Re: "You mean her PC needs to be on in order to read the hard drive?"
...or the quality?
5609 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Jul 2009
The local authority, in its beneficence, supplied us with a few PCs ( out of our existing budget of course) and didn't think in terms of how we'd use them, i.e. sharing case load data and templates. Or as the technically minded would call this - a server. In effect a bunch of standalone PCs on a simple network.
After about two years of nagging the new shiny IT educational dept. agreed to create a shared drive..And to be honest, pretty much all we needed, as long as people kept their own backups as well as the ones I made of the shared drive, because,well, it was a good thing to do. - they did in as much as no one trusted such complexity as a shared drive and still did most of the saving locally or on a floppy. None-the-less, we started to use standard templates and assessment materials and some people even saved to the shared drive, which meant we could get access to their stuff if they fell ill or whatever.
And then one day no one could get to the shared drive.
And no one knew why.
I was out of the office at the time, doing my main job the same as almost everyone else - which wasn't nursing the computers, especially now that there were proper professionals for that.
So when I got back a couple of hours later there were a few of the people who'd come in to do admin fuming, and several more being smug because they still kept their files locally (probably on floppy discs).
I went in to the room, had a quick look, went to the last computer in the row and turned it back on..
No one had ever explicitly told us that this was the machine being used as a shared drive - I don't think I'd even known myself, and since it wasn't needed that day, because there weren't many people on site, no one had turned it on.
At least it made the case for a proper server to be provided.....
It's the one I use, too. Automatically creates an image on a partition on a second internal hdd one week. And an external USB hdd the next. An external USB Hdd which I swap from time to time. The internal drive doesn't host my internal data backups. That's on a backup partition on a third hdd.
The external hdds do host both types of backup though - I like to live dangerously.
There's a lot in this. Users can specify what they do- how they do it and why they need to do it. Management can specify what the outcomes are meant to be. It takes both of these to develop a software tool. Developers seem (in my experience of working with some of them) to produce what they think users ought to want , based on managers' explanation of what they think the users do. The latter is seldom a full story. The former a mere fantasy.
C W ran the story first. Private Eye picked it up and brought it to the (wider) public's attention. Then in their own particular way stuck with the story, not letting it sink into journalistic oblivion. It's the latter that's most significant. Private Eye kept it in sight, while the Post Office B****rds were almost certainly expecting the fuss to die down as it usually does after a major scandal.
Yes,
mostly Dilbert is still Dilbert. But sometimes the cartoon seems to be written to express a particular viewpoint that doesn't actually carry any sensible punchline. It's not that it's right wing that's the problem then. Nor that it's making a point. It's that he seems to be making his point without any joke. It's just Dilbert saying something for him.
Users....use the equipment. If you want information from them or actions performed you have to ask very specific questions. Or give very specific instructions. There is no room for assumptions. .
Is the cable plugged in the back? y/n
Is there a light where the cable is plugged in? y/n
Can you see the whole length of the cable? y/n
Is the far end of the cable plugged in? y/n
Is there another wall plug the cable can go into.....? If yes, Try the cable in the other plug.....
Are there any breaks or scrapes along the length of the cable... and do on.
And within "functionality" comes simplicity or at least intuitiveness of use. And that is not the same as the developers' and fans' familiarity with the programme.It's only functional when a new user can a) immediately discover what it can do and b) find out how to do it.
Also any aspect of function that demands "You have to do X first" needs a bloody good reason why you have to do X first, a pretty clear path to discovering you have to do X first and a good link from doing X to the function the user actually needs.
Really. Many years a go I went into a school as a (relatively highly paid) local authority funded specialist teacher, to work with a kid who had serious literacy difficulties.
There was a horrible smell in the school's open plan teaching area.
I was met by the headteacher who said "Ah Terry, do you think you could sort out that smell for us".
And yes, since I had a kid in that school entitled to my specialist help, and since I was funded by the rate payers (at a promoted teacher grade) to provide that help I said "It's not my job". .
I also said "You have a schoolkeeper for that."
The head told me that the SK was too busy!
Wow. Spot on with your documentation comment.
My experience is that Open source documentation is it's mostly either unintelligibly written ( a few years back I volunteered to edit some to make it useful) or deep technical gibberish. At worst a link for a help item or even a changelog will go to a "Wiki" page with an incomprehensible structure, marked by incomprehensible headings and incomprehensible jargon/technical expressions. Useful information like, say Save dialogue changed to allow user selection being buried several levels down in a section called something like user interface which is in a branch called customisation which comes under a heading lable of, say gui design And these may be in a chapter heading called Interface design protocols or something
Needless to say the link in the software/download site won't point to that useful nugget of information contained within the wiki. It'll point to the Wiki's title page, which will contain 5 chapters - none of which would be identifiable as having any useful information for anyone other than the developers (because, by and large it doesn't).
I can only speak for myself. I use free software by preference when my use case for paid software can't justify the cost. e.g. I haven't bought ABBYY because I only need to use OCR about once a year, if that. £165 is a lot for that.
I also use free versions when the alternative is a subscription. Yes I will pay £50 for the paid version of some product, or even £100 maybe. But not £50 every year forever.
Interesting, in that context, is that Microsoft's "Ribbon" is much less customisable than the previous menu system. It's not a fault with the Ribbon, per se as much as the Microsoft in their wisdom stupidity made it difficult to customise.
Once I would have removed the items that I would never, in my professional ( and certainly not in my home) life, have any need for, and regrouped other menu items according to how they fitted together in my use case, quite easily. (Like anything I used for editing in an "edit" menu rather than split between review and home) Which was a useful productivity feature.This is no longer the case.
I may be wrong (I usually am) but my impressions is these gadgets are all initiated by a "Let's think of something we can make money on" process rather than an "I've thought of something good, let's see if we can make money on it".
It's a subtle difference, perhaps. But I think important. Because it means hat the product doesn't start with an actual good idea (beyond the generic one of gathering some dosh).
It's stay, not expand in business.
The number on the side of a van/shop frontage etc. is to attract new customers- tell 'em your number.
It won't lose them customers who get their details by recommendation - but it will block off an extra source of business. So they can stay in business if they don't rely on passing trade.
While I don't know if it's relevant here. Not every garage is an MOT station. Our local, nearest, for example takes cars to a friend who does the MOT at his place. This is not uncommon. Some just do servicing and repairs and leave MOT to bigger places. Some just don't want to do admin and prefer to keep their hands oily.
This is talktalk business and small companies employing a dozen or so staff would quite reasonably use this. They aren't big enough to have their own tech support, may not be in a tech industry and have little or no knowledge or interest. They just wan an email system that works.
But that "very very small" " Mickey Mouse" operations is a couple of dozen, or more, livelihoods, not including the thin margins of their suppliers etc. Multiplied by by thousands of businesses. And in a Pandemic with lockdown etc.
This could be the difference between survival till things recover or failure for many of these companies.
We can't all work for Amazon.
Yep, we Jews are to blame. As always. Funny isn't it. We even control the media , so no one can say things like that the virus if fake, that we want to inject you with a microchip or that we control the media so that no one can say... ..
Why's there no icon for recursion?
Conspiracy theorists are weird people
And just as a postscript to all of this. I am, as I type this, in the middle of trying to forward the government's green voucher confirmation to an approved contractor so they can start the work. But this government email is being bounced by the contractor's Spam filter.
It is literally nothing more than a genuine and expected email from a government department being sent to a company who's job it is to receive and act on said email..
<bounce>
In any such situation, we always need to remember. Councillors are nominated by their friends in the party and elected by a public who know very little of them beyond their label. Some of these, in turn will rise up the party ranks and be nominated for parliamentary elections.
So once idiocy gets in the rot can spread far and wide. And like any kind of rot, it's easier to get it in than to eliminate it.
Thinking about this, about a million years ago I was involved round the edge some project or other where the engineer sometimes wrote CuM for cubic metres ( of soil to be shifted). But they were transcribing a conversation we'd had, not writing a technical document. (Something along the lines of "We informed the client that we would need to move 300CuM of earth").
Sort of apropos of this.
When, many years back I was on Jury service, the case was delayed while the defendant's statement was sent electronically ( they could have printed it and and brought it along quicker, but that's another issue). The reason being, it turned out after 'is Honour rather testily asked why here was such a delay, being that the electronic system for sending the statements wouldn't transmit the swear words so they'd had to get it rewritten taking out the words that wouldn't go through.
You are mixing up these two things. Theatres can sell tickets - online- without gougers getting in the middle. Either by doing their own E-commerce or using an agent with a fixed contact to do it for them. Resellers are a very different issue, even, or maybe especially, licensed ones.
Some of this is due to, what a parallel thread calls, outsourcing. i.e. damn fool beancounters thinking that they can provide a service that doesn't directly earn them revenue and might leave them with unsold tickets ( collecting in the money) by off-loading it to another company.
In the case of theatres they do this by turning a blind eye to the downsides. e.g. price gouging and unfair sales practices.
Having had dealings with these companies over the years the common thread is that they sell a lot less work for a little less money than the council pays. The shortfall between what the council staff did and what the councillors and officers imagined they did was then all a premium priced extra. The outsourcing companies were all very aware that their contract was insufficient, because they had poached good council staff to run things and win contracts. The councillors and council officers otoh always seem(ed) to think that the job they were outsourcing comprised a simple headline task, and hadn't a clue what their staff actually did. X minutes to clean a classroom sounds plenty to people who think the job is just a quick Hoover of the floor and polish the desks. Tell that to the people who are dodging round piles of modelling, dusting heaps of National Curriculum documents abandoned in the corners, Hoovering the alphabet tiles placed where the kids sit in front of the teacher's desk and scraping glue ( and worse) off the surfaces.
Outsourcing is a slightly different matter. There are councillors ideologically committed to outsourcing everything they possibly can. They seem to have a religious zealotry that thinks that actually employing staff to do stuff that needs doing is the least efficient way, and that it's always better to have a negotiated, limited, expensive contract with a private company who'll only ever let their staff do what's written on a spreadsheet unless there's an extra fee. And who's calculations were based on using even fewer staff than the council did, at lower pay, which won't get them an adequate, committed or skilled workforce.
So certain are these councillors that centrally employed staff are too expensive/untrustworthy or whatever. They never consider that any failings in the system of having a centrally employed workforce are almost all down to them trying to employ too few staff in the first place. Which is a kick in the teeth to the hordes of dedicated public servants who've been going the extra miles to make sure that schools are cleaned thoroughly, homes repaired properly etc.
And of course the poo strikes against the ventilation system as soon as something goes out of scope, usually the day after the contract is signed. So committed are these people to buying in services that they just assume that a different outsourcer won't be just as bad, so when renewal time comes round....
Maybe I'm wrong. I always thought that Go Daddy were the outfit for amateur web sites, families, hobbyists and very small local businesses etc.
They're who you go to when you want to play around with building a little web site to show off your home made pottery, flower arranging or stamp collection. Or maybe to sell your hand crafted rings and necklaces to people who couldn't get to your market stall in the Jewellery Quarter. That sort of thing.