Posts by Terry 6

UK.gov threatens to make adults give credit card details for access to Facebook or TikTok

Re: How to stop it dead.

We also use "tabled" in the UK for items that are to be discussed. The difference, if there is one, is that in the UK that's now become an indefinite statement, i.e. it's on the list to be discussed - at some point.

It's in many ways worse than that. When the high court makes an unpopular ruling ( because sometimes "The Law" isn't what people want or imagine it to be) the populist politicians - in government or just near to it-see their favourite papers whipping up a little storm and try to take advantage of it, whether it's to use that to support their own agenda or simply to accrue populism points.

Re: Dead Cat

They both froth. Both froth about urban myths and moral panics. Just different ones.

Grauniad readers tend to be internationalist, mostly white middle class and think that they have a White Saviour's obligation to (selected) minorities.

DM readers tend to be nationalist, mostly white middle class ( but maybe a bit older) and think they only have an obligation to their "own kind".

Re: Much cheaper plan:

To be fair half a century ago I did forge the occasional letter to my school.....

Re: Much cheaper plan:

Most parents should be able to parent. (I'd require a test before they're allowed to. If you need one just to drive a car....).

Few would have the tech savvy to do stuff with routers and stuff.

Have you tried restarting? Reinstalling? Upgrading? Moving house and changing your identity?

Re: Safe NT

The UK's equivalent (DBS) has had a few difficulties over the years.

On the whole it seems ok now. It seems to work by checking your entry on the various black lists etc.. It has to be renewed every few years but I don't know why and there's also an annual auto-renewal system which deducts £13 direct debit.

Which is fine, but begs the question of what is a renewal for. (However you define "begging the question").

Is it just to make sure we're still alive? Or is that the only time it's updated and the lists checked? Renewing it seems to be an end in itself.

Re: Occasionally, you get a straight answer

been fobbing him off with 'we are working on it, it will be sorted soon' .

Surely the point is that doing this to customers is a stupid, pointless and ultimately self-defeating strategy.

Why was said minion even trying to fob off customers? They're not going to look back at several hours/days of frustration and think "I'm glad they didn't tell me".

Re: Ask other users in our forums...

something vaguely near,

Oh yes, the forum favourite. Referring you to a link that has a related keyword or two.

Q) How do I resolve the menu section of the programme going black with a black font when I select an item from the screen?

A) Read this page xyz.com/how-to-select-menu-items....

Re: Ask other users in our forums...

No point wanting to strangle the phone jockey. They're probably being gas lighted by their own management, who've given them the same bollocks information they're passing on to us. At least if Virgin Media is typical. If VM's servers were being attacked by Martian invaders the service status would still say there were no problems ( though to be fair in that circumstance they could probably be excused) and the phone support staff would still be wanting to test your Hub's connections, being completely unaware of the chaos raging.

Re: Not identical, but...

Sadly, almost certainly true. Since shareholder value is calculated on a short term investment basis, will share rise before the fund managers trade them.Or more to the point, whether fund managers think they will.

Re: Ask other users in our forums...

Thanks

Re: Ask other users in our forums...

Or there was n "they" to remove it. The point of these forums is to avoid having to pay staff.

Re: Ask other users in our forums...

CuChulainn

Can I use that, please?

No, I've not read the screen. Your software must be rubbish

Re: Users, no matter how long they might use an application, never mind their instructions

Honda's does. In fact you have to make a deliberate choice to allow it by leaving the mirror control switch set to "on". Normally it'd be set to "off " once they're positioned.

Re: Users, no matter how long they might use an application, never mind their instructions

Yes, or have cameras.

Is reversing round a corner still in the UK test. I thought I'd read somewhere that it was removed.

Re: As we have found out so many times over so many late nights-

Close. It's assumed ( probably wrongly) that most people can use a computer. BUT there is no justification in assuming they know how to use a particular (especially a not an everyday) programme or that they can and will follow procedures.

Every company is responsible for training and supporting its staff.But do they?

Re: Dialogs.... time for

Many years back my late father was QC manager for a factory making coats for M&S.

The place was badly uninvested with antiquated machinery.

M&S had notoriously high standards ( then at least).

Dad had a precise spec to work to - anything outside that he'd reject.

There was a high reject rate, mostly caused by poorly performing, ancient, worn out machines.

The directors would then go in in the evening put the stuff back into the dispatch, at the bottom of the pile - like the recent Apprentice contestants tried with their dodgy fish. M&S' staff were quite capable of foreseeing that dodge. But unlike those contestants' customer M&S' approach was more rigid.They'd reject the whole consignment.

The bosses' response each time was to swear and shout and curse at, and as things got worse, to fire managers. But not to change things. Dad left before he was next to be fired.

A few months later they went bust. No surprise there- not after M&S withdrew their contract on the grounds of poor standards compliance..

What shocked me then, and I think dad as well, was that these directors would have taken the M&S contract, knowing the high standards required- but believed they could put one over on a company like M&S rather than try to meet the standards..

Re: Simples...

Yeah, Photoshop Elements' native format retains the various layers.Save as a standard image format and they're flattened.

Re: Return code ignored

This has been a source of annoyance for many years. Design operations ( not just computery stuff of course) built upon what some remote manager well insulated from the daily grind imagines the job is, how the staff perform it and what their needs are. Completely forgetting/missing/being totally unaware of the major aspects of those workers' day. No one actually asks the peons what they need to do the job efficiently.

That could be anything from the manager's deciding to have one central printer in a four floor building saving a few quid in equipment costs while wasting up to 10 minutes on every 15 minute task while staff toil up and down the stairs, to not having any kind of backup system in place, let alone off-site because the manager has never had to even be aware that this goes on in his own office.

Re: Users, no matter how long they might use an application, never mind their instructions

that they would continue to write down keystrokes.

If this is the usual situation users will have been given inadequate time to get a feel of the software, even less time to practice under guidance so that it becomes automatic and are then expected to go back and use the blessed, complicated ( to them if not to the trainers and developers) and unfamiliar programme in their day job, immediately, with time pressure. And probably to train the rest of the department.

When you are on the roundabout it's hard to remember, let alone read the "How to get offf the roundabout" guidance.

Big ( and maybe other) software companies- especially OS ( like Microsoft) - companies have done a pretty good job at training users to ignore onscreen messages. Because they've so often been unhelpful, irrelevant, or yes, pointless.

In this instance a little "disk full" message would, maybe not even registered with the user.

A big message saying "There is no more room on this disc. Please select one of these options to continue". with a list, might have saved a bit of angst.

To err is human. To really tmux things up requires an engineer

Step outside

Beyond the general concepts, none of this story means much to me.

But The general principles as applied to life do. Having several similar looking systems in the same place make a mis-selection almost inevitable.

A good and simple example. The Honda HR-V has the hazard and start buttons close to each other, near the centre of the console.. Though different shapes they are both reddish and about the same size. Inevitably drivers ( and yes, but not just me) will wish to thank a driver who's stopped to let us out of a side turning or parking slot or some such and switched off the engine instead. Which could be anything from embarrassing to bloody dangerous. The new e:H-RV has a few refinements, among which is that the Start button is now back to the other side of the wheel, roughly where you'd expect an ignition key to go.

UK think tank proposes Online Safety Bill reviewer to keep tabs on Ofcom decisions

Re: Lets stop messing around shall we?

It's interesting that the BBC governors have a cabinet office representative, now.

And since the govt. (i.e in effect the actual PM and cabinet, not the MPs) decide on whether the BBC gets to keep its funding and how much, said representative is as much a political commissar as any Soviet cadre. Though to be fair, they won't be sending anyone to a Gulag- they'll just block knighthoods and well paid sinecures when they leave.

European watchdog: All data collected about users via ad-consent popup system must be deleted

Re: Generates annual revenues of €41.9bn

And of course, if that were a justification then there would be no laws against fraud, or political corruption. Though in truth that does seem to be current govt. policy

Re: Agree 100%

Hmmm yes. Since each time I use Google ( and often there's little choice) they require me to select no no and no for three separate settings and then OK before it'll move- with each setting requiring an active selection- I have to agree.

Lost your mouse cursor? Microsoft's PowerToys 0.55 has you covered – with a massive crosshair

Less with Windows

I can usually find the Windows cursor with a quick flick of the mouse.

But Photoshop Elements really does my head in. Because some settings make the cursor so tiny it simply vanishes. Which would be very precise to control if there was some way to actually see where the f**k it is.

How can we recruit for the future if it takes an hour to send an email, asks Air Force AI bigwig in plea for better IT

Re: Big Biscuits

To you it sounds like a bargain. To me it sounds like a bargain. To bean counters it's a different cost centre and the two things bear no relationship.

And to politicians it's an extravagantly big sum of money that is hard to explain to voters so they don't want to try.

Re: OpEx vs CapEx

high end recycling centers

Unfortunately Local Authority education support services ( and I'd guess Social Care too) don't have such luxuries. In my case the alternative was taking the old PCs to the domestic recycling centre in the back of my car and hoiking them into a skip - or at the very best a semi-secure rehoming container. I'd bet a couple of quid that some services just bunged them into the big refuse bins and sent them to landfill HDD and all.

Re: OpEx vs CapEx

And it's not uncommon for organisations dealing with sensitive data to have decommissioned HDDs smashed with heavy equipment.

Working in education, of course no one senior would spend money on that kind of stuff, or indeed have worked out that old HDDs contained information about vulnerable kids and families.

I used to do as much destruction as I could. I'm aware that many other services didn't even remove the HDDs when sending ageing computers to the dump/recycling centre. Because we once got a query as to why some PCs had no HDDs. The answer being that some services did take the bloody things out first- just not all of them.

Re: Parkinson's Law

There's a book. Not just that bit.

In Parkinson's Law: The Pursuit of Progress, London: John Murray, 1958 a chapter is devoted to the basic question of what he called comitology: how committees, government cabinets, and other such bodies are created and eventually grow irrelevant (or are initially designed as such). (The word comitology has recently been independently invented by the European Union for a different non-humorous meaning.)[10][11] Wikipaedia

Re: Big Biscuits

Leaving a PC on and idle for any significant amount of time - unless it's serving files* - seems remarkably wasteful. It can't take that long to come back up again once you switch it back on, surely.

*My main home PC has a nice big shared partition on one of it's HDDs. For shared files when I'm using the laptop. It still gets turned off if I'm going out/to bed/meal times/etc. Not because it's a Windows box. But because it's a terrible waste of the Earth's resources to leave them on, idling.

Parkinson's Law

One of his less well known Laws is that a committee will spend next to no time deliberating on, say, a new power station - but then agonise endlessly about a bike shed. Because they understand what a bike shed is and costs.

I suspect that there is an element of that in these sorts of decisions. Big things that go Bang are pretty incomprehensible to beancounters. But a $500 PC (even times several thousand) they can question.

Machine learning the hard way: IBM Watson's fatal misdiagnosis

Re: When the three year old is just very quiet and floppy

That can change very quickly when they get ill.

Re: One doesn't imply the other

Either way, he wasn't writing for techies .

Re: One doesn't imply the other

but also what is not being said.

Absolutely.

I'm not a doctor. My professional diagnoses were purely limited to understanding and resolving blocks in kids' learning of basic skills and to some extent behaviour issues.

I'd have achieved a lot less if I'd just tried to work with what I was told, rather than trying to spot what I was not being told. And much of that was tangential to the reason for referral.

Some very simple examples from my earliest days.

I was told that an eleven year old girl was spelling randomly. Her reading was fine and her writing in general wasn't terrible.I looked at her spelling and it did seem very strange. But it didn't seem random. There was some sort of pattern within it. No one had mentioned that she was Portuguese - but she had an accent so I asked. And then I checked some examples of Portuguese speech patterns. And then went back to the writing samples. And of course you can guess the rest. I confirmed it with an adult native speaker of course.

In a number of other such cases - "random spelling" and the good old "they write their letters back to front, must be dyslexia" even though the kids weren't having any other problems with literacy- a quick look at how they formed their letters and a referral to the OT service resolved the issue, almost magically.

Diagnosis is so often about what isn't being said.

How to get banned from social media without posting a thing

Re: There's your answer!

But this is not so different from the idiocy of idiots who idiotically respond with "sorry no" to "does anyone.." type questions on the corporate network.

"Does anyone know where the spare paper clips are kept"

"Sorry no" x300

Currentlly banned from social media by daughter

She told me to stop using it because it just makes me angry.

She's right. Much better that I get angry dealing with Virgin Media's useless customer support, TfL's failure to do the local street maintenance they promised to be done in early January- after fighting them for most of 2021, Barnet's failure to sort out local street repairs and the Metropolitan Police's failing to deal with the antisocial behaviour and minor drug dealing at the end of our street.

{Nurse, I think it's time for my pills}

How to polish the bottom line? Microsoft makes it really hard to claim expenses, say staffers

Re: How do you get a 50p coin out of a Yorkshire person's hand? With a spanner...

Ah I've come across this one. It's not about cost savings. It's about power and position.

It's saying "First class for the bosses, second class for the peons".

They'd rather spend an extra £50 in travel than put you in a hotel room that's £30 better.

Re: Hypocrisy

At a certain local authority we were told that train bookings could only be via Trainline. And tickets would then be posted to us to give to staff. Which created a several days' delay and anxiety every time someone needed to go to an important conference at shortish notice ( most of them tbh- though they didn't happen very often) ior some such. We were within walking distance of the mainline station, and staff could easily have collected prebooked tickets from the machines in the station. Often those tickets were also cheaper than the corporate price we had to pay.

But then, in the past on El reg I've recounted how the approved supplier costs of stuff- especially tech- were often higher than I'd pay in the local chain store and took much longer to arrive.

Head of Big Tech Expertise? Believe it or not, it's a UK.gov vacancy for a Whitehall job

Re: Salary?

I hadn't noticed that salary. About the same level as a Headteacher of a smallish local authority school. So a bit more than a head of a large LA school department would get. Perfect for a moderately successful head of IT wanting to get out of education

Also, from the private sector, I found this online;

Head of Finance - job post

St Helen's School

Northwood

£60,000 a year

"Whitehall"

It's indicative of how Londoncentric the Civil Service still is that such a word is still used. In essence, they can devolve the dogsbody civil servants to place North of the M25. But anyone important is in "Whitehall"

Whitehall is a road and area in the City of Westminster, Central London. The road forms the first part of the A3212 road from Trafalgar Square to Chelsea. It is the main thoroughfare running south from Trafalgar Square towards Parliament Square. Wikipedia

Do you know what TikTok is? Then you might make a good magistrate, says Ministry of Justice

Who else?

As Doctor Syntax said, he considered this when he retired. As did I. Because when we are still working we're...well...., working .

Most of those " Teachers, bricklayers, stay-at-home mums," are busy teaching, sticking bricks together or staying at home being mums. And in the case of the latter, if they wanted and were able to go out to work, presumably, mostly they'd take paid jobs, just like the teachers and bricklayers and everyone else.

Machine needs more Learning: Google Drive dings single-character files for copyright infringement

Corporate wilful ignorance

but that's exactly why there needs to be a mechanism for communicating those bugs back to the developers.

This is an issue that goes far beyond Google or this story. It is a general issue in all large companies ( and a good few medium ones, I think)

Beancounter lead companies do not want to hear from the public that things are going wrong, that there is a fault etc. To do that would cost money providing customer service and hit short term profits, bonuses etc. So they hide or remove contact details, create websites that take customers round in circles from "contact us" to FAQs to "need more help" to "contact us" to..... Or direct users to "Support forums" where people who have nothing to do with the official company and don't get paid can offer amateur advice that may or may not be helpful, but won't make the company aware of or resolve any genuine product issues.

That they piss off customers and lose them, is a matter for the next financial reporting period.

IBM confirms new mainframe to arrive 'late in first half of 2022'

Re: odd wording

This is a common sales tactic you can see around in all sorts of places "Our <brand name> latest new <shiny gadget> is 20 times better!!!"

In tiny print at the bottom of the screen in shades of grey "compared to our old version".

COVID-19 was a generational opportunity for change at work – and corporate blew it

I assume they do. Friends and family that wfh all get these. I don't know who's responsible for the insurance though.

Re: Strawman

Tat is what's behind a lot of UK govt. COVID decision making. They are under pressure to get people back using the massive amount of office space being developed in the major cities, because so many companies have invested in these; financing and building enormous skyscrapers, opening branches of big chain catering establishments to service them, and so on.

Re: Strawman

I can remember, as a very junior specialist teacher ( n.b. quite senior in general terms) being pulled up by the Senior Specialist Teacher (i.e. manager) for some minor aspect of how I was working. My defence "But I get the results" was met with "Results aren't everything".

These were real kids' futures we were working on, so yes results were every bloody thing. If we got it wrong there weren't (m)any more chances for those kids!

Tesla driver charged with vehicular manslaughter after deadly Autopilot crash

Re: Slap Tesla with an injunction.

And at one point they took up a prime location inside Brent Cross shopping centre. A big shop space.Right in the centre of the centre. What was that if not a big expensive advert. You couldn't drive the bloody things.

So if you do go slower- that won't kill anyone.

My HR-V recognises speed signs, and places the information into the display.