Posts by Terry 6

Re: New Name for Autopilot needed

With no knowledge at all I'd just assumed that route mapping (satnav) was part of the autopilot system and took the car off the big road into the smaller one because that was what it was meant to do.

Otherwise, what *does* it do?

Re: Autopilot

The facts do not bear this out. It is not up to being " an autopilot with a warning". And tesla isn't just covering themselves by issuing a warning. It is not self-driving. See above comments.

(Upvotes for the previous post are surprising. They so contradict the agreement with earlier posts).

I thought that. It's enough having to deal with all the maniacs out there without having to watch your own bloody car for suicidal tendencies.

Even though not an American ( and my psychology degree decades in the past) I'd assert pretty strongly that no one would think that Tesla used the word part "auto" as being short for automobile. Indeed, I'd say that it was a close to inconceivable as you can get. (Not 100% so, obviously, since previous poster has suggested it).

Re: Who HR's HR

This is in line with the very observable fact that every time there is a "need" for cuts a new batch of "change management consultants" arrive to add to the HR dept. And yet when the next "need" comes on the horizon and a new bunch arrive the old ones are still there.

Re: I say it's plausible

TBH*, being a pessimist I'd say that even if you have tested it there's a >0 chane that stuff will not go right.

*OK. I'm a belt and braces person who still thinks you should have a piece of string, just in case.

Re: Where does it come from?

I was starting from the ground here- the initiation of a project by the using organisation. Maybe one performed in-house even; I'm old enough to remember when that happened.

Any one who goes on a foreign holiday and won't eat the local food..........

{embarrassed by English tourists who only eat pie/chips/spag boll- not other pasta o/c}

Re: Well done Liam...

The best advice I was given was "start speaking". It then gets better as you go along, if you listen and gradually incorporate what you hear.

Re: Besides invisible diacritical marks

Verandah bungalow pyjamas etc

And read kids' books.

Where's Spot available in all.

Also kids' songs.

These match conjugations cases etc.

Re: StarOffice, OpenOffice, LibreOffice

Sometimes it's just fun.

There's still free software for "non-commercial use only". Belarc I think uses that.

Re: Well done Liam...

I was unable to learn languages at school. Near total failure. After I left school I discovered I could pick up languages really quite easily if I was actually in a place that spoke them. Other people I knew did really well at school languages. I was really envious. But they proved totally useless trying to use them in real life. So I guess it's horses for courses.

Re: taxi driver principle

Years ago gold got stupidly more valuable. At the height of the market my late mother-in-law was saying " I need to buy gold" (I don't know what with btw). Head in hands.

I'm hazy on dates, but much of Microsoft's descent into moral ambiguity, crap software and aggressive design changes seems to have its roots in the moment when they realised that the internet was going to be a big part of the future ( or indeed was already) and that they'd totally missed it. The sense of panic knowing that they were on the verge of irrelevance is still, I'd guess, a big part of their decision making

Re: The REAL motivation

Oh my God!

I agree. Is it me?

My assumption has been for a while that MS want everything to arrive through the "Store". That they envy Google's control of phone apps and Apple's of their phone/tablet apps. With the cash flow and ad harvesting they can accrue.

And that is about the only thing that they do that seems to have any logic ( however malign) to it.

The rest, stupid design changes that worsen user's experience etc. is probably just internal politics and empire building --is my guess.

Yes, but.

The "but" being why the F did no one a) make sure the punters knew this was looming in their lives b) tell them when they arrived that the work was starting or c) make sure that the customer facing information sources knew and could tell people if they looked online/phoned

I think this is endemic in call centre staff. I don't think I've ever had someone from a major company come to fix something, who'd been told what the call centre knew and brought the right bits. I'm not meaning technical stuff here. What part of "The freezer handle is broken and needs a new one refitted" is too complicated to pass on so that he arrives with the dratted handle?

"Any updates to the data will now be committed to the database, will trickle down to related records, and cannot be undone - do you wish to proceed Y/N".

F That. I'd probably choose "no" too if I saw this.

Virgin are my faves for this. They seem to never tell their phone staff or update the service status when there's a problem at their end. So you can find the internet not coming through. Reboot the box, and it still isn't working ( but had been an hour or two before and nothing has happened otherwise). Check service status- nothing.

Phone 'em up and they say they need to run a check. Then it's "We'll send an engineer a week on Monday" time.

Usually by then Downdetector has caught up.

Once, just once, a phone jockey said "I've been getting a lot of calls- I'll check". He asked his manager - who'd heard nothing but went to make some calls. And in due course I was told there was work going on in the area to fix a problem they'd known about for 4 hours already.

I think VM managers are afraid to admit publicly if anything goes wrong.

Re: What does installing a crypto miner have to do with computer security?

Ahh. Interesting to know. having had a few of those in my spam folder. (And not having, as noted above, used the thing in decades).

Re: How did that accident happen? Whoops just like that.

It's an old joke I heard when I was about 12 ( so >50 years ago).

Re: Sounds like us (sic)

I did that as a kid. Old enough to want to know how the light switch suspended over my bed worked. Not old enough to know that unscrewing the thing could be a bad experience.

The switch was a bakelight globe thing, probably about 3cm diameter, that was in two halves with an external push arm and then the live gubbins inside. Easy to unscrew for even a small child.

Re: They had it coming.

"They're not given much time for a job"

There's a whole world of wisdom tied to that. Whenever I find a cock-up in some corporate process, from cleaning to completely rebuilding a school there will always be a point where some fuck witted bean counter has said one of "We need to get that done in n number of days", fewer than the experts have assessed it, or reduced the budget to less than it's possible to complete the work with, or said "We'll find money for that bit later". ( They never fucking well do, though.).

So you end up with inadequate storage space/cupboard doors that don't quite fit/ the promised and essential electronic locks that weren't installed/network sockets with no computers ( or vice versa), but staff who need to use them and so on and so on.

Re: I predict .....

And, if Sacramento is anything to go by, power lines that are suspended from poles between houses rather than tucked safely under the ground.

Re: Toyota.... paying to retain capability

Yeah, I'm well aware of this one. We can afford to replace our car with a hybrid (it's a luxury that we do so before we come close to needing to, but we could get our money's worth first if we wanted to).

We buy a lot of our stuff at Costco- which is usually much cheaper, we have access to cash to buy there in bulk and the room (especially now, emptyish nest) to store it; and their new petrol station is much cheaper too. Even without Costco we'd be able to buy a lot of stuff at bulk prices- often considerably cheaper that way and requires fewer journeys too.

Re: I predict that Toyota is going to remove functionality ...

In and around London most of the public transport routes seem to be based on the work patterns from before the wars. Which means that if you want to travel between two adjacent locations that aren't on the same "spoke" a ten minute journey could easily take an hour or more.

I used to travel between a handful of locations in North London and could manage two 60 minute slots in an afternoon using my car. If for some reason I had to rely on public transport I'd use my entire lunch break getting to the first and wouldn't have time to get to the second. Because instead of getting into my car and driving 10 minutes I'd have to walk ten minutes to a stop, wait ten minutes for a bus, travel 12-20 minutes to somewhere near another stop, spend 10-20 minutes walking and waiting for that bus, travel 10-15 minutes and walk 10 minutes. Total over an hour on a good day . With everything I needed for the work in a bag. For just one appointment. And since the schools needed me to be reliably on time there was a significant chance that I wouldn't even be able to do that piece of intervention work.

I'd have loved to use public transport more, but it would have meant travelling for twice as long at the start and end of the day ( bus and tube routes from home were in an optimum location and still wouldn't get me directly to where I needed to be) and achieve half as much during the day.

Re: "All office chairs are gaming chairs"

It seems a fair bit more difficult to get Armagnac these days. At least without going to specialist (read Bloody Expensive) supplier. ;-(

Re: Happy New Year

Clearly a tweak to that algorithm, then.

Re: Paid parkng Tesco....

It's about the data. It's always about the data.

Re: Tesco....nicked our car park..

American stores, as far as I could see when I've been to visit my cousins in California, seem to be mostly in the spaces between towns, i.e. a strip of the places a shortish drive from the town. Without free parking they'd have no punters. And stores further in still have to compete with those because Americans will just drive to them otherwise.

This tends to apply in the UK for out of town locations- or those not in a high street location.

But high street branches are different. They serve more local and less car bound customers so may have more limited parking facilities.

Re: Should be outlawed...

A fun version of this is with the two major greetings cards companies (maybe others too).

A little offer at the bottom of the order screen "Do you want £xx pounds off your next order?"

Who wouldn't. In tiny print it is enrolling you in some monthly rolling payment scheme for some entirely different thing.