Posts by Terry 6

Twenty years since Windows 95, and we still love our Start buttons

Re: while enabling ... the Windows Store

Yes I agree with the first part. but.

Linux is a long way from being user friendly for most members of the species.

No way ready for ordinary users. Even if they had some means to identify and evaluate the best "distro" from the dozens out there.

I happen to have switched one of my boxes to MINT yesterday.

I haven't used Linux for years, and then was never more than a reasonably knowledgeable general user - definitely far from being a Linux Guru.

And I soon remembered why I went back to Windows last time I did that.

Getting the install to work was bad enough.

The page that offered me a list of install options contained one which sounded most suitable, because it seemed to be the one that would let me create partitions, or maybe keep the two I already had. At least that's what it said on the page

But no. That option took me straight to a page that was barely comprehensible to me and would have been gibberish to an ordinary user. Nothing offered what was listed on the previous page., except to resize the existing partitions, but that was actually useless/acaemic, it turned out.There was a list of partitions with funny names that an ordinary user would not have even known were partitions/drives. There was an apparent option to resize and install Linux onto one of these, including the Windows restore partition, which would have been an ideal place to store Linux, but no clue whether it was big enough.. Yet this made no real difference, because pretty much all the options on that page threw an error message to say that it couldn't find something or other. I can't remember what that thing was, some sort of entry point or something, I think. But I do know that since I hadn't, by definition, installed Linux yet, working from a live session - anything missing was missing because they hadn't put it there. But the only option at that point was to click OK and go back. No option to create or find the missing whatever-it was. And no definition as to what it was wanting or why.

No clue, nothing, nada. Dead end.

So I had to go back and do a full wipe and install with a whole HDD single partition. No option presented to create extra partitions or keep the spares ( with or without contents).

So I had to do that.

It was fine then until I found that Pale Moon didn't appear in the list of software offered and I had to get it installed myself, downloaded from the web site. At which point the download file comes with a barely comprehensible set of instructions about how to install it.

But I got that done, with a bit of tinkering. No way an ordinary user would have got there.

Which was nothing compared to the printer driver. Downloading that from the Epson site there was no clue whatever about how to install it. Let alone an auto install routine.

In neither case was there a simple file called "click me" or "install me".

Most of the files I looked at had downright incomprehensible names.

And the instructions themselves read like something in a comic book for 10 year old boys, circa 1970, full of jokey geek names and jargon that would totally alienate any ordinary user, ("tar ball" "sudo") but with no definitions or explanation of what these things are, are for, or how to use them.

By now could they not have found a way to install stuff like that easily? or at least written help files that gave.... help?

Frankly the whole thing was like a geek game for geeks to show how geeky they were to other geeks.

people find the spraying of configuration options around various parts of the system so infuriating

The clue is in the name.

Control panel.

The place where you find the controls.

Like on the front of any other normal everyday usable machine. Or in a car.

A Microsoft car would now have the steering wheel on the door, the hand brake on the roof and the pedals distributed randomly along the floor.

A Windows 8 car would have the brake pedal hidden under the driver seat.

Re: Windows 3.1 was awful

Win 3.1 wsa fine at first. When there were few programmes, in a few groups. All nicely displayed around teh screen.

But when things got more complex you needed a better way to list the groups and organise stuff.

Win 8 made that rather more difficult. The combination of "charms" - i.e. hidden controls, compulsory links that were difficult or impossible to organise, built in (cr)apps links that couldn't be moved or organised easily if at all and a desktop that would vanish if you twitched made it unusable.

Win 10 is a vast improvement, but still worse than having a well organised 95/7 start menu.

IMHO all that was need was a better way to organise the start menu. Something that makes it easier to put related programmes together in a folder of choice, with a place for uninstall links, stop installation programmes creating their own folders, and get rid of the stupid sh*t links that get put in those folders.

e.g.. a folder for "graphics" programmes but not a folder each for each and every single f***ing graphics programme.

Instead, Win 10 does just the opposite.

Start is full of Windows (Cr)apps that can't be moved, in alphabetical order, that come between the nice folders.

The two concepts of organise and declutter have been missed. (As it was with the "ribbon")

But to do work that's what we need

dropbear

a body harness and a pair of tensioned bungee cords that are now supposed to fling me up five stories because "it's the cool new way to do it"

Best description of Win 8.x I've come across.

Have a beer.

Cortana and Log-in page - what these tell us about Microsoft

Cortana and Log-in page - what these tell us about Microsoft

With all the hype about Cortana you'd have thought Microsoft would have fallen over themselves to make sure that it worked "out of the box".

My own experience and a number of web forum posts show that they have not done so.

A frequent experience is that Cortana will tell users that it is not enabled in their region, when it absolutely is.

Looking further it will then acknowledge that you need to adjust you language settings, so that they are all the same, before Cortana will deign to show herself.

But Windows set these up all by itself, so they ought to be all the same already. In fact some bits think I'm in the USA, even though all the other bits know I'm not. And even though it's all in English I still need to load an English Language pack, when I can find the place to do this. And do a couple of restarts. However, the language settings are split up and spread all over the OS, often with deeply buried bits, and finding them, let alone making them the same, even for a tecchie user is a challenge.

I'd demonstrate, but frankly I've almost lost the will to live just finding these bits.

How could Microsoft have made Cortana so fragile?

How could they have made the language settings so complex and opaque. Let alone automatically setting them up subtly wrongly? They're just language settings FFS.

Which brings me to the log-in screen.

The "lock screen" can be customised with a picture of choice.

So can the desktop, after you log in.

But in between there is the password log-in screen. ( Which IMHO is pretty foul).

And you can not change this.

There is a bit of a work around, I gather, that will make it a solid colour.

With a registry hack.

But giving the screen a picture of choice seems to have been made close to impossible by Microsoft.

The only hack I've come across online seems to be pretty unsafe, bricking machines it's used on.

But it's only a picture. And since, as noted, the ones before and after can be changed- why not this?

It's as if Microsoft just couldn't be bothered to make it work nice.

And maybe that's what it tells us about them.

I was always a fan, but with all the Win 10 and Cortana fanfare then these stupid issues, it does seem as if they really couldn't give a stuff about what they give to the users.

BOFH: Why, I LOVE work courses. Please tell me more, o wise one!

Re: Well..

The really depressing thing is that there may will be a room chock full of keen eyed earnest types who will lap up the whole pile of c**p with joy and willing enthusiasm, expecting you to take it all seriously, to ignore the obvious flaws in the magical thinking that counts for research and God help us all, do serious role play.

But the really really depressing thing is when they come back into the workplace, full of fizzy enthusiasm and try to act on all that nonsense.

Windows 10: Buy cheap, buy twice, right? Buy FREE ... buy FOREVER

Re: Why free?

Eastfinchleyite

As it happens, I did buy a new laptop today, largely because of the update.

Older child's three year old HP laptop has been a pain in the a*** from day one.

It already has had a serious warranty repair then another repair out of warranty, and now having problems with the sound socket. So when the update to Win 10 stalled at 55%* I just thought sod it, headed up to Tesco at Borehamwood and got her a new one to take back to uni ( she can keep the old one to use at home - or else I'll wipe it and stick Mint on.)

But if it hadn't been for the update I'd probably have had a new socket soldered in and kept it running for another year.

*There are a few reports about this happening, on the web, but none seem to have a relevant solution

Re: Free you say?

Linux isn't for you average Joe, having to occasionally drop into the command line,

As it happens command line AKA Powershell was pretty much my first port of call with Win 10.

To get rid of as much of the Win 10 bloat as I could.

And I like Win 10

remove-appxpackage "packagefullname"

for a whole bunch of c***p that comes with Win 10

MORE Windows 10 bugs! Too many Start menu apps BREAK it

Re: I have 600

It becomes very finite when the installer writes a link to the actual programme, another to the software options menu, another to the uninstaller and another to "xprogramme on the web".

Decisions

What kind of idiot coded a 512 limit, and coded an ugly fail when the limit is exceeded?

Forty years doing various jobs as a trainer, user, and support.

And I can't think of a year when I haven't come across some sort of design decision that seems bound to cause far more trouble than it's worth - leading to the inevitable "Why did they do that" cry.

Ballmer's billion-dollar blunders: When he gambled Microsoft's money and lost

Re: Sigh

Beautiful example.

Re: Sigh

I don't remember writing that Microsoft invented stuff.

Just that they spotted what the users wanted and gave it to them.

MS-Dos was beautiful after CP/M

Win 3.1x was very good for its time.

Word under MSDos was really easy to use, and Word for Windows was very good.

Win 9.x too.

And even XP

But somewhere along the lines we started getting delights such as "documents and settings" folders - as if the two things naturally sat together, and Office "ribbon" designed to stop users hiding away the clutter they'd never use, and Gawd 'elp us, WIn 8.1 for touch screens stuck on our non-touch computers.

Sigh

Once Microsoft was able to sense what people needed and provide it in a way that made their lives easier.

Somewhere along the lines they seem to have decided that they could tell people what they should want, and to make matters worse, to race after the leading competitor products that people really did want at the same time.

It’s DEJA VU: Customer forgets to tell us about essential feature AGAIN

Not just offices

Schools too. And hospitals.

All the new build schools and hospitals seem to have the same bloody architects too.

Enter a far too narrow doorway into this damn great atrium with dazzling white walls and acres of (wasted) floor space. The reception is on or close to the left, ( with the lifts concealed behind if it's a hospital).

Information signs are grey, with white writing facing into the lights. Above your head there's a corridor at dizzying height, and in the middle there may be some uncomfortable seating so that you can soak up the echo.

Contactless card fraud? Easy. All you need is an off-the-shelf scanner

Disappointed

I thought the Which report was about recommending the best card scanner. :-)

Even Microsoft thinks Outlook is bloated and slow

No, My bad.

It is fixed . It did work I just missed that one.

Mia Culpe.

That being said, it's hardly an obvious or intuitive method. In fact it's totally opaque.

Hence three of us here on El Reg being grateful for this tip.* And secretaries and office adminstrators up and down the land when we share it with them.

Given a "How do you think we should implement this function?" discussion I can't believe that this was the best solution that anyone could come up with.

*My method was to create a page break, which then allows a line above the table. Then delete the page break. Weird, but not much harder than the official method above.

Re: Where is the real Outlook substitute?

A good point. I only use Outlook because it keeps my calendar on my Winphone and Computer in Sync. We use Thunderbird on the family PC.

A few years back I used to be able to sync my calendars through Google, until Google removed the functionality that allowed Google and Outlook calendars to Sync.

I'd often write events through the website with Google, while I was out and about, and read them on my desktop in Outlook when at home or in the office.

So I stopped using Google. Because I wanted a programme running on my computer, not just a web page that I had to log in to in a browser every time I needed to know where my next appointment was.

Now I never log-in to my Google calendar anymore, because I don't even use it anymore. A calendar needs to be on the desktop so you can see your schedule, not in the browser.

And Outlook does this.

I don't often join in with the Microsoft knockers.

But this time...... I'm in there with you.

The Outlook app on my WInphone seem absolutely fine for use.

It works fast, loads instantly, what's the problem.

This doesn't seem to be about the Outlook on my PC, which is a bit slow to start, but it's there to give me access to my messages and calendar, with suitable filters and what have you, so I'd prefer it a bit quicker, and less fussy, yes, but wouldn't want anything less than this gives me.

So this new thing, what the F*** is it for? Really. As a way to get us to email text messages?

Why?

Talk of a solution without a problem.

If Microsoft want to make things more efficient they could start with some of the weird and wonderful annoyances in WORD that have been there since Office 6 at least. For example, don't ever put a table at the top of a page. As at Office 2010, my version, you still can't then insert a line above it if you need to without a bit of trickery.

And anyone who has ever tried to console an office adminstrator who has spent hours creating a document only to see the whole thing go pear shaped at the last minute because a small formatting change has made the whole document do something gobsmackingly barmy will be able to suggest a few improvements they could make.

(No Icon for LibreOffice users?)

God knows there are plenty of annoyances they could iron out. But this bit old..........

Windows 10 on Mobile under the scope: Flaws, confusion, and going nowhere fast

Oh Dear

It does sometimes seem as if Microsoft don't know what is good about their own products.

Too many times I've seen a good product have the parts that worked well knocked out of them and the bad bits from other platforms added to the bad bits from their own.

Russian billionaire: GET me the ALIENS ON THE PHONE. Do it NOW

Re: Intelligent alien life?

search for intelligent alien life.

I'd settle for some intelligent Earth life.

Reg reader? Work at the Home Office? Are you SURE?

Experience

I worked in local govt for many years.

(Don't suppose central govt is too much different).

1.) When ever front line staff, in any area, were reduced the work force in the department in question would creep up over the next year or two. But the new seats would be filled with managerial types, not front line workers. This was true for all departments that I saw.

2.) "Essential" new posts that could be permitted as an exception under the new budget rules all seemed to be beancounters or managers, not front line staff.

3.)When there had to be serious cuts a whole new level of managers would appear to do the deed.

Afterwards they'd still be there.

4.) The less direct work someone did with the users ( of whatever type or department) the more likely they would still be there after the cuts.

5.) Essential work would get into a backlog, then expensive agency staff would be employed. These would be in place on a pretty much permanent basis because the size of the "establishment" couldn't be increased by directly employing staff, under the rules. See 1 above.

6.) "Outsourced" work would need to have a manager employed to do something or other that involved lots of meeting, with the outsourcers, who often ending up costing more than the people they had replaced even though the staff they brought in were paid significantly less than the ones who had been doing the work. The senior front line staff still in post meanwhile kept being pulled off their proper job to deal with the day-to-day issues that the managers were meant to be managing.

Reg reader casts call centre spell with a SECRET WORD

Re: Ee are the same...

Anyone here had the experience of tech support accepting that you've done all the steps, then got flustered and started back at the start of the script again?

It's happened to me.

Re: Ee are the same...

That's one of the most maddening things about these sagas.

When you can describe the specific error, the circumstances it occurs, the steps you've taken to isolate it to a specific programme/item/circumstance, the number of times you've switched it on and off again, turned off the AV etc. They'll still make you go through the same non-related steps that they would go through if you haven't told them anything before they will either come up with a solution or, more usefully, escalate it to someone who knows what they are doing.

A special mention here for Virgin Media who have a long tradition of not telling their front line guys ( or putting information on their web site) about what is going on in their network. So that they will take you through the whole cycle of resetting and testing and what have you when it eventually transpires that the entire locality has no broadband/TV/Phone.

Sky still blue, above the ocean: Google still raking it in

Bean counters

Beyond Google's performance I found this phrase telling;

Recently some analysts have grumbled that Google isn't growing its business as rapidly as it once did and they'd like to see it cut its expenses.

Which, though El Reg's summary, does seem to be an indication of something important.

The extent to which bean counters seem to believe that business' costs should always be moving as close to zero as possible, rather than looking for acceptable (or good) cost/earnings ratios.

It's the old story of the farmer who decided to train his donkey to eat less.

So every day he reduced the food he gave it.

And just as he thought he'd succeeded the ungrateful beast went and died.

Toyota recalls 625,000 hybrids: Software bug kills engines dead with THERMAL OVERLOAD

Re: Honda

Hmm, Mine also an 09 was used mainly suburban driving.

We got 50 or so on motorway driving ( not mad speeds). Which was noticeably poorer than we got when it was newer.

Re: Quality

@irony deficient

Fair enough

Honda

Until recently I had the Insight hybrid*.

It was cheaper than the Prius and at the time I bought it even had marginally better fuel consumption .And Honda doesn't seem to have had this level of recall problem.

But about 4 1/2 years into owning the car the fuel consumption deteriorated quite badly. From over 40mpg we found we couldn't get much over 30mpg for the same sorts of journeys.

The dealerships's answer was that this was what Honda said we should be getting,at that point, so that was alright then. Presumably Honda must have known that this was an issue after four years of use.

As the Americans say "Go figure".

*No longer in production.

Re: Quality

@ Andrew Moor

Not aircraft ( or maybe also)

Another car, 1970s

Accountants decided the cost of being sued for killing customers was worth the money to protect the car's price point.

It was the Ford Pinto - and if I remember correctly it was Ralph Nader's first consumerist campaign.

The beancounters' evil plan was scuppered when the US courts started to award serious punitive damages.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/a6700/top-automotive-engineering-failures-ford-pinto-fuel-tanks/

or for a detailed break down of the numbers ( second half of this article).

http://fordpintoethics.webs.com/

Twitter shares soar after buyout story appears on bogus Bloomberg site

I know it shouldn't ought to be allowed but

I can't help the feeling that it's Big Business that created the domain shambles, Big Business that gambles on share movements and Big Business that got caught by falling for a fake Big Business news item that pretended to be a Big Business news site, but with a different TLD.

So, deep down I just can't stop the feeling that It serves them bloody well right

Sorry.

Ireland loses entire airport amid new postcode chaos

Why the snipey headline?

From the sound of it this (Irish) project doesn't sound like it fell apart and had to be abandoned after costing several times what it was meant to cost. Didn't fail to deliver what it was intended to deliver.

Hasn't lead to a multimillion Euro court case. Hasn't even lead to lots of postmasters being locked up because they can't defend themselves against "the computer".

Whereas, just across a small strip of water..............

What do you MEAN, 'Click on the thing which looks like a Mondrian?'

Re: £££s

No no no.

Black cabs are a specialised service. Mostly for travel round the central city, though they do have a suburban knowledge subset. You can hail one in the street to get you where you need to know, with metered charges.

Cabs are ruinously expensive to buy and run, with strict maintenance rules, all sorts of requirements and a cabbie who has advanced driving and done the knowledge and can get you the quickest way to where you need to be. (And despite the myths, they do).

There are no rich cabbies, though if they work hard they can make a decent living.

Licensed mini-cabs can be pretty decent but there is no such guarantee.

Charging is what they can get you to to pay - which varies wildly.

And you have no idea what condition the vehicle is in unless it happens to have just come from its MOT. Standards of driving vary wildly too.

I've used mostly mini-cabs around home ( to the airport , bringing friends and family home from stations, hospitals and the like) and black cabs for work, to get me between meetings on a tight schedule, for example.

It depends what you need.

Re: Anyone been tempted?

I'd guess that most people have already learned that the error messages are either meaningless, wrong, or ignored by the support desk who are stuck to using a support script that ignores user input.

Re: Call me a cab . . .

Whatever

Explain anything

There has been, if my impression is right, a growing trend for people to not listen to or read explanations properly. Rather just to respond to key words, or a main concept.

So that if you write or say, maybe something like, The ( device name ) is faulty so that the timer won't start unless you reset it by turning it off at the mains"

You are likely to be asked to check the fuse.

And woe betide you if you give an example.

Like,"The thermostat dial is loose, so that it doesn't set the correct temperature. Yesterday it was set to 20 degrees and the room went up to almost 30".

Because you'll get, "I see; the room is too warm. I will send you instructions to set the thermostat".

Re: You Think You've Got It Bad?

Sounds a reasonable description to me.

Re: Call me a cab . . .

There was, and is, no such thing as a 3 point turn.

It's to turn "using forward and reverse gears" and the main testing point, now and 40 years ago was not to hit anything or anyone ( including the kerb).

Sorry, say boffins, the LHC still hasn't sucked us into a black hole

Re: Bravo

Unless of course, in most of the Multiverse we got destroyed/didn't ever exist and we're in one of the very few versions that did - so far.

Joke icon. Unless it's true of course.

Re: How would we know?

world getting stranger.....

SO that explains Islington.

China wants to build a 200km-long undersea tunnel to America

Re: I wholeheartedly approve.

the whiner can be of any age & most often is

Yep. That's me you can hear. I hate traveling in a metal tube, cramped, uncomfortable seats, ghastly food like substances, three people to get past just to go to the toilet. Tedious vids on tiny screen and hours sitting in the airport shopping mall staring at the sort of shops that only sell stuff you don't need .

Luckily I've never had to fly for work.

Some people ( like my B-in-L) love it. It'd be my idea of Hell.

Now a train journey.

I'd have liked that.

Coat, for on the way out of the terminal.

We tried using Windows 10 for real work and ... oh, the horror

Re: Sounds a bit rough, but that's not what bothers me.

Badly expressed. I meant the icons in the Modern interface rather than the tiles. (Sort of what passes for a start menu).

I'll give myself a downvote for lousy explanation. ( and leave the original in place rather than withdrawing it and posting an amended version.)

Sounds a bit rough, but that's not what bothers me.

What does bother me is when they make an annoying design decision that serves no purpose, but has to be used. In this case it sounds like it's not that there are tiles in the start menu, but that you can't put the bloody things where you want them as in Winphone 8.1 ,, .

Or as in Windows 8.1 - where tiles can't be moved around by drag and drop, Like when a new install creates its own folder, just for its precious self. It has to be "right click, open location, move tile through the tree, go back, delete folder". i.e. There is absolutely no f***king reason why they couldn't just let us manage our own desk top and start menu the way that we want it.

I like Microsoft in general. But they do seem to have this mantra that things have to go where they want to put them, often for no rational reason, and not where users want to find them. Why else would they have by default muddled documents and settings together into the same place, buried several layers down. A good place for "their " settings but absolutely wrong for "my documents".

More to the point, having made that sort of decision they make it as difficult as possible for ordinary users to reorganise. (And sometimes even for tecchie users - why else make it so difficult to create custom versions of traditional Ribbon menus in Office?)

Brit boffins teach mere PCs to find galaxies in Hubble pics

Must be getting closer to weekend

I read the heading, and thought it was getting off-duty coppers to look at the images. (Trained observers after all).

Which would be much more interesting. IMHO, of course.

Roll on Friday.

Unions call for strike action over 'unusable' Universal Credit IT

Re: byline

All of these.

Re: 15.8 billion!?

what else could you get for 15.8 billion

Greece. (With change).

Samsung, Oppo collared in smartphone bloatware probe

Re: I don't like bloatware but...

@David Nash

Was that irony?

Or did you mean it?

Or just trolling?

(It's not their phone. They sold it. Just like if I sell my car I can't insist that the new owners take granny to Bingo in it.)

Re: It's not installing the bloatware that's the issue

No AC. That argument won't hold water.

This isn't like having a car with an installed radio, to follow your image.

It's like having a car with a radio that

a.) comes preloaded with 200 Country and Western titles that are on permanent display, and

b.) that the radio can't be replaced without the risk that the entire car may never work again, but invalidates the warranty.

Hacking Team hacked: Spyware source code torrent blurts govt customers

Absolutely, and when you put the sword into the hands of ethical governments like err, Saudi Arabia you'd better be sure that you have a bloody good shield.

Let me PLUG that up there, love. It’s perfectly standaAAARGH!

Re: Education

Oh yes.

It's almost a kind of artwork.

The double adaptor with each point having a 4/6 point socket strip trailling on the floor.

I've seen a few of those. (Shudders at the memory)

Re: @X7 re: my dad.

I do get the impression that his emotional intelligence may have been on a par with his technical

(My background in Psychology) Since he seemed pretty adept at breaking relationships as well as clutches.

You can be a klutz and still keep a family together ( I know a few).

As a student I spent a year in a house where apparently innocent electrical items seemed to be a bit tingly.

Early on I got a serious shock, so decided to investigate. After the circuit testing screwdriver lit up on a light switch I turned off the mains and started to look inside the sockets and switches. Several had live wires in the wrong holes.

A few years later, I had my own flat and needed to do something minor to the light switch near the front door..

I turned off the mains. But being paranoid checked the inside with that same old tester. It was live.

Turned out it was wired to the flat upstairs, from when the last owner's mother had lived there.