* Posts by Terry 6

5587 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Jul 2009

Windows 10 once more in print condition: Microsoft applies out-of-band fix to Patch Tuesday cock-up

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Why do people put with this nonsense?

I agree, but would comment that quality control, to the mind of the corporate bean counter, is a cost centre and so only gets considered as much as it absolutely has to be. These are people trained to think that actually providing the services and goods that people paid for is just one of the business costs that need to be controlled.They probably dream at night of a business that can keep charging fees without providing a service. And then wake up in the morning and remember that Adobe have pretty much achieved that. (And Capita are pretty close in as much as they don't seem to provide much of the service they get paid for).

Gulp! Irish Water outsources contact centres to Capita for up to €27m over 7 years

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: "new software and digital capabilities"

There's also the matter of the English flag having been pretty much hijacked by far right nut jobs, to the point that anyone hoisting a flag is defining themselves as a far right nut job.The union flag, however, still serves for the English. Last Night of the Proms and all that.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: This sentence

Exactly. When a company says it intends to so something very specific, say, have its existing paper records put on a computer, you can have some hope at least that a definite computerisation programme, with a definite purpose, will have definite useful outcomes.

But a vague "Put it all in the cloud" or such like plan is just magical thinking.

Only true boffins will be able to grasp Blighty's new legal definitions of the humble metre and kilogram

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: £sd

Actually, the common solution is to use 1 minute past 12 as the start point of anything that happens over night.

Terry 6 Silver badge

It's also that some metric ( and decimal) measures are a tad clumsy.

A litre is too bloody small a volume for measuring petrol. No one ever puts a litre of petrol in a car.

The jump from cm to m is too big when measuring height. 5' 8" is easier to say ( and visualise, I think) than 172cm or 1m 772cm.

A kilometre is a bit too small when measuring journeys, arguably. But is reasonable for the purpose. People seem to use Km quite happily.

And use degrees C with no problem at all for the most part.

But a litre is too big for a swift pint, and who'd want to ask for half a litre? The phrase is just too clumsy and rather prissy sounding. ( Also a good linguistic rule of thumb is that people use the fewest and easiest syllables they can. Pint works better here than litre). And should you just want a half with your lunch, "Could I have 0.3 of a litre of your best ale please, landlord..." No.Just no.

Part of the problem was when they decimalised our money ( not a moment too soon imo) they determinedly set out to remove the familiar intermediate units instead of allowing them to fade slowly - or not as the case might be. These did no harm and were useful. A shilling is a shilling whether it's 5p or 12d. Saying "5 shillings" instead of 25p or "10 bob" instead of "50p" hurts no one and if it stopped being useful or clear would have gone the way of all things. But it provided useful intermediate units. "What, 5 bob for a bar of chocolate!" Sounds better than " What, 25p...etc.". I doubt these units would have been used for precise amounts, which would have encouraged a natural demise. But simply going out of their way to discourage the humble friendly shilling and its derivatives was counterproductive.

And I'd argue made people less amenable to losing pints\feet/lbs and so on.

'One rule for me, another for them' is all well and good until it sinks the entire company's ability to receive emails

Terry 6 Silver badge

I dunno. How about totalling a column in Excel automatically, then adding the column of figures up on a calculator to check them afterwards - not once (that's understandable), but every time they do it.

And yes, seen that lots.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Memories

The friend didn't get it from Curry's did he? Though not alone in this they were notorious for flogging systems specced to just about run the latest s/w. Just about. .

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: chrome tabs!

The question of interest is why users are so scared about closing down running programmes/web pages. It points to a fear of not being able to find stuff. Which itself implies poor training and arguably poor software that just isn't as clear and intuitive as we would like to think it is.

Terry 6 Silver badge

No. They still teach them those basics at school. Despite the insane requirement for every kid to be taught "coding".* Despite the calls, (frequently from within El reg commentard comments) to change school IT to something that wasn't just about how to use WORD/EXCEL/Access ( or equivalents) this is still something that they need to learn.

*Everyone, from CEO to caretaker (janitor) needs to be able to use the standard office programmes, find their way round a computer and use a keyboard, even in the 2020s. Almost no one needs to be able to code. Which is just the 21st C version of us all having to learn metal and woodwork when I was at school in the 70s. School should be about gaining a education and generalisable skills. Not about training to do the job that you are expected to enter because you are one of the working classes and didn't go to private school.

Infosys denies former head of diversity recruitment's accusations of racial bias and visa fraud

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: "Infosys has denied the allegations"

Not as daft a comment as it sounds. Would these Indian staff be of any particular caste, or from a particular province? Or all a particular religion?

Colt Technology UK nixes winding-up order threat from Italian VoIP reseller over £3.8m disputed debt

Terry 6 Silver badge

Just speculating....

But I do wonder how much of the diligence in these situations is just someone saying "Yeah, he's a good bloke" after a round of golf.

Wailing Wednesday follows Patch Tuesday as versions of Windows 10 stop playing nicely with plugged-in printers

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: HP laptop keyboard borked

I prefer to run updates on family PC as soon as I can - when I'm sat in front of it and have the time to sort out the issues.

And rely on reimaging for any really nasty nasties.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Rejects Strike Again

To be fair, as a test, for the Devilment* I just switched off my trusty little Brother HL-1110 laser printer. Rebooted and all was fine when I switched it back on.

*I have a few recent restore points and images if I need to use them. And a Canon multifunction printer that's on wifi. But this little old USB Brother has done sterling work for printing everyday black print documents and drafts of stuff I'll print properly in colour later. For years.

Terry 6 Silver badge

I do wonder, in these situations, whether the testing is a most obvious/easiest case only. e.g. Reboot," Check printer.Yup, printer works. Next..." Rather than thinking about , say, bolting the USB printer that no one normally bothers with ( or just bought) onto the computer that's been in use all morning.

Brit MP demands answers from Fujitsu about Horizon IT system after Post Office staff jailed over accounting errors

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Not just IT:

I've posed this before, but probably worth repeating in this context.

The management consultant that used to come to us was convinced that management was a self-contained profession and that you didn't have to know about the specific business.

The stuff he recommended and the stuff I had to study in my educational Leadership qualification was pretty much the same. And it was all about getting compliance - mostly by being manipulative. Very explicitly, in the lectures etc. doing the right thing by your staff was seen as a management method to obtain outcomes. Not something you did because it was the right thing, as such. Working with staff to determine appropriate outcomes was not seen as being of any relevance. We, as managers ( Head teachers, advisors etc) were there to manage the (highly qualified and experienced professional) minions. There is no doubt that the staff are meant to be cogs in a well regulated mechanism - according to modern* management ideas.

*Might have changed, but I see no signs of that. I did this 10 years ago and educational management is always about 10 years behind the outside world anyway, so that we are made to take on the nuttier ideas after they've failed already.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Can...

Yep. Just the top of a pyramid of skulls.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Just don't allow bugs!

As is often the case this is a problem that's not unique to the IT world. But the nature of computery stuff is that there is far more complexity and far greater consequence than some ordinary businesses running the same shoddy practice.

In the 80s or thereabouts my late father was managing quality control for a coat manufacturers - mostly supplying M&S who were notoriously demanding (quite rightly).

He'd reject a batch of garments - his bosses would override him and dispatch the stuff with the ones that had passed ( they actually used to try to hide the duds inside the batch thinking M&S' people wouldn't spot them ffs!) rather than fix or remake them or sort out the quality issues. M & S would find the duds then reject the entire delivery. And of course not pay for it,. Time after time. The company began to get into problems, (not just due to this, but since M&S were practically their sole customer......) so they started to fire various middle managers, one after another - no senior heads rolled of course.

Dad got out before he was pushed out. Within six months the company had gone belly up.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Can...

Yes, the lessons learned seem to be that if you are sufficiently well connected and have had a senior establishment job you can slide from a fiasco in one major organisation to an even more senior job in another and so on.

And also that if you are one of those above you can lie and cheat with impunity and still get that plum establishment job.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Investigative journalism at it's best

And Private Eye who brought it to a wider public than Computer Weekly could have alone.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Private prosecution is one thing. Being the investigating police, and the prosecution, as well as the expert witness testifying in front of a lay judge - when you are in effect under judgement yourself if you lose the case (i.e. have a vested interest in the outcome beyond simply righting the specific alleged wrong) is very different.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Once upon a time I was (peripherally) involved with some software testing. In which a set of criteria for success were established, agreed and written down. As far as I remember there were a few issues that were resolved and it was sent out.

I've a nasty suspicion, based on stuff I've hear/been told over the years that that sort of regime is less common than I thought it was.

How they test instead is beyond my experience, but I'd hazard a guess that the suppliers demonstrate the flashy bits they know will work and sort of sideline the dull but essential bits that maybe...don't.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Any chance

It's more that;

* Johnson has no idea what to do and say without Cummings

*The Old Etonian buddy ideology guides his decisions and that

*There's a culture of impunity (and probably promotion) for the incompetent or dishonest Great and Good. They screw up and move on to better things when us little folks get sent to the knackers.

The latter holds for corporate failures as much as individuals. Probably why the likes of Crapita keep getting new contracts.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Pointless letter.

Exactly...The PO and Fujitsu would love it to all go quiet and let the public forget. The culture of impunity to claim another score.

Bite me? It's 'byte', and that acronym is Binary Interface Transfer Code Handler

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Colour me square

Years and years ago ( at the time of the Woolworth's fire in Manchester - we were on the next block) I worked a few weeks at a mail order company. Our job was to stuff little slips of paper that customers had filled in from newspapers into the right place in plastic wallets stuffed as tightly as they could possibly be, in alphabetical order. They were quite random and I have no idea why they weren't already in those wallets, I guess they'd been located and used somehow and had to be replaced.These were packed insanely tight so it was impossible to get the papers in and the plastic cut into your fingers each time. It was a truly horrible job- and you could see why they used temporary staff. The papers were in laminated layers. They'd be in order for a few days worth, then get more and more random until that bunch of workers got fired and a new set rolled in. Which meant that by and large these files were useless. They had to be that tight to save space. It was a big old building and the space was used really poorly. But there wasn't really a shortage of space. Just that they had always done it that way. What is interesting in the context of this thread is that the system clearly didn't work. Most of the stuff was way out of place, they had to employ staff to recruit new teams of cheap workers every six weeks or so ( that's how long we lasted - though I'd stopped even pretending to work about two weeks before). And there was no way anyone could have located these bits of paper except by pulling a whole section of wallets and checking every one until the right name appeared.

But there was clearly no intention of ever reviewing this system.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Colour me square

This also points to another all too common management phenomenon. Effort ==success.

The staff members who who appear to be slogging away doing what has always been done will get approval, pay rises and promotion - irrespective of actual productivity and effectiveness (within broad boundaries).

Efficient staff who find better ways of doing stuff and achieve all that's required of them and more within the standard working day are seen as dangerous slackers - even though their productivity exceeds the sloggers. This, in part explains the ( pre-Covid ?) suspicion about working from home. Those managers need to see effort, not outcomes. Home working can see measurable outcomes - but not effort. It also explains the popularity among some management for installing key logging and screen viewing etc software on computers used for home working. It's the time bashing the keyboard that matters - not the outcomes.

My theory, supported by experience (arguably), is that those managers are themselves sloggers -promoted through effort not achievement or imagination/innovation. Not very bright or efficient they work hard at doing what has always been done - and doing lots of it, making sure their staff do the same And their managers ditto, to the top.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Makes sense (sor of)

Terry 6 Silver badge

Must disagree there. Still have strong recollections of various French peeps saying "Eel e mor*" Though I acknowledge there's a bit of a growl on the edge of that final -r

*Because some device was "on pan".

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: No only System/36

And even available help pages don't help anymore, anyway.

They'll inevitable contain instructions on how to print and such.

But won't even mention the several obscure menu items that seem to serve only to make the programme come to a grinding halt. Or how to perform some key programme functions that don't seem to have a menu item anywhere, or how to stop an essential function automatically rotating the page before it's printed or what to do when you get an error message saying that "formatted lists can not be sorted" or some such thing........etc etc etc.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Colour me square

Nah. A long time ago in a different place etc etc.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Colour me square

Been the wrong side of that one. Ask but don't listen to the answers.

(Sighs, bangs head against wall)

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Colour me square

I agree that, and have argued extensively about not designing new software on the say so of a management team about what the staff do, how they do it or what they need to be able to do it.

But in this circumstance it's more that people have mastered a complicated procedure ( and this was insanely complicated - with all sorts of rules about when and how many Flexidays can be taken in exchange for how many hours) by following a set of rules that they don't actually understand they will cling to that procedure until the heat death of the universe - because they don't dare vary off the path they are following- because they don't actually know where it leads. They're Red Riding Hood off to Grandma's cottage by following the path. And anyone offering a better way that will get them there quicker is the Big Bad Wolf.

(Also, don't try to help a girlfriend).

Terry 6 Silver badge

People often don't even include the -shire for that 'un.

As in, "Wuster Sauce"

But arguably it's not as bad as French - where many of the initial and particularly final consonants are silent, (morte pronounced "more" etc.) rendering many words indistinguishable from one another.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Colour me square

My thought, not being a developer, reading this was isn't this the sort of thing you'd grow out of pretty quickly. Certainly, writing programmes (amateur) a few decades ago, I did do something of that sort in debug steps for the first few projects. But then I settled down to putting something more useful to me when the programme section ended or fell over- basically the comments. "This is the bit that adds up the hours" * being far more useful than "fuck fuck fuck".

*I'd written a programme in the 1980s that collated and added up flexi-time and reported how many flexi-days could be taken, how much could be carried over etc. within the council's rules, for a girlfriend who worked for the council. It worked beautifully and could have saved her a load of the time that she spent every weekend adding up the hours etc. She never fucking used it. preferring to sit there with her bits of paper and adding it all up herself, divide by etc etc..... It was an interesting learning curve for the callow 20something year old me. About people, not computers.

The UK's favourite lockdown cheese is Big and Red but doesn't require a stinking great audit after consumption

Terry 6 Silver badge

Cheddar why?

I came down to London early 80s. Walked into my local shop and saw an enormous row of cheeses. At first sight this was very promising. Until I realised that almost very single one was a variety of Cheddar. Including various imported Cheddars. I quickly learnt that this was replicated even in the big supermarkets. Up to 50% of the shelf space and of the number of varieties of cheese were all just varieties of Cheddar.

I don't mind a bit of Cheddar. I had some grilled on toast for my lunch today. And for a Plough Person's Lunch with a pint it seems perfect.

But it ain't that special. It's a good almost generic, slightly sour flavoured, slightly waxy OKish cheese.

But that's it.

Office supplies biz owned by UK council shrugs off ransomware demand for 102 Bitcoin

Terry 6 Silver badge

I know it's a naive question, but maybe that's what's needed. Why isn't there a system of successive read-only backups that can only be wiped and reused manually/offline - retained for a significant time period?

Nice wallpaper you've got there. It would be a shame if it bricked your phone

Terry 6 Silver badge

Not even "user input" in as much as an error condition could be accidental and should be trapped. But shouldn't make a device fall over.

So you really didn't touch the settings at all, huh? Well, this print-out from my secret backup says otherwise

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Looking for liquidated damages.........

Also, the school cleaning staff; do extra bits of work that need to be done as and when needed without there being an additional set of charges ( time, admin etc), can be flexible about working times and routines, know the vagaries of the school and its staff - so can be more efficient, don't have to provide a profit over and above the cost of their wages- have no internal company structure to finance or share holders to feed or management bonus schemes to accrue, and are far more likely to remain for a longer period reducing recruitment costs. They almost certainly also do a better job, too. Because they're part of the school community, including helping with events and stuff.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: "the concept of saving face"

Or, arguably worse, to find some interpretation of the rules you wrote, to retrospectively justify what you did - while introducing a back door for the (less reasonable) population to then also fiddle the rules.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Fear the

Oh! :-(

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Ah, customers.

The problem, though, is that we do have that breed of pointy haired boss. People who think that saying "make it so" is what they're paid to do. And that they "want to be brought solutions not problems". Except that whoever first thought up that apparently (but not at all) wise concept doesn't seem to have known about budget constraints, time scales and bureaucracy. iow Yes I have a solution. It will require the £30k that was not put into the budget, though it was in the costings, which is why we have this problem. Also buy in from the four departments that are going to be disrupted because this should have been done before installation and also the finance dept. have just announced a five week delay on all additional budget requests until the start of the new financial year.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: "the concept of saving face"

That's the thing. We do have this. But it works by denial and impunity. "No we didn't hit an iceberg. No one is to blame because we hit an iceberg and that large chunk of frozen water that you can see isn't technically an iceberg. And I'm not going to abandon this ship because it isn't sinking."

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Ah, customers.

It's unpleasant to work for any boss who doesn't know what it is you do. For a start, they never understand why the job you're on takes so long. Or why it takes two of you to do it. Frequently they don't understand the explanation or don't want to because they've already told their boss that it'll be done by 3:00pm and can't know say it won't be finished till tomorrow lunch time due to some process that they haven't taken into account - whether it's "that's how long it takes for the glue to dry" or "The materials to do a first test run aren't in stock and will arrive in the morning." or whatever.

Even in non-technical jobs. " No we can't do X this week to work round Mrs.Y wanting to change her days because before we do X we need to sort out W......".

"Can't you leave W until afterwards and go back to it"

"No because....."

"Well you'll have to.." etc.

And such bosses never take responsibility when the wheels come off ( possibly literally) for telling you to do it.

There used to be a management consultant that worked with us.

A nice chap, which didn't stop me wondering - if he's so good at management why's he running freelance courses in management rather than being the CEO of megacorp. His view was that management was a profession in its own right, and you didn't need to know about the line you were managing. My late dad, who worked his way up from working on the line to managing a factory, would have hated him. because dad knew that a manager had to understand things like; just because the sprocket wangler could thromble 23 threads a minute in theory, real life said that anything over 20 would cause it to overheat.

After 30 years of searching, astroboffins finally detect the universe's 'missing matter' – using fast radio bursts

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: ...but does it really "matter" given the state of Humanity?

There's also something about the democratisation of belief. Somehow, now, every belief has to be accorded respect (particularly when expressed via social media) and given equal status. It's as if False Equivalence has become a human right. The BBC has been particularly fertile ground for this- because it has been practising "Balance" in defiance of gravity. i.e. On one side of an argument will be expertise, research and an established academic track record. On the other side will be some politician, lobbyist or loon who chooses not to accept the evidence. And the BBC's presenters are expected ( maybe even willing) to accord equal weight to both sides. And if the facts bear out one side - as with climate change for example- they'll describe it as "controversial" because there are opinionated fools who refuse to accept it.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: ...but does it really "matter" given the state of Humanity?

I can see what you are saying, and "intellectual" is a strange concept.

But, professionally I can also argue that the children of those who read, consider and discuss stuff are also more likely to do so.

Whereas illiteracy and poor attitudes to learning etc while not hereditary for the most part (some would argue that) do run in families.

Photostopped: Adobe Cloud evaporates in mass outage. Hope none of you are on a deadline, eh?

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: A plan B (or G)

Using Elements 2009. Obviously I'm not using it as a pro user would use full fat Photoshop. Having a "licensed" copy is owning in the same sense as having a long lease is owning your home - maybe more so, no one from Adobe tells me what colours I can make my pictures.

But using subscription software is like renting a short let flat in a development area.

To test its security mid-pandemic, GitLab tried phishing its own work-from-home staff. 1 in 5 fell for it

Terry 6 Silver badge

Some of the fake TV License ones look very convincingly official And I'd guess an awful lot of non-tech savvy/non suspicious minded cynical bastards ( I think there's an overlap) would be worried enough to click on the link and put in their bank details.

Das reboot: That's the only thing to do when the screenshot, er, freezes

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: "Or is it only us for whom the days are blurring?"

I can't approve that, but otoh......

Years ago i was wanting to buy a pretty expensive calculator in a department store. They were displayed in a square counter sort of arrangement, with the sales staff on the inside. I stood near the one I was interested in. On this occasion the staff were over the other side, chatting. And ignoring the customer, me. They knew I was there, just not bothered.

So I got annoyed waiting, and decided to occupy myself. By collecting the price tickets, from in their little holders, walking round to where the sales staff were so engrossed in their conversation.

I simply said, "You've wasted my time, I'm wasting yours." Then dropped the pile on the floor in front of them and walked out.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: RTFM

In London they don't even say "where used to be".

It's all "Go past [ famous name who used to live there but died in the 1950s] junction. Turn right at [service station that was demolished before you were born] corner. Bear left onto the [Pub that lost its licence in the 60s interchange]" and so on.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Funny that

Perfectly reasonable if it doesn't have a little "peel me" arrow. Sometimes they do sometimes they don't.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Seriously though...

S'what I used to do, a hand drawn arrow, with spidery "click here" messages. In the early days printed on to a sheet of paper and given to the colleague(s) in need of help. That sort of thing. A few years later getting my hands on a decent free programme ( when personal computing was still not so common) that allowed me to annotate screen shots was a God-send. Can't remember what it was even called now, decades later.