* Posts by Terry 6

5587 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Jul 2009

HP printer small print says kit phones home data on whatever you print – and then some

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Dumped HP deskjets some time back

I stopped using HP printers ( or anything else by them) years ago due to a ridiculous failed driver update.

The driver software would only install after a complete uninstall of the previous software. OK fine.Except one DLL would not uninstall. Nothing would remove it and while it was there the install routine would not run. It aborted when it cam to that bit. To make it more annoying the version number of that dll hadn't even changed.

There was no option to skip, which would have done the job, just to abort.

Printer was then useless.

I spent days trying to get that fucker off my PC. There was a whole set of uninstall layers and depths that could be applied ( buggered if I could see why it should be so complicated anyway). I did them all,repeatedly. If my memory serve me correctly i even tried to remove the traces from the registry. Just got nowhere.

And then went and bought an Epson

Never bought anything HP since.

Right-click opens up terrifying vistas of reality and Windows 95 user's frightful position therein

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: And how do you show a space

Being as how neither "lo" nor "behold" are actually Hebrew words the presence of either in the Bible would really have given theologists something to think about.

As to what the King James version of the Bible contains, mentioned in that link - that is the King James version of the Bible. The clue is in the name.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: The 1990s haven't gone away yet...

You can disable caps lock Google it e.g.

https://m.wikihow.com/Disable-the-Capslock-Key-in-Windows

or various Tweaking apps will do it.

And don't worry. Everyone does. Putting it next to the " a" key means that typing ND SO instead of and so or similar is really common.

Terry 6 Silver badge
Flame

Re: Taking the Trash

But they never do. My local stretch of footpath along the A406 is like a kind of shooting gallery.

As it happens I don't actually mind the cyclists so much.

I do mind that they often come shooting along as if there were no bends, narrow bits or err pedestrians.

And I'm sick to the back teeth of the ones who do that and object and get really aggressive if they meet a pedestrian. Those are the ones who think they have a divine right to cycle where they like.

It's a footpath not a cycle path and it's not their right of way.

Terry 6 Silver badge
Flame

Re: The 1990s haven't gone away yet...

Not mobile devices, because they don't have such an obvious caps lock. And it pre-exists that anyway.

There are a lot of people who just don't get the idea of a shift key. I think it's the idea of using two keys together. It's point and peck typing. One finger at a time hitting one letter at a time.

Caps lock-tap L-caps lock tap i k e space tap t h i s .

I never objected to the school ICT curriculum and have serious doubts about all this coding for the same reason as my doubts about every lad doing woodwork when I was a kid - very few have the aptitude or future pathway that makes this a priority.

BUT I did object to the lack of basic keyboard teaching in the curriculum.

And even when I was at school myself in the 70s this was becoming an issue. And would have been more use to more of us than bloody wood and metal fucking work too. How many times have I used a lathe in the last 40+ years? 0 A plane, once or twice and not very well because it's a skill you lose quite quickly.

A saw, over those 40 years? a few dozen times maybe.

Which almost certainly goes for 90% of the population.

Some basic DIY skills and how to use a keyboard were more important than making a dovetail fucking joint even in 1970. Knowing how to change a tap washer, put a hook onto a hollow wall or change a fucking fuse would be a damned sight more useful

[end rant]

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Similar

As a kid we went to Wales on our holidays. On Sundays everything closed, including the pubs. It was "dry" in the places we went.

Except the clubs.Where the locals all vanished to.

Terry 6 Silver badge

A what can?

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Themes

I dimly remember, in those Windows 3 something days that you always had to save before printing ( still a good idea to save save and save again anyway). Because if you didn't there was a good chance the computer would freeze or crash and lose your work when you tried to print.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Exactly, users automatically click Y to any are you sure message, because if they weren't sure they wouldn't have done it.

Afterwards......

UK.gov's smart meter cost-benefit analysis for 2019 goes big on cost, easy on the benefits

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: 1/2 OT, bbc lies

"It was clarified fairly recently"...

Which is solid evidence that they were doing so. Until "fairly recently".

There's no reason to think they've stopped. And they haven't.

But the important bit is the presenters, because they don't challenge the witnesses or their credentials. The expert's comment and a rebuttal full of bollocks by a talking head from a pressure group are treated as equal. And indeed invited on in that role.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: 1/2 OT, bbc lies

The BBC is not the independent and balanced organisation it was.

two things have pulled it down (they're linked imho).

1) Govt. appointees to the board who's roles are frankly not far removed from political commissar -and who are involved with appointing senior staff and in turn commissioning editors

2) False equivalence as a form of "balance". If they have a world renowned expert backed by a solid scientific consensus on to talk about something they truly understand they have to get some wazzak on who disagrees. Possibly an outlier, possibly just an opinionated talking head or paid lobbyist with no formal qualifications in the matter. Then they treat both views as equal and the presenter will write the subject off as disagreement/controversial.

Justice served: There is no escape from the long server log of the law

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: By the itching of my thumbs...

This is because bean counters like a supply chain they can monitor for fraud, rather than an efficient or cheaper one.

(Been there done that)

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Surely...

There's a universal truth in there. No one gets promoted for quietly being good at what they do.

Telling everyone how difficult a task was does get you promoted - even if it is the same task as the person just did, above, quite easily

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: From the Seen That Department of Obvious Idiocy ...

Old story.

A tourist is walking along a cliff edge path. There's a massive drop.

Stopping at a cafe on the route he says to the owner, "That cliff edge is really dangerous. There ought to be a fence there."

"Ah, there was," said the owner. "but no one ever fell over so we took it away again."

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Surely...

Or indeed anyone travelling in London. Brent Cross shopping centre has a big bus park, but you don't make the mistake of going to Brent cross Tube station to go shopping, 'cos though plenty of buses terminate there, it's miles from the shops and nearer Golders Green. Likewise if you want Stamford Hill overground, it's actually at the bottom of the hill in Stoke Newington and actual Stamford Hill shops and stuff are a mile or two up the hill.

Assumptions can be risky. They rely on other people being sensible, for a start. Like only putting the name Brent Cross on a station that is actually in Brent Cross.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Documenting procedures

My experience, through documenting how-tos for various teaching tools and tests that I'd been using, is that the key skill is to know what's in your own head.

There are so many things we do that seem too obvious to mention, or that we don't even realise we're doing anymore. SO they stay in our heads and never make it into the instructions.

It could be as simple as some version of not realising we've always held down x before we press y and telling the user to hold down x and y.

Are you who you say you are, sir? You are? That's all fine then

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Voice response phone

Or find a phone number when the list of infrequently* asked questions proves f***ing useless.

*Infrequent because most of them are either blindingly obvious, totally unrelated to anything that might happen or are just trying to sell you stuff.

Terry 6 Silver badge
Flame

No one mentioned..

...but we should for form's sake.

They're always having a particularly busy time and you'll have to wait a little longer.. whenever you call.

Particularly galling if it is always particularly busy at that time because then they should get more fucking staff on the phones..

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Accounts names

Same here. Sometimes she just shouts across the room.

Sometimes a daughter will say she's my Mrs. and give them permission to talk to me.

Once it was a cleaner.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Accounts names

Been through a few bereavements.

Northern upbringing help here..

"She can't she's dead" seems to get the humans working better than passed on/deceased etc.

I have no mouth and I must scream: You can add audio to wobbles in latest Windows 10 patch

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: S'funny but

It's the tenth fucking anniversary of publication of the solution/work around to this fucking bug Today.

I just looked back at this link.

This is the link to the solution. And it's dated 13th September 2009

https://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/24761-recycle-bin-fix-custom-icons-not-refreshing.html

Terry 6 Silver badge

S'funny but

I've never had any major Windows borkage over the decades.

But I've long since lost track of the annoying minor failures and bugs that should never have occurred.

Currently have the Start Menu ms-resource:AppName/text issue.

OK not a big deal. But it just shouldn't happen and if it did should have been fixed asap.

And btw setting custom recycle bin icons still needs a registry edit* to make it work. After so many years and versions. A bug that should have been fixed instantly when it first appeared.

* ,0 after the icon names

Wunderlist creator asks Microsoft to sell him back his biz as Redmond updates To Do

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Microsoft got it right?

Yes it is.

For most users Outlook sends and receives emails, then allows a really sophisticated set of sorting rules with all sorts of conditions. And it integrates calendar really well.

Yes it's a pile of crap for lots of other reasons. Not the least the multiple address books.

But for use by people working in an office it works very effectively.

And let us not forget, this is what software is actually for.

Terry 6 Silver badge
Pint

Re: What about "extinguish" do you not understand?

Yes

Oh and thanks, I missed that one. Have a pint on me.

Like most users I wouldn't ever look at "Ease of access" settings because like most users I don't need to have specialist settings.

Ease of access is associated with difficulties and disabilities. It's where you put settings that most users wouldn't want to tinker with, but some people need to.

So why the fuck do they put that there?

It's almost as if someone in the design team was so wedded to this stupid concept that they couldn't envisage anyone voluntarily not wanting it.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: What about "extinguish" do you not understand?

I think there's more to it than that. Microsoft has a long history of expansion by acquisition. But all too often, having acquired a product/company they decide to play with it. The product becoming some powerful exec's private football. Instead of keeping the product fresh and useful they'll decide to fix the bits that aren't broken and change or remove any functionality the users might like, while holding on to their own pet ideas against all resistance. Which is why we got Windows 8 and the stupid "charms"- the invisible controls that only ever appeared by accident and when you least wanted them. And they've kept bits of that even in Win 10. Like the very narrow disappearing scroll bars in the Start menu.

Phone home: Indie Chromium browser Vivaldi goes mobile

Terry 6 Silver badge

Chromium browser on my phone, Meh. Got PaleMoon and Firefox

Email client, Meh! Lots of choices out there

Email client with a calendar* a la Outlook or Thunderbird+Lightning? That would be worth considering.

I was stuck with Outlook on my desktop for years before Lightning integrated to TB better. There's lots of room for improvement. Filters more like Outlook's with sophisticated rule making (and organising) would be a starter.

The time a Commodore CDTV disc proved its worth as something other than a coaster

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: BAUD

The person who does the business news and some presenting on the BBC1 Breakfast programme pronounces poor as "pawer" or something like that. A Geordie I think.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Copy Space

Which, if computer instructions appear to you as mystical incantations, is exactly what you would, even should, do.

And on the non-IT world I've dealt with plenty of instruction guides that would have the same effect on the uninitiated. Including some school assessment packs that only made sense if you understood how the tests were supposed to work.

I once had to designate one of my staff to sit with a teacher who'd messed up a school based spelling assessment test because of this and help him rub out the students' answers ( in pencil luckily) and then show him how to administer the test correctly. He'd never used a test of that sort, so he'd done what he'd always done. The test had sentences with blanks for the kids to write in the word, and he had to read it out to the class and let them write the word in, but he hadn't understood he was meant to tell them what the word was ( it was a test of spelling not guessing). The instructions just weren't explicit enough.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Self fixing

And in schools......

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: hmm

That just reminded me of another one.

I bought a flat. Previous owner owned this and the one upstairs where his aged mother lived and he'd converted the entrance so that it had been like a single unit, then converted it back to sell.

When I redecorated I carefully switched off the power before replacing the light switches.

In a moment of well founded paranoia I put a tester on the first one I did, by the front door, before I touched it and yes! It was still live. Turned out he'd wired that one from the flat upstairs so that he could turn the stair light on or something. Another Dick.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: hmm

In my student days some of the sockets and light switches in the rented room and shared kitchen gave nasty tingles. (Late 70s)

Since landlord was useless I investigated. And yes. Neutral and live wires apparently connected at random. I went round the entire fucking house redoing them. Dick!

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: hmm

You forgot the "is it plugged in" and "is the socket on" questions.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: One wonders

Still my view. A passing fad.

Tesla Autopilot crash driver may have been eating a bagel at the time, was lucky not to get schmeared on road

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: It will be interesting when the 1st similar case happens in the UK what the police reaction is

Happens in UK too, hence dash cams have become more common. Deters them and provides evidence.

Terry 6 Silver badge

And not too many people crossing in front of planes or other planes stationary or suddenly turning in front of them.

Terry 6 Silver badge

AI

Irrespective of definition.

Is there anyone else out there that thinks ( as I increasingly do) that the lack of natural intelligence makes the artificial stuff seem less and less probable.

Terry 6 Silver badge
Pint

Re: What a complete plonker!

That makes sense. (The analysis, not the occurrence)

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Did he get a ticket?

There's that lovely study where the subjects are asked to watch a simple ball game. Afterwards they can all comment on various aspects of game play, but failed to notice they monkey* walking between the players.

*Guy in a monkey suit.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Whole story

Seems that prospective buyers should take a lie detector test and an IQ test before being allowed to buy a car

ftfy

Terry 6 Silver badge

" crew were loosing focus and in an emergency it took too long to regain focus. "

Anything which removes from the driver feeling the need to remain in constant control and concentrating is a high risk.

Because there will always be a point when s/he thinks that they can put attention elsewhere for a brief moment. And if nothing catastrophic happen then they'll do it more and for longer in future. And so on.

It's not about driving as such. But about perception.

The purple SIM of fail: Virgin Mobile punters left in the dark with batch of borked cards

Terry 6 Silver badge

Or indeed, if you were sitting on the help desk phone and start to get a number of similar and unusual calls you might think there was a trend........

Terry 6 Silver badge
Flame

Stufff happens

Stuff happens, how they respond to it is the issue.

After numerous back-and-forths with Virgin support he has now given up and found a new network provider....... suggested his phone was to blame

And I am so sick to death of tech companies denying the cause of an issue and employing "switch it off and on again"/reset your device statements when they know full well they have an issue.

Sometimes they don't even tell their frontlline staff (VM are notorious for this).

WHY THE FUCK DO THEY DO THIS-IT WON'T GET BETTER BY MAGIC!!!!

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Am I the only person i nthe world who doesn't have problems with Virgin services?

Mine's always been fine. Their router, too.

I dunno.

I can get full 200mb, always.

Divert the power to the shields. 'I'm givin' her all she's got, Captain!'

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Testing is hard

This fits in with a few of the other stories and my own experiences ( non-dramatic I'm glad to say).

Underlying all of these is planning that only extends to a current layer or so..

We have a resource, we have a risk to the resource, so we plan for that risk.

But then they stop. No one risk assesses the resource that is being used to protect the essential resource right back to the point of independence.

With luck they'll check that there are systems in place to make sure the backup is in a safe place. But no one checks to make sure that the location that holds the backups is safe.

As in "Yes we keep copies of all the records ( in the days of paper) in the basement next door"

But when there was a big flood ( It's a very, very long time ago now when I came across this, but I think it was an enourmous water tank in the roof burst or something) the water got right down to both cellars - including the ones with the spare sets. If my memory serves me right the main copies were in better condition (slightly damp) than the spares.

I just love your accent – please, have a new password

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Caller ID = Your routines suck!

User name fields are often able to show previously typed entries - whether they were correct or not.

And that means that they will also display passwords- when the user has accidentally typed it into the wrong space.

So if the username field shows something totally unlike a username/very like a password, it's almost certainly a password. And the username that goes with it will usually be in the same list, of course.

Terry 6 Silver badge
Coat

Re: Totally insecure

or better, on a post-it note so that it can be placed straight on to the monitor.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Note too the dissonance.

On one had the company is to large and spread out for face to face reset requests, On the other hand the service desk were expecting to recognise the disembodied voices of those same remote individuals.

And to spell this out, if they aren't available for face to face password requests they aren't available to get their voices recognised.

Today's Resident Evil: Ransomware crooks think local, not global, prey on schools, towns, libraries, courts, cities...

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: @Terry 6

Oh yes.

We had a very high tech photocopier that could be networked once. One of a vast contract. Ours wasn't set up as a networked machine because the brass didn't think we needed it and the manager of our team didn't understand how any kind of tech worked.

I got a promise from everyone that our machine could be networked at a later date. As soon as the value of that became obvious ( fewer inkjets etc) I asked for it to be done. They agreed, the savings in staff time and print costs were really obvious.

Nothing happened. Engineers came and went. No network printing.

Eventually they admitted that the network card had been omitted to save money.

Terry 6 Silver badge

My considerable experience of local authorities is that scrimping and saving is the norm.

There is waste an inefficiency, of course there is. But often that's the result of "savings". The (another old chestnut) waste of money long term because of savings short term, that sort of thing. If there's no budget for disaster prevention there is going to be an expensive disaster.

Security gone in 600 seconds: Make-me-admin hole found in Lenovo Windows laptop crapware. Delete it now

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: "crapware remains primarily a Windows problem"

Yup.

I happen to like a nice clean, organised Start menu. Software titles grouped into folders according to function. Apart from anything else, I don't always remember what I have (like assorted freeware graphics programmes I might be trying out) and some titles are far removed from their function. So...

I do not want 3d Paint, Microsoft Edge,Connect etc etc. stuck in an alphabetical list between my useful category folders.

Especially since I don't want them at all anyway.

The whole marketing philosophy of force a programme under the punters' noses drive me loopy. When I go into a restaurant I don't expect the waiter to stick a plate of sausages in front of me when I sit down.