Posts by Terry 6 6378 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Jul 2009
So;
MPs and the Home Office are desperate to speed up the work and save money on it at the same time.
Tech Bros offer them a solution that they claim will speed things up and save money-while being all gee whiz and forward looking
Desperate officials have about as much tech knowledge as Fred Flintstone ( and less practical skill) and want to maximise the savings as quick as they can, rather than proceeding cautiously
And to use the usual formula; What could possibly go wrong.
Education - and I've said this on here many times-has to be one of the worse
There are teachers ( I use the word loosely) who are determined from day one to rise up the ranks. Which they do very quickly. This is not due to good teaching, or self-critical development*
It's because they seize every opportunity to make a name for themselves by spotting and jumping on every new bandwagon- and the higher its sponsors are the better, but then knowing how to quickly and gracefully exit just before it becomes toxic ( they always do) and on to the next one.
*self-critical development is death to promotion in education. No one got promoted by saying "I think I could have done that better by..."
But constantly saying how well things are going seems to have a magic effect on the people above them, probably because that's how they became the people above them.
A PS I copied, deleted and reposted this after I remembered....the most egegious recent example was a teacher with no primary experince who got appoined as executive of the school his kids went to and another local one. Resulting in one of teh schoold damn near getting closed down post-OFSTED and years of rebuilding its competence - but, but an MBA,
Hmm The Peter principle sort of assumes that people cease to get promoted when they reach the level of their own incompetence. If only it were so.There seems to be a kind of executive escalator for some people, leaving the level of their own incompetence far below.
This is the root of almost all internet/email based scams.
User has trust in the processes and has not heard of the nasty things that scammers can do.
So they blindly do as they're told.
Works for phones too.
And yeah, I'm a Scam Marshall/Friends Against Scams and part of my volunteer work is teaching the residents where I help teach IT skills about the nastiness that's out there.
My biggest bugbear is when one part of my bank is sending out emails saying "never click on links in emails" while the marketing department is sending out emails that say "just click on this link"!!!
That story comes up in property transactions too. MITM attack replacing the solicitor, telling purchaser to send the payment to the new account number.......
A simple call by the client to check would save them, but I guess in the excitement- and not knowing about this stuff- makes them vulnerable.
But it's hundreds of thousands gone...a home in fact. I presume the lawyer insurance covers this(?)
Ignorance is never bliss.
Absolutely
I've use 'Nux on some machines over the yuears.
Just replaced Windows on one laptop with Zorin ( my distro of choice). Ironically because on my Windows PCs Creality's software won't work ( owing to my having deep sixed Edge and the Webview2 Runtime or whatever it's called)
And it reminded me how Linux systems can work beautifully and simply- until they don't and tip users into a command line rather precipitously.
As well as the home users sticking with 10 we need to remember that "non-profits" and small and medium businesses are using computers and likely won't downgrade to an 11 machine until the current one dies
Home users probably use a PC much less than they used to anyway. Most of that stuff takes place on a phone or tablet now. So buying a Win 11 supported PC is unlikely.
The reported economists are stating the figure they ascertained that investors have (in aggregate) decided that AI/LLMs will give them. (So decimal point accuracy is purely the result of that calculation - not a forecast). Not that they are themselves predicting such productivity savings.
Also, by confusing this a significant point is being missed:Investors will expect to see those savings. Indeed will likely demand them- and base their valuations on them.
The consequences of which could be significant, whatever happens. Not the least that companies' C-Suites will be ordered in no uncertain terms to provide these cost cuttings.
Whether it's based on reality is of no relevance. A prediction will have been made and factored in to the expectations. Jobs will be lost and productivity targets will potentially not be met
BBC consumer programmes sometimes cover this one.
Often fashion items marketed as luxury materials from a company called say "John Smithshaw of London" with pictures of Tower bridge or the Houses of Parliament.
But turn out to be shit fabric of random shade and dodgy sizing shipped from China with a return policy that means it'd cost more to reject them than they costed.
Often sold by Facebook market place ads.
Why anyone would buy stuff sold on there is a deep mystery. But people obviously do.
True, but as a good rule of thumb over the centuries language has evolved with usage and if a word or phrase really is needed it'll survive- even if not with its original meaning.
(e.g "begging the question", Which I know annoys some on here, but the reality is it does good work the way it's commonly used now)
Oh yes! 13 month old (now) Fox Terrier pup managed to chew three alarm wires, the internet cable and a USB when in the teething stage.More dangerous wires were prepared for, we put insulating tubes ( for water pipes) round them. But thin wires on the skirting board were just too tempting for her and harder to protect.
Ah yes, the different kinds of measurement problem.
At one point I was buying casting resin. From Amazon, because I have vouchers. Some were in litres. some in odd ml sizes (630ml say), some gave a price per ml to use for comparison, but many didn't. Some were in ozs and so on. And all with massively varying costs per unit - some could be twice as expensive as another one. And £20/litre v £20 per 500ml makes a lot of difference.
I ended up with a spreadsheet to work out which to buy each time I needed to order.
I can only judge that by my own (one time) Local Authority school system. It was decades into the computer age before the LA accepted any kind of responsibility for supporting Schools' IT
That's decades of schools winging it.
Followed by a service being provided that turned up with all sorts of procedures and costs that the schools didn't understand. And had never needed previously.
Years ago I had a copy of ABBYY and from time to time found it really useful. I think it had come free with a scanner.
So when I wanted something for home use a few years later I looked. It was so expensive!
And then they seem to have killed it off anyway.
Now they're only interested in "Enterprise" products, apparently.
That's (part of) what pisses me off about those TV ads. The ones with a vague Albert Einstein parody making wild promises about energy saving. Does it f*k.
All it does is tell us we're using the stuff. We know we're using the stuff. We don't somehow imagine that it isn't being used when we're making dinner- and need to be told. And the people most in energy poverty are even more acutely aware of this fact.
The meters don't tell us room by room where we're wasting electricity- which might be mildly useful, for some people from time to time. Anything else is sheer bollocks. Anyone who can and wants to cut down on what they use will do so without the stupid display.
Conditional formatting.
The tool that means when Mrs6 (AKA Brown Owl) looks at the waiting list for her Brownie group she can see at a glance which girls are now old enough to join.
And from time to time new rows are needed. sometimes we use. Copy and paste.
This is not use by some big mega-corps with lots of techie staff.
This is a volunteer youth worker fitting in her volunteering at the end of a long day of actual paid work. , supported by a moderately techie retired teacher (husband).
And people like her rely on Microshit not stuffing up!
She gives her time to the world, Free.
In exchange those fuckwits are trying to make her life harder.
Bastards.
....is that the civil service top brass (and probably senior politicians too) are terrified of technology. None of them understand it and none of them want to be responsible for it. PPE degrees probably don't prepare them for stuff that does stuff. So everyone wants to shift responsibility before it blows up in their hands. Pass the parcel.
Every renewal I threaten to leave them, and so they drop the price. I get great speed and a decent price, but it's a battle.
Maybe now I won't bother. It was the hassle of shifting all the accrued email linked accounts that kept me tied.
Not so much changing the email address we use daily. But all the accounts that are tied to it. Banks,utilities etc. Some from decades ago. Some more recent, if only because when asked to provide one our VM addresses just naturally came to mind. We've had them a long time. Long before they were VM even addresses.
Bastards!
For a brief glorious period it was possible to fax a senior manager, or a head office. And an acuall physical lette rwould appear on the manager's desk. Being a physical object, rather than an email it tended to get attention.
The some b****d came up with a way to send the fax messages digitally directly to the PC inbox.To be ignored seamlessly
Girl Guides' forms and documents are like that*.
Clearly cobbled together intended for the Leaders and Brown Owls to print out and hand to parents to fill in by hand. Or for the leaders to use ditto. Stuff like consent forms and Risk Assessments.
So trying to fill the forms in on the computer is impossible. Either literally so, because they aren't editable or effectively so because the formatting (which is horrible) falls apart.
Obviously the leaders are wanting to email the forms, because no one wants to print out dozens of paper forms ( on their own printers, if they even have one) and waste time chasing the parents to give it to them to lose (or send it via the kids who'll lose it for them) and the parents expect them to be emailed in the 21st C..
Not many of the girls' parents will have a printer. And the leaders don't want piles of paper.to file away. Or indeed to sit filling out Risk Assessment forms with a ball point pen and insufficient space.
*Mrs. B is a Brown Owl and Older Daughter is a Guide Leader
I became a the tech support and trainer for my own and a range of other educational services and local schools because (in the 80s) I had a decent understanding of computery stuff. A combination of high school coding classes and then in adult life, doing stuff with an Acorn Electron. I joined another teacher in running central trainning for school staff and took over from him when he got promoted to a headship.
By the standards of what was neeed a few years later I knew nothing. But in that period I was a true guru. For a good few years I kept up to speed, so my guru status just about survived. It lasted well into the period when school IT started to get professional. But it couldn't last. I did have my proper teaching job to do as well.
everyone else hates it because the petty cash reimbursement process is subject to a level of scrutiny that His Majesty's Customs and Revenue can only aspire to
This always used to wind me up no end. Getting the odd fiver reimbursed was always a real pain, whereas people could spend a small fortune of tax payer money on some expensive and unsuitable device it it was bought through official channels.
And of course the staff time wasted with the pettiness of petty cash far outweighed the amount of cash being reclaimed
Penny wise pound foolish accounting.
More to the point; simple inference.
There are times when one may need to get a precise definition of something, rather than just assume. But this is not one of those
I didn't know what it meant either. But I did know that this made sod-all difference to the story. And could guess what it meant FWIW anyway.
That said, it doesn't hurt to simply answer the question. Better to question than not. usually.no need to get hoity toity with the questioner.
No they're bloody not!
We are precisely not referring to the tech savvy here.
This is about ordinary members of the public, who wouldn't ever have heard of Scribus- a package which is, or looks, more complex to use than Publisher, and certainly less friendly.
Whereas Publisher used to be part and parcel of the software package that they already have.and which is totally familiar to them
(And Inkscape is in a different orbit all together)
.
People who don't care about proprietary software, don't know there is any other kind, and aren't creating long lasting or major publications. They just want to knock out the week's hymn sheet, the dally specials or the price of second hand school jumpers.
Stuff like that, made to look good to catch attention for a day or two.
People who have no interest in tech, just want to do stuff. And who will probably turn to ChatGPT to do it for them now.
Not the ones that the shit-for-brains marketing fuckwits of Microsoft sold it to.
They kept it in the Pro versions of Office and took it out of the Home version.
Publisher is of little use in corporate offices. It doesn't belong in that environment. Never really has been They have people who do Design.
But for the small business and sole trader, for the charity and non-profit sectors. For voluntary groups and home users it's brilliant.
In Publisher we can quickly create a flyer, or a menu. A poster or a greetings card.
Got a church fete coming up? Or a charity auction? A cake sale or a used school uniform stand? A Sale or a new item in stock. A library's Summer reading list. A small cafe's price list
Publisher all the way.There's nothing like it for ease of use, simplicity and versatility. It has a gentle learning curve and great tools for the small scale user.
So of course these pathetic sad bastards took it away from us. And now they want to kill if.
Fuck 'em
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..
