Posts by Terry 6 6252 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Jul 2009
If a FOSS company can take responsibility for maintaining a FOSS application that it needs, from another source, should it need to, because the original developers go belly up (if corporate themselves)quit/retire/die (if volunteers or a combination) then that makes 100% sense.
If however they don't have the capacity/funding/skills to do that then proprietary s/w may be the only safe option.
In my experience there's consultants and Consultants.
The former are doing practical jobs; passing on experience and/or knowledge, e.g. organising disparate groups so that they can work together or advising on a new methodology that the organisation has already concluded it needs like better record keeping or improved use of available data, or reducing carbon foot print through improved recycling/renewable energy and so on.
Whereas Consultants are just salesmen ( and women) who earn big fees by persuading organisations to implement the latest management snake-oil fixes to problems that may not even exist, or if they do, won't be amenable to quick fixes and probably aren't even in the place these parasites are directing them to look.
I've benefitted from the former and suffered the disruption of the latter.
The first clue to decoding which is which is whether you already thought there was a problem that needed solving, based on available data, or whether they are promising to fix something that actually works pretty well. The second is whether they are looking at real issues that exist or selling a generic method. And the third is whether what they're saying is cosy for mangement and uncomfortable for the poor bloody infantry.
7 doesn't exist. Non-participants can feel smug, but from management there will only be resentment. I've had my card marked enough times to know this. After some ineffective or even disastrous, expensive project has ground to a halt the people who promoted it will have jumped ship, with plaudits still ringing etc etc.It probably will have faded out rather than being cancelled, so no one will associate them with the failure- except in postmortem examination, which almost never occurs.
The hold-outs and critics (muttering "I told you so") will be remembered for not being supportive, not being team players, or just generally resented.No one will be complimenting us on our foresight,experience or analytic thinking.
The "good" consultants don't cease trading. Because.....
...good in this context means being nimble enough to hop off the trend and onto the next one, ready to reap the rewards of promoting that pile. Education is even more full of these bas**rds than industry, as far as I can see.. Internal end external, and combinations thereof. And as well as wasting precious resources they fu** up real people's lives, because they get them tied up in the latest scheme, then when they have them committed they jump ship, as they always do. Leaving the starry eyed followers behind- often with their jobs gone and sometimes careers wrecked. And sometimes the stuff the consultants and advisors briefly promoted was actually good. Which still doesn't stop them jumping ship and letting it float onto the rocks when some new fad comes along.
More than once I've seen good teachers recruited from across the planet, setting up home here to work on some new trendy project from their home country that's been imported to here, only to find that the fad here (and there) has faded before they’ve even unpacked. (OK usually my sympathy is limited because it was always a load of b****ocks so serves then right- but then many of them were genuinely well intentioned, if slightly naive).
, which may involve things like car maintenance.
Of course, and I've heard many a request to borrow stuff for such purposes.
And I think in every single case the borrowers would be falling over themselves to say why.
As I "Can I borrow your pliers, I'm swapping the battery......etc"
Not just university.
This applies through public service; schools, hospitals, police stations. Pretty much everywhere.
Politicians equate " efficiency savings" with cutting administrators, not administration.So the academics, teachers,nurses, doctors, constables etc etc spend time filing reports, two finger typing slowly, when the should be doing a professional job.There will always be some admin, (work notes do need to be recorded) but it makes no sense to give front line staff backroom work if avoidable.
Shortly after the Local Authority implemented central purchasing for external teams we bought a laser printer. Instead of me sourcing and installing it we had to get it through the IT guy responsible for this. Who brought it along and insisted on setting it up. In those days they were bloody expensive too.
And he didn't have a clue how. I could see he was struggling to instal the toner cartridge. ( it wasn't difficult and I'd done a few). Next thing I knew there was black powder everywhere, the drum was sitting on the window ledge in the daylight and he was using the only vacuum cleaner in the building to try and get the black power out from inside the printer.
Amazingly it worked once he'd actually put it together* But the drum didn't last long- and they denied responsibility, of course.
*I think it was a Brother
More to the point; be alert for anomalies. If a marketing type wants pliers it ought to be an automatic response to wonder--and ask-- why?
Because there are only two acceptable answers, draw them or photograph them. No use of pliers for any other purpose could be expected.
So any other reason would be suspicious.
Yes. I had Gmail set up to send to Proton. Mostly trivial stuff like Masto notifications that went first to my Gmail addy. But they weren't arriving at my Proton account. Somewhere they were being silently dropped. I think that was Proton's fault - my fix was to switch the originating email address directly to my Proton one (effectively downgrading that one to disposable).
To an awful lot of people they are an integrated system. This long predates Outlook. Your calendar, email and address book are your organiser software. Whether they go together logically is questionable, even to me and I am a user, but to plenty of people like me they go together emotionally. They feel like they belong together. Which is why TB gained the Lightning add-on that then became integrated.. TL:DR answer. People consider these should go together. I consider these should go together.
As yet there's no native Thunderbird app for iphone. So I use Outlook.com on my iPhone with TB add-ons on my PC to sync my calendar (TB Sync with Provider for Exchange Active sync -it's beyond my skills to know why it needs two apps to do one job).I guess anyone who doesn't sync a calendar between a (Windows ?)PC and iPhone won't have this problem (do 'nux machines' versions of TB do this better? I should try to add mine to the mix and see).
Beyond that, though reluctant to keep using Microsoft’s Outlook.com for my phone calendar, it's all worked beautifully for me. (YMMV- version changes in TB can screw up Active sync and/or TBSync and it relies on the devs having the time and will to keep everything updated- always the problem with relying on FOSS)
I notice that the official line in training materials used to introduce the public to these LLM "AI"s always seem to have a preamble to the effect that they're already using AI, with examples like those.
Part of the sales pitch seems to be to broaden the definition of AI to the point that people accept it for the sake of the other "intelligent" software they use. In effect anything that integrates and analyses data is now an "AI". Apparently.
Only a slight drift off topic here.
Years ago I called out the RAC. My car was running very unevenly. It was obviously something electrical, because I could hear the interference on my radio- perfectly in time with the engine. As I accelerated it went up.
The RAC guy insisted it was something to do with the fuel lines, and kept saying "It's nothing to do with the radio" And ignoring me when I said, "I didn't say it was the radio, I said you can hear the interference on the radio". Instead he treated me like an idiot who thought the radio made the car run unevenly. And insisted on towing me to a garage.Where the following day they replaced an HT lead and charged me a fiver. Just two days of my life wasted. For something he could have tested in 10 seconds* and replaced in 10 seconds more.**
*I subsequently bought a little tester for a couple of quid. Never needed it, it never happened again.
**I complained and had an apology with my membership refunded "As a goodwill gesture".
A lot of very good work was done in the lead up to Y2K on important systems.And a lot of money, including ( maybe particularly) public money was wasted paying for obvious nonsense work. We had a bunch of stand alone (no internet) laptops that had to be tested, at our service's expense so paid for out of our teaching budget. This was mandatory, by the local authority. Machines that were used to type stuff up in WORD and then printed. Nothing else. The worst that could have happened? I suppose they may have refused to boot for some arcane reason, We'd have had to borrow a couple of machines to tide us over for a day or two while the IT guys remediated the issue at the start of the next term ( when, by the way we probably wouldn't need to use them much for at least another month or two). But that seemed unlikely to the point of ridicule. None the less we had to fork out for this.The machines were by no means system critical. But the mandate was all machines. No exclusion for non-critical aging laptops. No risk-assessment ahead of the work, which would have saved a bunch of public money.
Yes. For a friend who's a wheelchair user it's brilliant. And there's a lawn mower equivalent for outside too.
But for us- even though we have a similar bamboo floor, there's joining strips between hall and kitchen ( slightly different level) coat stands with spindly legs, rocking chair, all sorts of dumped bags and of course the Fox Terrier pup.
I know users behaviour can be a pain and seem like stupidity.
I supported IT for my team of specialist, brilliantly diagnostic teachers and I've had all of that and more. But they can't be blamed for all of it.
*"There's nothing on the screen". We assume they’re being literal:They assume we mean the stuff that ought to be there (Windows usually) and the strange words that might appear on the screen aren't anything they think should be there. If we ask "Are there any messages/Is there any writing on the screen?" and they still say "no" that is a different matter
*Turning off the screen rather than the actual PC. As I said already, and we've said on here many times. To many users the computer is just a TV that does stuff. And the box is where the work goes to. And you turn the TV off: Not some attached storage box
*"Yes it's plugged in" when it isn't. Less excusable, but to some, perhaps many, it's been plugged in and working for months or years, and the tangle of wires looks the same as it always did- so of course it must be plugged in still. The idea that it might have come loose at the back is probably not even considered, because most everyday appliances don't have a connection removable at both ends, let alone become unplugged ( and they just don't think of the few that do, assuming they do have and are aware of such).
*"The email isn't working" when the whole PC is off. Actually I can't excuse that one. There are limits.
As a side issue. I've always been slightly puzzled by the "give the contact/agency staff crap equipment" mandate. Maybe giving perm staff good equipment is a way to retain them(?) but a good financial rule of thumb if you are using expensive contract staff you make sure they get the job done asap- and decent, reliable kit is cheap compared to extra agency/contract staff fees.
It just means there are websites that use passwords that don't actually need them.
Yup.
I have accounts with crap email addresses to log in with and crap passwords. Because I don't need them to have more than a superficial lock. Add to that the fact that many users of such sites just want to get started and not go through setting up an account they don't want with a bunch of fatuous security they couldn't give a toss about. So go for something quick and simple.
The problems can occur when they cross the line between just using such an account for something simple and basic and decide to add stuff they can be sharing with their friends and family- because that's when it sometimes becomes risky and valuable to the scammers.
That may well be coming. But until organisations like ( but by no means only) Girl Guides stop sending essential forms in formats that can't just be edited and data added on screen then emailed back the printer will be needed so that the poor devils who have to complete the paperwork by printing it, filling it out by hand, than scanning it back, (or sometimes putting it in the post).
Significantly the Local Authority today provided paperwork in PDF that could just be opened and completed in WORD- no printer needed. So it can be done.
Ironically- I knew what an ERP system does. I've never known what it stood for, but the words don't make much more sense to me than the letters did. In fact less. Because I've never associated it with "planning" particularly. Tracking, yes. Recording, yes. And I guess both of those lead to better planning. But that hasn't appeared to me to be what the systems actually do.
From my years working within a local authority run service, I can say with confidence, and from my chats with people working in private companies, can assert with almost as much confidence, that senior management has a hazy understanding at best of what the actual frontline staff, and the back-office that supports them, actually do.
Any external contract that I've suffered with has been designed from a base of near complete ignorance.
So, the cleaning contract for an off-site teaching base was agreed on the basis that it would be cleaning a few office spaces (correct) 5 conventional classrooms, an entrance and a hallway. But it was actually a large meeting room, those offices, 4 classrooms which got exceptionally hard use (sometimes the kids threw things), and two secure spaces- one of which had special padding. The original cleaner knew what needed doing, did it and was paid for the hours it took. The contract cleaners didn't even come close.
Or the photocopier- part of a LA wide contract- was specced on the basis that a few teachers needed to do a bit of copying, worksheets and stuff. No! A team of highly specialised teachers were producing large volumes of complex reports and assessments including legally required documents, which were being printed from a range of machines*.. But the council contract for our particular copier/printer excluded networking, because they didn't believe that printing directly to the copier was useful. And then they complained about the amount of inkjet and small laser printing we were doing.
*This tbh was fine by us, they were next to our desk, not outside in the corridor. And no waiting for another person's work to finish printing on a Friday afternoon.
All government jobs would be free of basic tax, in a rational world. Their tax is just giving back to the government some of what the government gave to them- with admin costs on top.
In reality it wouldn't work, because however little they were paid there'd be a hue and cry about tax free perks.
I sort of have experience of this. As a local authority peripatetic teacher using my own car I used to get a parking exemption when visiting schools. We'd done this for decades, but it became a public issue when some of the Town Hall staff were caught using it to park outside the council office all day.
But instead of just stopping them there was a general furore about council staff getting free parking- as in "I have to pay to park outside my place of business, so they should too" which sounds reasonable ( and bloody well was for those lazy sods in the Town Hall), until you remember that the actual staff don't pay for their (legitimate work) parking anyway, the employer does. Which was the council. So we were still parking, but we had to get parking vouchers from the council in exchange for funds the council gave us to do our jobs, but now included paying for the vouchers and also the admin cost to the council in providing, distributing and monitoring voucher supply, and the considerable waste of our time ( paid for by council the tax payer) in obtaining batches of vouchers, not to mention all that card scratching, carefully making sure we'd scratched the right bit on the right card for that zone ( we might be in 5 or 6 different zones across the week and two or three on any given day) so we didn't pick up fines and the anxiety of making sure we had a supply in the car of all the right cards for the right zones. Massively stressful to us, and wasteful to the council- just so that we didn't "benefit from free parking".
Then there's Virgin Media which first started to requires a second email address that's not your VM one as the 2FA, but then decided to make that the username instead of the actual account address.
So I had to remember that to log in to My.chosen.name@vigin media.co.uk I had to type my.name@someotherprovider.co.uk
Then on some of our family addresses, but not,strangely, all they decided that the 2FA address couldn't be the user name either- and I had to supply a third address to log in with.
It got so confusing that I pretty much gave up using them at all - which may be exactly what he were aiming for.
Even better a local authority that insisted staff change passwords every 30 days.
Which meant that a) busy school staff just used to increment a password, often something easy to recall and type, Like Year3AcornClass1..Year3AcornClass2...etc.
B) At the start of each term there'd be queues of staff all calling central IT to get the expired PWs reset from most of the teachers and TAs in most of the primary schools.
C)Not having time to faff about while the kids are coming in if the password wasn't an easy one ( and sometimes even if it was) they'd have a PostIt note near the keyboard and would cross out the number at the end and replace it with the next digit when it expired.
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