Posts by Terry 6 3454 posts • joined 31 Jul 2009
That being said, long preceding this, the area round St. Mary's hospital Paddington had parking meters along the front of the hospital that, from one short section to the next, had different parking charge schemes, with different combinations of change required. So the chance of having the right money for your visit, and getting on a meter that took your change, and being able to get the appropriate time period were slim to none.
There was a team of wardens that quite literally went round in circles, continuously. ticketing people who had given up and parked where they could. This being a hospital most people weren't regular visitors who'd know the drill or could just take their time and wait for the right meter. ( Don't give birth yet, I'll be right in when I've found a meter that takes 10ps )
Yes. I made a mistake typing my car reg no. at the Dartford crossing.(Used some letters from a car I had a few months previously)
Got the letter, phoned and they said the penalty stood, but I could just pay the fee. It's only about £3.
However they don't credit my card with the £3 that went against a non-existant vehicle number, though I had the email confirmation it had been paid.
Two issues, then.
1) I had a confirmation that a fee had been paid at the correct time for a reg number that was mostly correct for mine, but they can't just reconcile the fee paid to the reg number that did cross at that time when requested to. A pretty trivial bit of work.
2) They did not refund a fee paid for a crossing that was not made (by the reg number).
Yep, back in the time of floppy discs used to make 3 backups of our work files on a Friday. Straight copying in them days and only took a few minutes. Rotating 3 sets of discs so that the b/u would be over an earlier one. One day I copied the bloody things the wrong way. I think I got distracted. Luckily it was the second copy. So I very carefully and with everything crossed, restored from the first one and started again.
Oh btw. Just this very day I restored an image to my home PC which had had a hissy fit for some reason. I'd been running System Restore, which fell over and took out a fully working version of Windows, instead of restoring things that needed to be restored. (My Thunderbird set up. I'd been trying to go back a version and it mucked everything up. It's like they plant depth charges to stop you doing that). The Win10 version of a BSOD. (The one that reassuringly tells you it can't start Windows so it will switch off the computer instead). Grabbed my Macrium boot disk and went to the most recent of the various images I keep stored in a partition on a second internal HDD for just that purpose*. So at least I know that works.
Now I think I should make another boot disc too. Can't be too careful.
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*Also on a USB external HDD. And on another external USB HDD that I swap with every couple of weeks.
That's kind of the opposite. But a lot of Brits we do also do that thing too. Demanding a named brand when any old stuff will do. Notably Paracetamol - requiring, even demanding- Anadin instead of the generic,. Both containing 100% Paracetamol.
And of course, back in the olden days IT had to be IBM
This is no different to writing job descriptions to get the person you've already selected. Sometimes, of course perfectly validly- as when someone's been doing a temp job for months and you are required to advertise the perm job.
But open to abuse, too.
WANTED Support assistant with 19 years experience of being the MD's niece etc.
How any organisation, but particularly any govt. owned one, can have the sheer brass neck to put out a contract that specifies a random subset of potential suppliers. I can understand a quality threshold e.g. "Must have a successful history of supplying x", ironically seems to be missing from UK requirements (Capita et al). Or a national security one, such as only companies owned within its borders. Or an ethical one, that the companies must meet some specified threshold. But not simply listing a subset of the various ones available because it wants to.That's just an entry level pathway to corruption and back handers. As well as simply being transparently perverse.
Maybe because the volume of email is much lower, but I have the opposite. Sometimes, just after TB launches emails seem to download to the general inbox and stay there, the rules having not run on those messages. When that happens running the rules manually doesn't move them either At one point I found I was creating duplicate rules, thinking that a rule for a given message source didn't exist already.
Ah, interesting. eionmac
I use folder rules to put work, shopping, freelance work, family, retailers, etc. into the required folders under the unified inbox. Because I have more folders than addresses, by a factor. I'm guessing you have your own domain with unlimited addresses or aliases, so can generate an email address for each use case.. But that's still too much of a faff for my taste.
I just have a small collection of free email accounts - I'm not relying on email for my livelihood so have no need to pay for accounts. And which email address I use only partly depends on purpose. Retailers I need to contact will always get my gmail account with a +recipient-name as part of the address;as in my.name+Tesco@gmail.com . But otherwise I rely on a filter rule to place emails where I want them to be.
I have wondered over the years whether Thunderbird was trying to be like Outlook, Outlook Express, or Outlook.com. Somehow it seems to miss the good points of each as well as avoiding the poor ones.
It gives me the single log-in for email and diary across assorted devices, so that I can pick them up on my phone, PC, laptop and tablet. But the calendar client isn't great and I have to use a 3rd party sync tool (TBsync) to enable this across the devices.
It has some basic filtering, which does for me, but that isn't great either.
And it sort of allows a unified inbox*, so that I can see most of my emails at once, irrespective of the address, though not all because imap won't, and it doesn't make that particularly obvious either.
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*Is it just me? Does everyone else with several email addresses want a different inbox for each of them, instead of just having a set of folders under one unified inbox, so that all emails for, say, purchasing go into that folder whether it's from a supplier or a co-worker ( when I worked f/t- mostly just friends and family now). But emails about admin would go into that folder, meetings into.........and so on.
It's years since I had this explained to me. But the way it goes is that capital expenditure needs write offs, so there is an annual depreciation cost. Operational expenditure is just an agreed budget,and they can control it.
I'm sure my ageing memory has oversimplified this.
There was a brief window of time when companies who'd just about perfected ways of avoiding being told about customer complaints* could be contacted on Twitter and shamed into sorting out the problem they'd caused. But then it all got big enough for them to work out ways of bullshitting or ignoring that, too.
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*We all know this, probably suffered it too. But it needs to have the light shone on it.
Big companies don't want to pay customer service staff. So they hide or remove phone numbers and email addresses. Instead there's a web page with a tab that says "Contact us" that leads to a page of FAQs that have no relevance to anything that anyone would care about. followed, possible only after you've clicked on one of these, by a link that says "Need more help". This takes you to a generic Help page. On that page, carefully hidden, will be a contact us link. Which leads to the FAQ page.........
The rapidly deteriorating usefulness of Google searches is pretty good evidence that computer based discrimination of context is not improving.
In general, what appears to be happening is a bigger and bigger dataset of what people asked for previously being used to direct results towards ignoring what the user puts in and instead feeding back what the user should have put in, according to their database of previous requests by millions of people who aren't that user and the need to give advertisers an appearance of value for money.
In The case of Twitter this seems to include an element of "Everyone is looking at or posting <this> this so when you ask for or post something different we'll assume it's just <this> anyway."
This is the insurance problem. AKA "We don't need insurance, we've never had a (named disaster)"
Old joke: Chap on a hike finds the path goes past the edge of a very sudden drop.
When he gets to the next village he says to the inn keeper, "That's a scary drop back there. I'm surprised there's no warning sign".
"Oh there was", was his reply. "But it got damaged and since no one had ever fallen we took it away".
It's funny how developers can do this sort of thing. There's a publisher of educational software that a few years back produced a programme for schools that defaulted to saving the kids' work in the programmes folder. Which was on a locked down network in most schools. And the settings within the programme were also locked down behind a password and concealed from the users/teachers' view. And the error messages were suppressed. So the teachers didn't know that kids' work (or hopefully their trial work, familiarising themselves with the software before letting the kids loose on it, though I wouldn't bet on that) wasn't being saved because the programme was trying to save to a locked down location.
So one more good bit of educational software sat ignored in most schools because it was effectively unusable.
What this puts the spotlight on is that there are a lot of people who take precious family photos on their phones and then, once they've done FB, "Insta" or whatever, just forget about them, assuming they'll always have them on their phone. Of course there's a bit of a panic when they get a new phone, especially if they switch between Apple/Android. But they just trust that the phone and their precious photos of little Chantelle growing up will be here when they want them. Backups? Never crosses their minds.
I agree.
I have all the family photos on a photos partition, with a backup on a backup partition (which happens to be on a second hdd) which is then backed up onto an external HDD that I swap from time to time.
I also have various old HDDs floating around, that carry most of the photos. And some free cloud storage accounts.
I'm trying to find a way to keep a copy away from home, too.
I only use Elements (PC) but it's hard not to notice that cataloguing and indexing photos that are nothing to do with Adobe seems to be a major part of what it does. In fact one of the first jobs after installing a new version ( just went from 9 to 2020) is to make it stop running in the background, recreating unwanted Start entries and all that shit. Adobe seem to think that once you install one of their products they own your device.
Clearly you are determined to find fault with and insult teachers. Equally clearly you won't accept any argument that shows the lack of logic or objectivity in what you write.
Normal teacher assessments are never more than a subjective estimate, they are not standardised in the way that exam marking is with the teachers who are btw also the exam markers spending a lot of time comparing marks and answers together. Nor are they intended to be. They re a guide. And some schools/teachers will estimate higher, to give confidence ( and to get better uni offers). Some will estimate lower, to make sure the kids don't get over confident. Some schools do mocks early, some later. Some more than once.
But you just want to attack teachers.
Live with it. It's your problem, no one else's. (At least not any more).
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But teachers didn't go on strike back then ( "back then" undefined).
What strikes are you talking about, and why would that have relevance?
weren't focused on bringing down tory governments How are teachers focussed on " bringing down tory (sic) governments"? In what way are they? Have you been reading conspiracy web sites by any chances?
doesn't actually bother to understand how the kids they teach react to exam conditions . In what way could teachers modify their assessments of the kids to replicate the negative effects of exam conditions? Penalise nervous kids? And anyway, what makes you think anyone can predict how individual kids performance will vary? Let alone by how much. Could anyone determine that child A will lose 7% of his/her marks due to exam stress and downgrade those marks accordingly? Even if it were objective and ethical.
Exams are a test of learning and everyone is given the same chance to demonstrate that learning. No they are not. And no one who has ever had anything to do with exams ( or learning) would claim otherwise. And that's without even bothering to discern what you mean by "learning". Exams are a test of recall, resilience, concentration, effort, and sometimes even understanding. And for that matter, what definition of "learning" would be appropriate to selection for University or employment? Assuming that there's even one such definition that serves for all/most subjects.
You seem to have a lot of resentment in you. And that's something you need to sort out for yourself. I've pointed out the irrational nature of your comments. That's all anyone can do.
Oh dear. You must have had a bad experience of education. Or maybe education had a bad experience of you.
As for your comment. Teacher assessments are as open to bias as any profession forced to make a summary judgement. And of course there are some. I have stories, even working with primary teachers on SATS. But they are the few.
But also, teacher assessments don't and can't take into account the differences between working in a classroom and sitting in an exam room. Exams have different variables; nerves, memory, technique etc.
The question is which is the truest test of a child's knowledge and understanding of a subject. Is it two or three years working on challenging tasks or two or three hours regurgitating preformed answers in a big room. Add in the students that have special arrangements because they have parents or a school better able or more capable of pushing for those, and those who need them but don't get them because they don't have a school or parents who push the right buttons. Mix in a bit of random chance ( which questions come up).
Yes "algorithm" is being used as a magic word. As if the computer chose to balance the results in some clever computerish way. We know that an alogorithm is just a string of calculations and comparisons, chosen and weighted by the hoomans and then pushed through a computer to do the lots of hard sums repeatedly and quickly. The computer didn't make the decisions, it just worked them out for the people.
But you wouldn't think that from the BBC/politicians.
We need to scotch that one. The grades submitted for the exam substitute were far more carefully applied, checked and moderated by schools than normal ones. They weren't just the usual teacher assessment. They weren't down to one teacher's judgement. These were treated as an exam substitute . As near as possible a realistic assessment, checked and signed off by a series of professionals. So to downgrade these assessments on the basis that traditional predictions are unreliable is inevitably going to be unfair and unreasonable.
As to the fairness and reliability of traditional exams......
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