Posts by Terry 6 6076 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Jul 2009
Think about it. If you are standing in front of the pay machine with a basket full of groceries you aren't in a position to wander off and find a cash machine- assuming there is one near by. I don't think I've seen one at my M and S store, it's certainly not near the checkout. And nowhere else in that location- a small retail park- has one.
Yes, and they didn't have any kind of sign up at my local to warn us. So I tried my M and S card on my phone and after some wheel spinning it rejected it and told me to try again. And it got rejected again. So I tried with the physical card and it still got rejected. So then I tried with a different card on my phone, which got rejected too.
At which point I went back to old fashioned chip n pin. Luckily I could remember the pin for one of my cards quite easily, since I seldom need to use the pin with the others,and by then I was too flustered and cross to even think straight, let alone recall the other pins.
There's an awful lot of businesses out there that aren't big companies with IT ( or any other) departments. Small businesses. Maybe just one or two people doing admin and another handful making stuff. IT support won't exist. If it's broken they take it somewhere to be fixed. Even if there are a few dozen this probably still applies. The people in the office will be using Windows PCs running Office- with possibly the bare minimum of IT skills required to turn it on and off, then launch and use a small number of programmes;WORD, EXCEL and something that does the book keeping. If they are adventurous enough to use some kind of backup/Sync software it will probably also be Microsoft's. It's all they know- and there is no way on this Earth that these millions of small businesses are going to be switching to something they've never heard of.
The world of IT is not just about Megacorp PLC with its offices in every major city, nor about IT pros using obscure Linux distros to control a custom made board that manages the lighting in their aquarium.
reporting the same 0x80070643 generic install failure to some users, rather than something more helpful.
Windows is full of these types of messages.
Almost inevitably a search for the specific code or wording will come up with some kind of definition along the lines of "there's been some sort of failure in something somewhere"
I generally defend users. I've never been a proper tech pro and all my work supporting users has been firmly from their perspective, But I do draw the line at something is obviously not working as it should but we'll ignore/silence it
FFS I don't care if it's a bleeping box or a leaking roof you damn well tell someone (usually me) and get it looked at, you don't just ignore/silence it.
First time I met this; a new peripatetic teacher was added to our team ( this was in the days when education had money to support kids in schools- so a long time ago). On days when she was in the base (and I was away in schools) she needed to use our computer. And kept telling me it was always crashing. I had no problem at all with it.
Until the day she came in while I was working there.As soon as she came close, crash!
I rebooted and we experimented.- No giggles in the back there! But her fluffy jumper was pretty sexy. And yes I could feel the electricity.
Much nastier. A few years later we were moved to a building with nylon carpets. The computers were OK- perhaps they were better protected by then. But even going close to a radiator, door knob, filing cabinet ( all the things you'd find in an office) and wham! A jolt you'd really know about.
Actually Bran, that's pure bollocks. And irrelevant to this item. This is mostly Windows users' views. Sure we have the usual smug Linux fans joining in, who will comment on the Windows they don't use, whether relevant to the thread or not. But for this item, it's about Windows' various versions. Which most seem to agree was best with Win 7. Win 8 being excrement, 10 being a step back from the abyss and 11 a whole new abyss. Some may genuinely prefer XP and I miss my WinPhone too.
And yes I've used Linux too.Have it on one of my laptops. And for the most part my Ubuntu and Zorin (dual boot) distros do what I want. But for real world everyday purposes I'm a Windows user.. And preferred Win 7 to anything that followed.
This is an issue. As far as I understand it (a parallel with quantum mechanics here- if you think you do.....) each GP- or maybe local health board or some such, has their own contract in to a private service that interfaces to the GP part of the NHS App, with a set of properties that someone decides (GP/company/board?).
Where I went to teach residents to us the NHS app a few months back, the patients can directly contact the GP service who hosted the session, in the app. Some of the residents were from other GPs, who couldn't contact theirs ( nor can I. The GP can send me a message- but I can't f****ing reply to it except by phoning them!!!).
They also send me texts I can't reply to btw!
"Please send us a blood pressure reading". Sure, Why not make it as difficult as possible to do so.
Absolutely. The history of big, monolithic all-in-one solutions hasn't exactly been glorious. Even with much smaller and less complex organisations.
Let's have the NHS with a unified data sharing system based on common protocols, so that information can be shared securely as required..
I'm guessing that this would be a big enough project. And would create significant benefits.
Then maybe if something else is needed, maybe that can be developed with compatible protocols. Maybe.
....to produce £35 billion ($44 billion) of savings.
That might well be the end point, but as a starting point it's just total crock of shit. You can't design a system by deciding the savings and working backwards. That's just magical thinking. All that does is create a list of corners to cut.
The best you can do is design a more efficient system, and then work out how much it might save- if anything.
As Lee D said, I want my "existing nice, ordered alphabetical, sub-categorised start menu and not try to either split everything between Apps and Programs (meaning "Microsoft Junk" and "Everything else")"
I've had Commentards tell me here that I should be using search like they do, when I've stated my objection to the clusterfuck that Win 10 Start becomes if you don't know how to take control of it, and that 11 removes much of that control. When I've pointed out that Search is pretty much shit when programmes' publishers give them stupid unhelpful names, if it's a programme you use infrequently (Balbolka, Greenfish,TDmore etc.) I've had comments denying that this is likely. that I may only use something once or twice a year as if this is unreasonable.
So yes.
These particular scum are of a different type. Even the worst normal crim would struggle to engage with someone, befriend them and become part of their lives just to steal from them. It's a behaviour so far from common humanity that it's difficult for a normal human to believe.
And these scum know which buttons to push. Going by the stories on Scambusters etc. they reel the victims in with plausible back stories and a careful game plan that makes their victims reliant on the apparent relationship before they start to suck blood.
It takes a really, really nasty personality to engage with people in that way. To befriend them only to ruin them.
Yeah. I bunged Ubuntu on my older laptop. No problems.
Dual booted with Zorin a week or so later so I could compare them side-by-side. Still no problem, other than the boot menu starts off pretty crappy, and civilising it isn't as straightforward as it claims to be.
'Nux may not be for everyone. I've used it a fair bit over the years and there always seems to come a point where something won't work the way I'd expect it to, or at all, and that usually means some kind of need to Google it, get 7 different answers, of which 4 don't work and at least two require a bit of SUDOing.
Yeah, nor I. But this is not about you ( or for that matter me, or Other El Reg commentards). It's about the big old world out there.
And those bastards will get their crap on to most compatible machines. But it's taking a lot of years to force the world to something that once people used to queue up to get asap.
It took many years before my Local Education Authority managers agreed that we actually needed a backup for all the student data we saved to the shared drive/server. I did my best to back stuff up to CD/DVD drives, doing regular and duplicate copies and keeping some off-site, like in my car boot, which rightly wouldn't be allowed these days.
When they did it was to a drive in a metal cupboard in an adjoining room. One backup- on site. And that's the best I could get. It was my constant nightmare. Some (potentially all) of that stuff had legal status. But the higher ups had better things to do with the funds, like regular new furniture for the Director's office.
I thought I was pretty good at keeping my home/family backups secure - something I'd carried on from how I did things in my working days. I do daily backups to a second internal HDD which is only for backups, every couple of days to an external USB HDD, which I swap regularly so that there is another copy elsewhere in the house, then monthly or when I feel like, to a third internal HDD that's for general scratch stuff, and I make ad hoc copies to some old retired HDDs in USB caddies and the like- one of which is always stored away from home.
So I absolutely shouldn't have any missing files, let alone whole folders, right?
So where the fuck did the entire folder of fun or useful images that I'd created in Photoshop(Elements) go to?
Not a trace, not on any of the backups.
It's rhetorical question. I know what I must have done-I somehow omitted to include folders in that partition (because it's a partition used for fun trivial stuff that I'd thought doesn't warrant backing up), in my backup list. i.e. I'd pointed the backup software to all my data partitions except that one and then subsequently decided to use it to store stuff that I had started making in Photoshop and did want to keep; but forgot that the data folder in that partition wasn't included in the back-ups. And then one day I must have deleted that folder instead of just some subfolders with unwanted old work-in-progress files that I didn't need anymore.
My conclusion,, that there is no 100% guaranteed method other than maybe constantly making backup copies in several different locations of everything that goes onto the computer. No exceptions, no matter how trivial the content may seem. And not ever deleting any of it. Which may prove to be impractical.
I assume that there are corporate requirements for Outlook in big companies. Lots of people don't work in Big Companies. And aren't forced to work with C-Suite policies
Thunderbird/Betterbird does a wonderful job of providing the main functionality of Outlook for everyone else. Email/Contacts/Calendar/To Do lists.*
It has add-ons that let you synchronise your calendar with Outlook.com or Google if you want to have your stuff on an iPhone as well and I think it already works natively on Android.
It's look....is just computery. Not pretty, not ugly imho. but it does the job. Which is what most people need. I switched to Betterbird fork because of folder sorting.
*Though not great for more complex filter rules, as in "Does Contain Xterm but Not also YTerm" which Outlook- last I used it a decade or so ago- was great at.
Teaching is a skill ( and an art). It's as much "doing" as is any activity, like writing code or installing software. The fact that those who are incompetent at doing other stuff have been let loose in schools has been a blight on UK education, though these days UK state schools at least are meant to use qualified teachers. ("Meant to" because I know of at least one primary school that uses a Higher Level Teaching Assistant to give teachers their time out of the classroom, and does so by teaching the Science curriculum!).
But teaching ( and training) isn't about slavishly delivering a course. It's about covering the course materials in a way that makes it comprehensible to the students, of what ever age. Knowing the material well enough to explain it is massively important. Knowing how to teach is considerably more important.
In my old age I'm a Digital Champion. Helping people become confident and included in the digital world. Many have never used a keyboard and don't know how to keep themselves safe online. And I quickly got moved from helping in the beginners' group to actually teaching it. Because I can teach, and it shows. I don't always know some bits of the course all that well ( like using You Tube- because I loath it and seldom do beyond pressing the Go button, or writing online CVs- because I'm too old for that malarkey), but I can deliver the course materials, and more importantly can make them accessible to the participants. I know how to explain things, give practical real life examples, draw in other volunteers who may have more experience with that item and so forth.
Oh, and those who can't teach make lucrative careers as advisors, OFSTED inspectors, education officers etc on the backs of teachers. as noted in other places in recent El Reg comments.
As a young teacher I did an analysis of our Special Needs departmental results. Lots of numbers involved.
Head of department thanked me mildly and I heard nothing more. Was a bit miffed to be honest.
Then a month or so later she came to me and asked for me to write a summary, because she'd been asked to present the analysis to the LEA- and didn't really understand it.
The nasty piece of work had obviously passed it off as her own.
But education is full of Nasty Ambitious Types like that. Mostly they're crap teachers, ( because the good ones are in the classroom,) but are really good at spotting which band wagons to jump on to, which schemes to promote as The Next Best Thing - and more importantly, when to jump off. They tend to be the ones who get to the top jobs and start inventing policy leaving behind them trails of chaos, wasted money and wrecked careers.
I've seen teachers spend months being trained in some wonderful new scheme, ( sometimes genuinely so) only for it to be abandoned a few months after they started to implement it, as the LEA person sponsoring it had moved on to a new project. I've seen specialist teacher trainers recruited and dragged across from the other side of the world to train schools in another wonderful new scheme, only to find that by the time they got settled the scheme was being cut back and the individual responsible for sponsoring it had moved on to some new shiny, leaving them with no job to do. I've seen teams of teachers pressured to promote a scheme they knew was rubbish, then once they were identified with it the officer who'd pressured them into it started repudiating it, because it was rubbish, as they'd told him, leaving them holding the smelly can. I've seen Local Authority Advisory teacher stand up in front of a school staff and declare that the Latest Thing was the only way forward and the previous method was always obviously rubbish, within days of having been declaring the previous thing the Best Possible Way to teach that subject.
And these people got promoted higher and higher.
can you suggest any ways we can explain to customers how this is useful?
This seems to exemplify a lot of stuff. Not just in computing. But the world of IT and tech is where stuff happens most I guess.
The implementation of someone's fave idea into a project, buoyed by enthusiasm and top down pressure, rather than considering how the end product needs to be used.
This is part ofwhy, as I've said previously, I will avoid Win 11. I have too many programmes I need to find on occasion, but with unhelpful names. In 10 I can group the links to the software into use folders (Graphics/video/office/..) If you know how.
In 11 it seems to be pretty much impossible. All software gets loaded into publisher folders, listed alphabetically by whatever dubious name they gave to it, and stuffed with all sort of extra marketing crap, as with 10. But then there's no way to sort it out.
Not really. I use Thunderbird/Betterbird. It took me many years to switch but I'd never go back.
It lacks some of Outlook's useful stuff, not the least the flexibility of Outlook's complex Boolean rules creation. Which I do miss.
But in general, once they'd integrated the calendar (formerly known as the Lighting Extension) into it it's done all I need.
Re: Microsoft would like users to move to the new version despite it lacking many of its predecessor's functions.
They keep doing this- continuous deimprovement.
I use Onenote. 2021 version.
And it's perfect for my use case. Sharing notes and bits of information across various devices. But the iPhone version lacks almost all of the editing control- like adding rows within an existing table-so anything beyond that basic functionality needs to wait until I get to my PC. Items needing to be added to a table get typed underneath and copy/pasted into a new row later.
They now want us to use a PC version installed from their "store". So I keep the install files for if ever I need to reinstall ( and of course my disc images will have it if I need to go back to that point).
Because the Store version is such a crap item. It's had much of the functionality chopped out.
And the number of versions is totally bewildering.
https://www.onenotegem.com/a/faq/onenote/2019/1126/1300.html
Store version called UWP these days, moving from something that made sense to something that doesn't, which is itself a microcosm example of them making things crappier.
Which would make sense, except where three or four buses go up to the terminus at 10 minute intervals, but emerge 40 minutes after the first one together Something you'd only be aware of if you happened to be catching a bus a few stops down from the terminus. You wait for the bus, one goes up, so you assume that one will soon come down. But then another goes up a few minutes later, but still nothing comes back down. Then another, and another. And you wait. And eventually they all emerge like Daleks, one behind the other.And it keeps happening- sometimes I'd only see two or three go up, but still four would emerge. Presumably one or two had already gone up and were waiting for the rest of the club by the time I arrived at the stop.
You reminded me. TfL always claimed that London buses arrived bunched because of the effects of traffic. Just unlucky.
Except, I used to get a bus a few stops from the terminus. Maybe 5 minutes away.
I'd see a bus go up, towards the terminus.But none coming down. And I'd wait, and ten minutes later I'd see another on the same route go up, then usually a third and often a 4th. And I'd wait, about 30 or 40 minutes later they'd all appear like Daleks in a row.(It's why I stopped being a Good Citizen and went back to driving- reduced an hour+ journey time to about 10 minutes, which saved at least one whole teaching slot each day and left me much less stressed and considerably more reliable).
Round North London possibly other places- 4 buses from different routes, but covering the same stretch for the next few miles, should in theory arrive spaced out about one every 7 minutes (averaged), but will somehow all manage to arrive at the same time, then leave a half hour gap until the next group.
I agree. I've never assume ( or believed) that any loading/installing/whatever animation was more than that. That if it was spinning or whatever this just means that the little minprogramme that makes it run is still running. Not that it's tied to the actual occurrence.
This is an issue that just won't go away. It's particularly an issue in public service.Whenever a government want to show they're controling costs they target the "non-essential" not front line staff, administrates etc.mostly on lower pay scales Great, so then you have your doctors, teachers,speech therapists etc. two finger typing reports and distributing them, chasing up appointments and so on and so forth, when they should be diagnosing, lesson planning, etc.
They also didn't have to meet the requirements of a national curriculum, plan lessons, submit plans for scrutiny, differentiate said lessons according to a whole range of abilities and individual needs, monitor each kid's progress in detail on a weekly basis,manage kids who arrived at school unfed, record and evaluate detailed lesson outcomes, write specific and individualised comments on every piece of work in the kids' books, take mostly unpaid responsibility for managing and monitoring chunks of aforesaid curriculum, handle behaviour issues that would in those olden days have lead to physical chastisement (yes I was at school in the 60s - with Mr. Slipper) or being booted out of school (or both), read and comply with policies on subject delivery, SEN, Health and Safety, GDPR, Child Protection, Risk Assessment....... etc etc. Listen to parents and speak with them outside of the annual parents' evening, when in those days they mostly told them nothing worth hearing,
And you know what, you don't know whether your teachers were complaining or not- they weren't complaining to > you.
I enabled not uploading data from Echo and Ring by getting shot of Ring and never letting anyone in the house use Echo/Alexa- possibly the only time in 30 odd years that I've truly insisted on banning something that the family wanted. But you know what, no one has ever wanted to enable the Alexa after the first month or three. And this was quite a long time ago now.
I mostly use if for the calendar. And the Outlook.com calendar is all kinds of crap, but it carries my Thunderbird calendar to my phone ( and back) which is all I really need it to do
I had thought about shifting everything to Proton's mail and calendar. But it's a lot of effort for something that works reasonably OK.
I use the Outlook.com app because it allows me to sync my desktop Thunderbird calendar to my iPhone. If TB was available on my phone I'd dump the Outlook.com app instantly. But until then Thunderbird with the TBSync and Provider for Exchange Active Sync add-on combination* give me mobile access to my calendar. I don't use the iOS email app. It just duplicated what I already had from the outlook app.
*By the by, I've never understood why it takes two add-ons to do one job. Why they can't be combined. But hey ho. It works.
This requires a substantial amount of work from the coding and development aspect, but it really is the only way to protect sensitive data delivered to the end users and stored in a central location," Fowler said.
Err. Isn't there a standard, reusable, off-the-shelf method for doing this? it's not as if these data stores are exactly unusual.
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