users with both a laptop (spent most of its time at home with their kids using it) and a desktop. If they have a leased PC and want a laptop they have to give the leased PC back to us and use a docking station with a laptop, amazing the amount of users who all of a sudden don’t need a laptop! For occasional laptop use we have a bookable pool of laptops for those users who don’t have a laptop and might need them for a short period.
Posted in Osborne details painful cuts for UK
could have been worse
at least the science budget isn't being cut. Wish they had got rid of the bleedy old person "Free" bus pass. Our buses are so full of old duffers that paying passengers can't even get on! There are several on the bus I catch using their pass to get to work on! grrrrrrr The cost of the thing is around £1Bn a year, and don't get me started on the disabled entitlement to a pass, dyslexia for instance!
Posted in EMC boosts NetWorker
Hope so,
As a Networker and DD user I hope so, but I doubt it Networker is AWFUL!
been here before?
We've been here before BT have form for this kind of bolloxs. They did it with their ADSL rollout, you had to go and register interest and if your exchange got enough interest they broadband enabled it. They used the same “not economically worth it” excuse, now what is one of their biggest revenue streams? Oh that’ll be broadband then. They could be making even more cash from broadband if they had rolled it put properly in the first place, without wasting time and effort with registering interest.
I'm actually embarrassed to hold share in BT, total shower
BT
I don't hink anyone EVER expects much from BT!
BT
The goon from the BT advert lives in my village in Cornwall. Not an interesting fact but true.
I hope they spend the cash better than they did with ACTNOW
How much!?
Speaking as a Cornishman (and that’s a proper Cornishman not some fuckwit who’s moved down here) I’m surprised it’s going to cost as much as £134M as no one actually lives in Cornwall, its full of holiday letts and second homes.
Posted in Air steward resigns via emergency chute
as wobblies go it sounds a good one!
I bet this poor sod has had the same thing happen to him on every flight. "Ladies and Gent's please remain seated until the plane stops" queue some clown standing up and getting their luggage.
How many of us have the same, PLEASE DO NOT USE EMAIL as the system is being patched, etc queue the phones calls that they can't open outlook. We've got a number of Xerox Phaser printers, they really don't like to be power cycled as when they warm up they use a lot of wax, so we have BIG DO NOT POWER OFF signs on them, found a user switching one off, got the reply to my question of didn't he see the sign "oh didn't think that applied to me!"
Only thing missing in this story was the bloke should have punch the t*at in the face, at least the arrest would have been for something worth while.
Posted in iTunes disses doctorates
Pompous!
I work in a lab and we've more PhD's/Dr's than you can shake a stick at (I'm not one of them only being a lowly M.Sc) Most of them have the intelligence of a coat hanger, but that's another story.
Any road up a few years back we had a new PA for the director of the lab start, and she happened to be married to a local MP who had just retired and being stuck in the house of Lords, so she was a Lady. She happens to be the most down to earth Aussie you'll come across. Anyway one of our more pompous boffins went to see her and tore her off a strip as she didn't call him Dr when sepaking to him, she came back with a classic put down informing him that he in future he should refer to her as Lady, that shut the T*at up!
waste waste waste
Spot on! The past government (you know the one that’s left us all deep in the s*it) had this loony idea that 50% need to go to Uni and spent the past few years conning youngsters in to this false dream that they could go to Uni, do their BA in Media studies come out and get a nice well paid job. When in the real World they go to Uni waste 3 years when instead they could have been earning money, get a pointless BA that isn’t really worth the paper it’s written on and gain a nice debt of £20k that’ll take year for them to pay off. Fantastic, plus to get all these extra people to study they have lowered the standard of every qualification from GGSE upwards to make sure people can qualify to get in.
We used to have a Uni placement student every year in our department, some years we’d have two of them, doing dev work. I was shocked to find out that they can PASS a degree subject with 40% and only need 30% to pass an exam! Bleedy hell that means they can pass and exam not knowing nearly 2/3 of the subject.
Anyway a little idea why not bring back the grant system for those wanting to study B.Sc or BEng, if this government are serious about science and engineering. If you want to do a BA in Theatre studies, etc take a loan out.
Ermmmm what about Devonport?
Hmmmm sounds like a typical fudge to me that will end in a cock up! The thing is the MOD plan to shut Devonport (and turn it in to a nuclear dustbin of old subs) by moving all subs and frigates to Portsmouth and to Jocko land. A part from the nuclear sub dismantling job that they have planned for Devonport, the other role is for all the amphibious capability to be based in at the base (it already is, as there is a very large Marines base in Plymouth). Now both of the carriers were meant to be based in Portsmouth, so how does this fit with plan to have Devonport as home to the amphibious capability?
Grants
Just an idea, but how about giving a maintenance grant to those doing Science and Engineering subjects. So if you want to study a B.Sc or BEng you get a nice fat grant if you want to do BA, LLB, etc you take a loan. Only trouble is sometime faux Science subjects like Psychology get lumped in with proper science and get awarded B.Sc’s
who's going to carry the phone?
any ideas of which operators are going to carry the phone?
NOT just an AMD issue
All this "it's an AMD issue" is passing the buck a bit. I've tested SP3 on 4 DELLGX620's so NOT AMD chipsets and 2 of them failed, one with a 0x0000007 and the other with a constant reboot issue, grrrrrrrr
grrrrrrrrrrrrr
Yep tis a pain! Although you're meant to need it to transfer money to people you haven’t transferred money too before, Barclays seem to have removed any previous entries you had in your payment address book! grrrrrrr
missiles
Our Navy is really struggling I go past Devonport on my way too and from everyday and there’s not many ships alongside and those that are mainly foreign.
SeaWolf performed very well in the Falklands considering it was brand new and hardly tested, it was probably one of the most advanced missile systems around in 1982 and has since been upgraded several times.
SeaDart also isn’t an anti-missile missile it’s designed to shoot down aircraft so hitting a missile is bleedy good going.
sources of cash
How much money could be saved if the ID Card fiasco gets kicked in to touch????
BIG cock up
Password protected was the words Darling used, no mention of encryption. Disks sent with TNT but NOT recorded or registered!!!! But this was done by a junior official and against HMRC best practice. Darling has admitted a probable breach of DPA, too dam right!
Heads really need to roll at HRMC this isn’t the first time.
Posted in Vodafone billing woes continue
Not the only ones
They're not the only ones with problems, anyone tried downloading a copy of their Orange bill lately?!
I've not managed to download one for a few weeks so I got hold of Orange, and they told me theres a Global issue at the moment so if you want a copy of your Bill you'll have to ask them to post you one!
BT shambles
I've been a customer of plusnet for over 2 years, never had any problems. BT on the other hand, shambles. They took 5 months to install a fiber connection to our site, this is dispite the quoted 60 day lead time!
Good news indeed
V Good news I've had shares in IMG since 98 and its good to see them taking off once again, and this time due to their own strenght rather than on the back of a bubble.
Posted in Britain gets shiny new science minister
Browns record on Science not good
Actually Mr Brown managed to raid the Research
Councils budget this year to the tune of £68M the first time this has ever happend!
SPV E650
We have a number of Windows Mobile 5 devices and I have just got an Orange SPV E650 running Mobile 6. Must admit I’m very impressed, a synch to use and to setup. Using GPRS and direct push email is simple and just works (when in range of a WiFi hotspot you can use this instead of GPRS to get your email). All you need to do is enter the email server name and your domain Id and password on the device and away you go. On our Mobile 5 devices we had to import our exchange certificates root cert as our cert suppliers root cert wasn’t trusted under Mobile 5, but seems to be under 6.
As for the phone, the E650 is very nice, the only thing it lacks is 3G but it does have Edge (If you can find any locations with Edge coverage, I can’t find any info on Edge sites!). It’s pretty small but with a very useable flip out keyboard and decent screen.
