Posts by Terry 6 6334 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Jul 2009
Yep. I like Zorin, which is on my non-Windows laptops.
I want to do stuff with computers. Messing around with the OS (Linux) or fighting it (Windows) is just a waste of my time.
You want to use the CLI? Cool. enjoy.
Don't mind Microsoft continually spying and upselling? Knock yourself out.
And being unable or unwilling to buy a PC that will support 11 but is no better for their uses case than the current Win 10 one they're using.There's something quite horrible about being told "Your shiny, lightly used PC has to be scrapped and replaced with another PC that offers you nothing more than the new version of Windows that's worse than the one you already have".
Even in 2026 this seems to be a fact that too many managements haven't really understood. Even if they say it themselves,they don't really think it; deep down in their guts the stuff on the computers is just the admin, not something of value.
I have literally come across managers ( of small organisations) that are more worried about the security of the stationery* cupboard ,and have it carefully locked and guarded (by a fierce admin), than of the data on their computers.Because envelopes have a visible price tag.
* (if I got the spelling wrong, sorry )
Not too sure about that. Every airport is a potential war zone these days. Because a plane is a big tube full of humans hurtling through the air at speed. It's not as if history hasn't had its share of " incidents"
Come to that the terminal is probably quite an attractive target too. It most likely has plenty of whoever the terrorists don't like in there, lining up to wait to get on a plane..
Oh yes. Had a temp job as a youth. Temp because it was shit, lousy pay and I'd already worked out that my predecessors got replaced about every three months.*
So among the time wasting games I employed was wandering round with a clipboard- got me all round the building. No one ever questioned why I was there.
*Job was filing away paper slips from people applying for a mail order catalogue. These had to be squeezed into plastic envelopes, so tightly that our fingers would bleed where they caught the plastic.
But two minutes of looking at these files showed that the filing teams were replaced regularly.
The slips would be perfectly ordered for a few weeks, then became less so, then were obviously just stuffed back in randomly. Then got orderly again, etc etc..
Which as an aside, is an brilliant example of how crap the management were. There was no need to stuff the things in so tightly- the place had bags of empty room for filing cabinets. Given a less horrible filing system they could have had files in good order. Instead of something that made them fairly useless.(no one would have been able to locate the bloody** things)
**Sometimes literally
Even worse, the speed promise is what has made teh project so damnably expensive.
At those speeds they need it to run in a straight line as much as possible, as I understand it.
And that means you can't avoid difficult or expensive locations. There's a village- lose the village. There's a farm, buy the farm There's a natural obstacle, remove the obstacle.Not just purchasing cost,but delay, inquiries, appeals and so forth. All to shave a few minutes off a journey that could be speeded up better by having good transport links at either end.
Not even that.
They'll open up under another name (KRB?) within hours. Probably in the same place with the same staff and a different name on the list of directors. And dissolve the prior company with all its debts.
Because UK law doesn’t go after the directors, unless actual fraud is demonstrated.
I hadn't paid to have it installed, but they were to remove packaging. So I set up the washing machine and put it on overnight.
In the morning it was in the middle of the kitchen floor. I 'd assumed that removing the packaging included the travel bolts.
They had assumed it didn't.
I think it did, but.......
I know nothing about security.
I do know that some local authorities do this on educational PCs. With good reason, probably. But when I waned to locate a cartoon for a training session I was prepping the one I wanted was blocked, because it "contained humour"
And when I was searching for some pictures of Roman/Greek ceramic tiles the sites I went to were blocked, because some of the 2000 yr old tiles had images of naked fighters.
As much as I loath 11 and won't use it, 8 was the worst of all.
I started with MS-Dos then Win 3.1 and 8 has been the only version I couldn't make work reasonably well. I think it was the fucking "charms" that finally did it for me. Important controls hidden in odd places on the screen, totally impossible to locate if you waned them, but would magically appear when you didn't want them, if you happened to move the cursor in their vicinity.
Rather that than in non-union places, ( and I've witnessed a few) where three's some guy stretching up from he top of aladder that was almost high enough, to replace a lighting tube in teh middle of a busy corridor.
It's easy to knock unions' rules. But without them we'd have no safe working practices.No guards on dangerous machines, no dust controls and so on.
I was expecting some reply like that- and of course some union shops were like that ( I worked in print for a while and there were undoubtedly Rules) . But I also worked for a mail order company with no unionisation- and it was far worse. Do your job, don't worry if it's massively inefficient, management don't want to hear this etc etc.
I'm not keen on their harvesting of data, try to limit it as much as possible and avoid it where I can.
But paid for service and goods that steal my data. That's a different kettle of ball games.
LG TVs ( and others) for example. Which lurk inside my expensive, paid for, TV and monitor everything I watch, then sell it to a list of data harvesters that fits 3 or more screens. Each of which can only have permissions revoked one by one ( sometimes more than one switch for a site too) but can all be added back by one single injudicious accidental movement.
This sounds like one of Parkinson's Laws. Not the most famous one, work expanding etc..
There's one in which the amount of time spent considering an item is inversely proportional to its significance. He instances spending 10 minutes deciding on a nuclear power station then an hour on a new bike shed.(or something to that effect)
I have a tiny (very tiny) bit of sympatry for Boss here.
My working years were punctuated by people (ironically usually bosses) who'd focus in on an example and treat it as the substantive issue.
Like when I was running an off-site literacy class and in one of the interminable churns of Local Authority organisation we weren't allocated a budget.
I emailed the new boss.
I told her that we needed a budget for materials for the class.
"Without a budget", I explained, "I can't so much as place an order for tissues for the classroom".
I was young and innocent and just thought this a good example of how dire the situation was.
Said Boss sent a long email about why we needed tissues, couldn't these 7 year old kids bring their own etc.
Which a) most importantly, ignored the fact that we still needed a fucking budget. and b) showed a dismal understanding of small children or the complexities of bringing them to an off-site classroom.
(She was by the way the Principle Educational Psychologist . )
I'll admit to it. As Deputy Head of an LEA off site teaching service I did H&S checks weekly with more in-depth ones once a month.
I didn't want my teams getting injured, I certainly didn't want the kids getting hurt.
And anyone who thinks that H&S is just a pain, or that risk assessments are just an annoyance has never had responsibility for the welfare and care of others..
And it really pisses me off now if I'm working in some place with blocked fire exits, out of date extinguishers and mains leads that aren't ever checked. I might be long in the tooth, but I earned my pension and wish to enjoy it for many more years.
I don't know where you come from with this. I certainly don't advocate for Look-See. Any more than I advocate for Phonics. They both have their place and can both be part of learning to read. But reading is a cognitive process that utilises all our cognitive, linguistic skills. And there is a massive body of research showing that this is how we read. And I don't just mean proficient readers, though I do wonder how you think that kids taught a purely mechanical skill can magically transition to proficient readers using diffrent skills.
And the limited evidence that we see from the lack of objective research in such matters, and anecdotal evidence as well, suggests that they don't.
But the argument you make is a well known straw man argument used by the Phonics lobby to persuade politicians and the public that their way was the right way. Look and Say methods ( e.g. Janet and John in the UK) were pretty much a distant memory when this argument was being used.
Just as they used straw man stigmatisation arguments to redefine cognitive methods as "just guessing" .
The third cynical plank was to provide self-defining "evidence". Reading tests that were actually tests of phonic skills.So that kids who could even read fluently could be shown to perform less well than kids with great decoding skills.
Why this was done?
Vested interest was one reason, because there's money to be made selling phonics schemes. They are easy to design and cheap to produce, but get sold by an effective monopoly ( they have to be "authorised") for a lot of money.
Lobby groups who genuinely believed that Behaviourist approaches were the way to teach or that these approaches were a solution to Dyslexia (which for some kids they can be- I have no objection to this approach for appropriate use btw). We see this a lot in Special Education where there are various organisations that promote Behaviourist systems to make kids appear to improve.
However, what really surprises me is that after I've stated that I was a reading specialist (i.e. someone who has studied and practised the specific teaching of reading) someone comes along on here and claims that they know more about a subject I spent years learning about and practising, but without stating how or why they do. Maybe you do have a PhD in reading development, but you haven't said so. I only have a Psychology degree and few decades of continuous post-graduate training.
Cursive handwriting is at least useful ( it's quicker if you are writing rather than typing).
Not only are analogue clocks obsolete, they have a problem (worse if there’s a seconds hand). The problem is that a quick glance sometimes results in errors. Because our perception isn't as good as we think it is. And our vision is as much created as observed. So sometime we see the hands/time wrong. We see the seconds hand and perceive it as the minutes hand. Or even mix the minutes and hour hand up, especially but not only when they're close together..
Ironically, I love my analogue watches- an elegant Citizen Solar with a steel band, brown face with gold Roman numerals and fingers. also a rather old Seiko Solar with a blue face. And best of all my Bugs Bunny watch that is fairly useless for telling the time because of the very convex glass and the pictures in the quadrants.But I seldom use any of them for telling the time.
Taught about it yes. Registering, nah. Sadly little of what we're taught is "learned" in any realistic sense, for most people. And the nearer we get to GCSE the more it's true (because it will instantly be removed from memory after the words "pens down").
The Gradgrindian version of Education is much loved by certain part of society. They want kids to learn lists of Kings, irregular verbs and Greats of Literature*. Whereas teaching kids to reason, and sieve evidence etc. is thoroughly frowned upon as wishy-washy Lefty nonsense.
*Stuff you can test and measure. Education may well be the only field in which Behaviourism holds sway still. Hence the preoccupation with Phonics** instead of teaching kids how to do reading.
**Yes I was a reading specialist. I know that Phonics isn't how we read, but it's ideal for politicians, because it's simple and sounds reasonable, is easy to teach, even easier to measure.and makes for good league tables. It just isn't true.Most kids will become readers whatever method is used, but this one creates reluctant, mechanical,poor readers.
Mishak
Does your calendar thing use Activesync?
I was using TBSync to share my iOS' Outlook calender to Thunderbird on my PC. But then the bastards broke it by refusing to accept Activesync below version 16 and the TB add-ons only support up to Activesync 14.
Lacking TB for IOs I've started my migration to Tuta.
We stick with ( older version) MS Office at home, because the documents provided ( I hate to use the verb "written") by Girl Guiding for their leaders are truly appalling. Barely functional in MS they totally fall apart in LO.
Do I blame LO? No. Because that works great with normally designed documents. But even LO can't stand up to the Guide Assn.
TB doesn't work in iOs yet. So I need(ed)* to keep Outlook.com on my iPhone for the calendar as my daily driver and was* syncing to TB's calendar with TBSync.
*But that is now effectively defunct, unless they get some kind of support for Activesync 16.
I don't mind which they acheive first. Ideally TB on iOs.
In the meantime I'm moving to Tuta since that does work on phone and Windows etc.
At Bradford Uni (1970s ) we used to warn visitors about the local curry strength.
And there was always one idiot who wouldn't listen.......
OTOH I visited Brum once, during my 2nd year.
And all the students warned me about the curry strength, so I was really disappointed.
Younger daugher did a tour of SE Asia a few years back. And was disappointed that they wouldn't accept her chilli tolerance. She can eat chilli strength that would floor most spicaholics.My home grown Scotch Bonnets are just so much ketchup to her.
Yes, that mandatory 10% figure tells us what we ought to be able to see for ourselves, that it is not based on what jobs need to be done, but on a political/ideological decision to please people who they think might then vote for them.
It's not really different from the past demands ( both parties) to cut "backroom staff" in health, police and education etc services to focus resources on "front line" staff. Ignoring that the staff in question are largely doing jobs that need to be done by someone. And if not these mostly lower paid staff it'll be done by the same frontline staff that the funding is supposed to be directed to.i.e. instead of an admin doing the admin it's going to be a staff nurse, or a copper or a teacher shuffling files when they ought to be nursing/coppering/teaching etc..
Err you said "Genuinely they cost more to the taxpayer than my sister and I pay in income tax each year,"
So they damn well should. Unless you expect a pension to be equivalent to less than a fraction of your salary. Because what you pay in tax is a fraction of what you earn.
As I follow the reasoning given, First they conducted a review to decide if outsourcing was value for money, and then they invited bids to find the cost? Sorry. but how did that work?
The only way that competitive tender can be evaluated is by having the bids in first, so that outsourcer tenders against a pro forma internal bid (And then look very closely for subterfuge by following the money paths).
At my uni, in the late 1970s it was a TV in the halls of residence. Blokes in overalls walked in. Switched off the TV, unplugged and walked out with it, quite casually.Would be put down to apocryphal had it not been for the lack of TV in a space where TV had been the day before, and a management spitting blood.
1) Expecting any job, but especially computer related, to take just the expected time is close to running your life by the Daily Star’s horoscope column and
2) There’s probably a named Law, or else there should be, that any task undertaken on a "While I'm at it" basis will always take much longer than the original job.
It's generational memory. Our grandparents turned up the heat on the electric fire, and the heat dial on the car radiator, their offspring still did the same in the house/office even though there may have been a thermostatic device by then, and the next generation still did this in the car.even though there was now "climate control".
The fact that a different device does the same job in a different way can be a harder concept to absorb than we realise.
(But it still drives me nuts when they do it)
When I'm doing my volunteering teaching basic IT skills to disadvantaged adults I always cover this as part of several of the sessions, in case anyone missed it, forgot, didn't listen.
If it's only on the phone it might as well not exist.
I am horrified, and tell them so, when I hear or read a story of someone who's lost precious memories, because they were all stored on a single phone.. Which said phone then dies/been stolen/dropped off a pier/etc.
ON TV the story will be that they'll be sobbing about how their wedding photos, or all the pictures of a child growing up were on that phone. Often the subject of the photos has died.
And I feel so sorry for them, but also rather cross that they were so stupid. Even if the phone with all the wedding photos hadn't fallen into the lions' enclosure during feeding time at the zoo it would have come to some sort of terminal event eventually.
On our way home from the USA after a 3 week holiday I was stopped and taken to a room, then questioned because my passport was new. It was new because it had been renewed a few weeks before our trip to meet the USA's requirements. They wanted to know where my old passport was, the passport that was now cancelled, that I'd had to renew because they wouldn't have accepted it since it didn't have enough time on it The passport that was now defunct since the one that I carried was my actual passport, the current legal one that met their requirement. The same one that had my visa (or whatever it was 10 or 20 years ago) The one that they’d stamped on my way in. And I was travelling with a wife and 2 kids, who were waiting anxiously and praying we didn't miss our plane.
