Posts by Terry 6 5608 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Jul 2009
Sleight of hand seems to be the default Microsoft mode of operation.
And they don't seem to learn that the users will latch on to their rigged games.
It seems so often with sleazy behaviour - not just Microsoft- that the suits seem to think no one will notice. The Post Office getting people locked up to try and hide their software failure a big case in point.
It doesn't matter how well you do. They have to find something.
In my initial teaching ("Probabation") year I was passed well before the end of the year by the inspector. "You've passed. If you can teach here you can teach anywhere". His verbal feedback was glowing.
But in his written report there was still a snotty paragraph about how untidy my desk was.
God yes.
We had to have our PCs and laptops Y2K somethinged by outside consultants At significant cost to our tiny budget. A simple risk assessment would have immediately told everyone that nothing was worth doing. At the very worst the same action could be taken in January 2000 to fix them, if it was needed. (Can't think how it would have been- half of them probably didn't even have the right date in 1999).
But no, it had to be done.
None of them, in those Y2K days, were properly networked, if at all. Some were ancient laptops that were barely used anymore, except for a bit of quick typing. Even the PCs had only a small shared area partition on one underused PC for file sharing. And literally all we had were a bunch of outdated WORD files -mostly local copies of reports that had been sent to schools, almost all on paper, or teaching materials. We could have cheerfully scrapped the lot - except we wouldn't have gor replacments.
One laptop, that had been forgotten, lay in a cupboard for years. I took it out one day when we were really busy, so I could work in the staffroom. And of course it was perfectly fine.
One of the primary schools I used to visit ( for my non-IT part of my job) had a head and bunch of her cronies that all sat in the staffroom together to smoke.
Said room was horrible for the many non-smoking teachers. Which in effect created an unofficial management team of smokers.
I'm pretty sure that happened in all sorts of other places too.
The full impact of user faced with the sudden ( though inevitable) demand to register for something or other that ought to be straight forward, the mini-panic of trying to think of something and the pressure of knowing you'll need to remember another username and password combination.
Inevitably an awful lot of users, maybe most, choose the buggerit route of using the first memorable thing that comes to mind.
Most passwords are not created with advance planning. But are spur of the moment choices.
And many are for trivial sites, so people are being gently trained to use weak reused passwords
Spot on. Last night I tried to use a couple of FOSS video editors.*
Simple controls, like putting a marker/handle where I wanted to end/fade a clip couldn't be found. And the help file said something to the effect "place the handle where you want to...... " ( which was what I was trying to do), without any explanation/picture about how to find or move said handle.
*Small one-off job that can't justify buying a programme.
Glad you said that.
Making the Office suite different was clearly the main purpose. Change for its own ( or marketing) purpose.
The ribbon does not make finding items more transparent. Locating stuff you don't use regularly is much less intuitive, grouping items that you use together in a work related menu rather than a structural one and hiding stuff you'll never use ( so that it's easier to search for stuff you use occasionally ) is now so close to impossible it almost doesn't exist.
The Ribbon on its own I could have been fairly happy with. The prevention of editing menus according to user need (without creating whole new menus and hiding the original ones) isn't. But part of this era of Microsoft has been about forcing users to work the way that Microsoft want them to. As the piece says the Win 8 desktop forced users into it. And they're still playing silly buggers with the Start menu - Editing programmes into grouped folders being a fiddle being the most obvious and most recently the list of "apps" vanishes before your very eyes after about 5 seconds.
Blood boiling time.
I've had to use so many systems over the years that simply didn't match the requirements of the people using them. ( Usually getting information in, getting it out and making sense of it, while not taking up too much of the time required to actually use the information). Because of over complex interfaces, weird jargon, unanswerable/compulsory question fields and so forth.
It's the users who do know what they want. And not their management who have a hazy idea about what the users even do. Obvious example was a health and safety thing once* that asked about some equipment that we didn't have or need, (presumably some other dept. did) but was a compulsory field and you couldn't move on to relevant stuff without answering it.
*Once. By the following year the whole shebang had mysteriously ceased to exist.
And to make them worse, they never ask about the fucking things that they do crap. Only the anodyne or (occasionally) excellent stuff.
Yes the call handler that took my complaint was friendly and understanding.
Now ask me if the poor sod was able to achieve anything- and presumable give her 1/10 for not being able to do anything about your total wankery. Thereby ducking the fact that it is not her fault!!!!!
The last time I had an HP printer ( or indeed anything else) it refused to update the drivers.
The update fell over at one particular DLL that wouldn't delete/overwrite/replace. So the update stopped .. So no printer.
Manually uninstalling the old driver wouldn't work. Despite going through the various depths of HP's uninstall software.
The specific DLL couldn't be manually uninstalled or deleted. Whatever HP had done had fixed that DLL into place stronger than concrete. Nothing would shift it. And the install software wouldn't ignore it. It just aborted installation Which was really the last straw - because the new drivers used exactly the same fucking version!!!!!!!!!!
I junked the printer and have never bought anything HP ever since.
Ah well. I once found myself helping a new (Anatolian) restaurant in Stoke Newington to (re)write their menu, because it made no sense whatsoever. Did I do it for payment? no. But even so, some gesture of thanks would have been nice.
Did they offer me a free meal? Or at least a cup of coffee and a snack. Did they fuck. Did I make sure I told everyone I knew that they hadn't? Did I go there or recommend them to anyone locally?
What do you think.
The thing behind that is that the entire planet is using a nasty combination of complex hardware tied to (arguably even more) complex software that works beautifully when it works. And we rely on that stuff just working. But often it doesn't " just work" and most people are then pretty much screwed because working out which bit isn't doing what it's meant to can be a fucking nightmare even for the experts.
And that's before you find a fix for it.
So someone who "knows computers" has, at a bare minimum, the ability to work out where the problems might lie.
The alternative for most users is to take their stuff to a possibly dodgy local place where they'll do something costly and destructive, possibly unnecessarily.
(My late sister took her laptop to one such place because she " didn't want to bother" me. Lost all her data for her. From a hdd that would have been recoverable before they messed with it).
That's not right. A department manager in a LA ( or the admin) will have a level of sign-off and only needs to refer items above that to higher authority. There are rules and costs attached to using the approved supplier, as has been much discussed in these spaces over the years. But these are percentages, not multiples.
No, don't be silly.
That part of the point is that it was from a politically motivated organisation. But that being said, that it's not in context suggests that the political motivation has much more to do with this. And yes, if it had been Labour generated the point could be the same ( but maybe not the LAs quoted).
Such as equivalent rate of loss in non Local Authority organisations and the general public.
Variation in rate of loss between office and mobile staff.
And even.
Variation in crime figures between authorities.
Otherwise this story is meaningless. Clickbait by an organisation wanting publicity or simply a way to beat local authorities over the head.
This one btw seems to be a Tory fan club.
An interesting phenomenon here.
From the initial previews there have been people damning the production. for what seem vague reasons. Certainly not whether it was fun or enjoyable to watch.
Critics came out against it. ditto.
And some people have been saying how bad it is. But it hasn't been the people who've actually seen it on the whole who've said that, but people who haven't been, because the critics didn't like it.
Even the people who I've met who did go and see it and then complained ( not many) just seemed to be quoting what they'd been told in advance - as if they'd only gone so that they could moan afterwards. (Yes it's a thin plot, so what. It wasn't meant to be about the plot. It was never about the plot!)
Corporate finance is weird. Especially, but not only, in public services.
It's all about show, not reality. So all sorts of faintly surreal things happen to keep teh organisations working.
Not allowed to spend more than £x00 in one purchase without authorisation from on high? OK break the cost into several components.
Can't hold budget over until you're ready to buy an item in May? Buy some random item in March and return it for a credit note.
And of course the oft repeated spending of the budget any way you can because otherwise the beancounters will reduce it for next year when, due to purchasing cycles that don't match financial years, demand will be higher.
How much has been wasted in cash and staff time by all this is probably beyond human comprehension.
In local authority services, in my experience, it was both an essential and an unconscionable gravy train.
In effect there was a blanket requirement for everything to be Y2K checked at considerable expense and no exceptions were allowed.
But this included lots of identical non-networked PCs and laptops used purely for typing documents to be printed and writing presentations. And a simple risk assessment says that the absolute most that would have been needed was to backup any current work to floppy just in the unlikely case the things failed to boot (which could anyway have been tested on a sample machine). And tbh there was greater chance of losing unbacked-up work from normal day-to-day usage than from Y2K effects.
I recall years ago a school admin placing a box of floppies that had backed up her files and accounts into the store cupboard on the shelf where the recent delivery of magnets for primary science had been dumped. Luckily the magnets are pretty crap so only a couple of discs were damaged. And they were only back-ups. And someone realised fairly soon and we redid the b/u (used same disks too, I think)
It's a good point.
Except where data collection starts small scale the complexity of a relational database is too steep a learning curve for most users.
Something simpler that could become a relational DB if required would be the tool of dreams.
In my younger days I used various simple DB programmes and they were all we needed. An awful lot of SOHO data collection starts as a handful of fields- typically Name, contact details (phone number, address fields), nature of query, a note, date of completion. And data searches no more sophisticated than how many had which type of query/ how many queries per month and so on.
And Access and the like are way too complex for that.
So people use a spreadsheet.
All the suites give options for reading and writing numerous formats.
And in the real world ( i.e. not the techie one) no one cares, or indeed notices, what the saved format is, as long as the bloody thing opens.
In fact an older format that is universally supported may well be a safer bet than something newer, because it's unlikely that it won't be readable by the recipient. And if it's a resume it shouldn't be requiring some highly sophisticated formatting, anyway.
It took me a long time to leave Outlook behind and rely on Thunderbird with Lightning, allowing me to stop using MS Office. And I can only do that because my life is much simpler now. Outlook's Email conditional filtering is just so much more sophisticated - (and I still miss it sometimes). Whereas TB's filters are fairly basic, quirky, difficult to apply and frequently don't run when expected, leaving stuff in the inbox folder that should have moved to a specified folder.
Oh dear.
Here's the definition for "irony".
noun, plural i·ro·nies.
the use of words to convey a meaning that is the opposite of its literal meaning:
Here's another (Cambridge)
a situation in which something which was intended to have a particular result has the opposite or a very different result:
I've already quoted one definition of sarcastic.
Here's another;
Merrium Webster
Definition of sarcasm
1 : a sharp and often satirical or ironic utterance designed to cut or give pain
2a : a mode of satirical wit depending for its effect on bitter, caustic, and often ironic language that is usually directed against an individual
b : the use or language of sarcasm
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