Posts by rototype 202 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Feb 2010
Happens all the time in Education circles (and medical establishments for that matter) - They think that because they've managed to get a post as a teacher then they're better than the ancillary staff and as such treat them as morons, and forget about any sort of funding unless it's one of their ideas (meaning they've probably specced up some utter shite and are merrily paying through the nose for it.
Works especially well on morning "I can't log in" od "My PC isn't working" type calls, an hour later you wander over to see how they're doing and you find they'd either forgotten to switch something on (PC, Monitor etc) or switch something off (ie Caps Lock) or they've actually properly checked and re-plugged in the cables.
"sending a copy to all other parties ie: the 1IC and all board members."
I did that one place I walked out of (made sure I had a job to walk into though) - it was politely swept under the carpet before anyone could say anything. Although apparently a few months later they had an impromptu IT audit instigated by one of the governors....
Is there the possibility that this "law" will mostly be there to frighten the more timid veggie/vegan parents into actually thinking about what they're feeding their offspring and adjust accordingly, If this is the case then it's doing what it should - getting the younglings the correct balanced level of nutrition.
As with some other comments, I wholeheartedly agree that parents stuffing fast food down the gullets of their sprogs with the exclusion of anything that could be deemed healthy should be shot on sight. Unfortunately this has ben going on for so long now it's almost regarded as socially acceptable to be overweight or even obese. This has probably come from the PC brigade saying it's not nice to call someone a fatty 10 chins. True, if you are then it's not nice to hear and I agree there are certain medical conditions that can have the same effect but in the majority of cases it's just through eating too much of the wrong sort of food.
Personally my diet is relatively balanced (moderation is the key really) - I eat meat fairly frequently, fish at least as frequently but I also try to have a day or two each week where it's 'meat free' meals - sometimes this is down to availability (an example is when I select the meals from the works canteen as the veggie curry usually has more/nicer flavour than the beef/chicken one). My one weakness is I possibly go a little heavy on certain grain based liquid supplements - my choice and I wouldn't force it on anyone.
"We probably all ought to pressure people in power to do more to address the issue."
Unfortunately this won't work while money is being made as those in power just say - "You're making money - where's our cut" (tax/bung etc).
Sadly this is not limited to the developing world or emerging economic growth zones but to virtually the whole world, disguised better and less blatent in more 'civilised' societies.
Halfrauds, not sure, some of their 'Pro' tools are actually quite good while not being too bad on price. Don't agree with their policy now of having the bikes and other shite downstairs while the heavy car stuff has to go upstairs (If I want to buy a battery I DON'T want to have to carry it down a big long staircase before I pay for it!!)
Maybe when they do go someone can buy their tools section off them?
In all actuality they probably leave them switched OFF most of the time, partly to preserve battery power and partly to avoid detection. If they're only using them for the occasional weekly ET then the battery should last for a couple of months before going flat, by which time it would generally have been found and confiscated - thus meaning they probably wouldn't have any need for a charger.
On another note, they'd probably only leave them on Vibrate if they enjoyed that sort of thing.
Possibly a couple of reasons - 1) allegedly they dropped him 'over a mile from his home' - if he's an average Merkin geek it could have taken a while for him to i-wheeze his way back home (if he remembered the i-route at all, after all he wouldn't have his i-sat nav any more). 2) if all his i-gadgets were stolen that'd mean (horror of horrors) he'd have to use an ANALOGUE telephone - where's the instruction manual? - Maybe he waited until he got a replacement i-device to phone them on?
I have a suspicion the number of people wanting to get the first episode of a new series with a new Doctor might well have contributed to the downtime, whether thisalone could have brought it down or whether specifically targeted for a busy time or just coincidence we may never know.
Personally I was going to until I realised I only have to wait until Friday and it's re-played on Three.
I also should like to participate next year - shouldn't be too bad, I remember back in the 90s there was the 'Baked Bean war' on between the local supermarkets, with a tin selling for 1p - combine that with a disgracefully extravagant 27p for a loaf of sliced white and it was quite possible to live for a week on £1 - which I did for about 2 weeks until my friends started avoiding me (think it was something to do with the after effect of the beans...) By the way I was skint then as well, but I managed to save enough to pay my rent that month. Wouldn't do it again on beans on toast but it's definitely an option worth considering for a couple of meals.
If it's that light, why oh why didn't they give it a decent lightweight hull as well and make it so it's amphibious as well (Ok, the frenchies don't need this but for the rest of us...)
With air sea and land capability they'd probably more than double their potential sails (pun intended.
I bought an inkjet 3-in-1 (printer/scanner/copier) a couple of christmases ago, Still going strong. Ok, so I mostly use it for the scanner - the cartridges officially cost more than I paid for the device in the first place and yes I use it so little I have to clean the heads every time I use it (which I don't if I can help it, I've got an old HP Color LaserJet 4500dtn for most of my printing needs, especially since I picked a s**t load of consumables for it when the company I was working for at the time decided they wanted the space more than it wanted the cartridges for these old printers it rarely uses any more.)
To be honest the main reason for buying it was the fact that my xmas cards that year didn't want to go through the laser printer. I also needed a scanner with a Windows 7 driver (old one came with '95 originally) so £30 was quite well spent. I've since found that some of the cheap replacement cartridges from some supermarkets are 100% compatible and work just as well as the genuine article.
... passing the contract to one of the senior councillors mates (probably discussed on the golf course/over a few drinkies). - ie a backhander.
The lack of controls is probably due to the fact the person 'awarding' the contract has absolutely no idea what controls are or even the slightest idea what data protection means. It was probably stipulated that the records needed to be unencrypted as no-one doing the processing has the nouse to understand what to do with encrypted files. (probably because they're paying peanuts - you know what sort of staff you get for peanuts)
Paris 'cos I think even she'd manage to do it better.
"Of course, I expect Apple to wriggle a hell of a lot before they'll actually do this. Would they actually pull-out of the UK market before complying with this?"
Would they? Please? PLEASE?
Personally I'd like to buy the Judge a pint for having the balls to say 'You've been naughty and now you have to say sorry - publicly' to Apple.
You mention that Dell come with full recovery discs - only the business models do in my experience, if you've cut corners and bought one of the cheaper home systems then you have to pay extra for the recovery media (I know this was the case a few years ago at lease, a friend was quoted £60 for the XP media alone by the Dell helpdesk!).
the bit in the article where it says she was only going back to close her bank accounts, seems like she's had enough of US control and is leaving for good. Don't blame her, I'd do the same, it's probably only draconian rules saying he has to be there to close it. Most times you can sent a letter in to close an account - but the US always has been a bit backwards on its banking.
Personally I no longer have anything to do with them (despite being 50% US by birth) - they're all tits at the moment so if the while world decides this (probably not too far away) they can all rot in their own mess. (they'd probably not even notice, which is the depressing part).
</rant>
paris for obvious reasons
Try more than trippleing that when you consider actual staff and anciliaries (cleaners, admin etc...) I worked at a school with 700 and there were 150 staff with maintenance, catering, housekeeping etc... we only had 2 1/2 IT staff there (one guy did A/V as a second role).
2200 pupils should warrant at least 5 IT staff full time - and that's being stingy. I'll bet they'd all been outsourced 'to save money', and the outsourcing company couldn't be bothered to do it's job properly ("it wasn't covered in the SLAs")
1 sysadmin, properly trained (and probably costing a hell of a lot less than the outsourcers charge) could have prevented this from happening.
I got a machine recently that was a few years old, and was shipped with V***a (2 options were available from the factory, XP or V***a). Reformatted it immediately and loaded XP. I also had a spare HDD for it so I loaded 7 on that for comparisson.
Bearing in mind that the drives are identical, 7 actually ran faster than XP, so on certain platforms an OS upgrade can actually provide a noticeable speed benefit.
Having lived in the north east for a number of years I heard the story.
The Sunday Sun is a name owned by the Journal/chronicle in Newcastle and was published regularly before the Sun decided to produce a sunday paper, hence the name News Of The World was used.
As far as I am aware The Sunday Sun is still being published in Newcastle, hence MGN are unable to use the name.
"Hopefully the more details on how many companies were affect will be published when it becomes available."
If they've REALLY f**d up as we expect they have there'll be a cover-up "In the interests of National Security" (translation:- they're likely to get their asses sued off and they can't afford it) OR they'll miraculously "find" something dodgy on all of the siezed drives and lock up all of the owners. (More paperwork bu thte headlines will read "US winning the war on terror")
Me, cynical, never.. (it's the one with the RAID 5 pockets)
I did the same on a 'colleague' using nothing more elabourate than a long thin USB lead (my desk was adjacent to his).
Started with USB mouse 'drifting' (anyone who'se used the early MS optical mice knows they tend to drift) - he changed the mouse 5 times.
Bored, attached a mini USB Hub and a keyboard. (by this time I'd let the rest of the office in on the secret..) random keys, screens appearing mysteriously... It was only when he unplugged it ready to do a full rebuild and I heard 'You Bastard!' I knew I'd been rumbled.
Mind you, I'd had him going for nearly 6 weeks....
Happy daze.....
Yes, DESKTOP drives are only £50 for 320 GB, SERVER drives however retail at about 10 x that price, always have done, always will - it's somethng to do with the way they are built (much more reliable), or possibly the way tey're marketted - comes down to the same thing in the end = £££££££££££££££....
Yes, the one with the gold plated server disks in the pocket....
...with the global economic meltdown continuing, people and organisations are tightening their collective belts and being a little more conservetive with their storege requirements - why add another couple of dozen expensive drives and racks and UPSs and power requirements to suit, when we can clear off the xxxGBs of cr*p that REALLY don't need to be kept (employees copies of their facebook pages/ipod backups/holiday photo albums etc... - I'm not even going to go into Golf scoresheets/parish council meeting minutes or football fixture lists and everything else that should never have been there in the first place).
<rant>
I suspect that if all organisations removed all un-necesary data from theor servers they'd probably halve their data storege requirements, and quite possibly put the Hard disk manufacturers into the receiversip courts in a flash (pun intended...)
Also - many companies that are outsourcing their services are argueing WHO pays for the storage these days, depending upon WHOSE employees are using it (not necessarily WHOSE data it actually IS) - this leads to servers that are constantly out of space so the users are storing more data locally (amazing how many Word documents you can squeeze on a 80GB HD with XP......
Possibly we are now beginning to see users beginning to use storage a bit more wisely (we can only hope) - My latest laptop ONLY has a 60GB HDD (yes, it was second user, it was the model I wanted and it's working very nicely Thank You - on Win 7 Ultimate, so it's not a 486 before you ask) - I have all the data stored on my desktop/tower at home that has the usual cheap high capacity drives in it, plus an external USB/ESATA drive to back it all up - I gave up on tape drives when it became cheaper to buy USB drives than data tapes... When I think I'm going to need that data I download it to the laptop and when I no longer want/need to carry it around with me I re-upload it to the desktop and back it up. Isn't this the way everyone should do it?
As for keeping data on the 'Cloud' - I agree with previous posters thet except for data that you EXPRESSLY WANT to share with the world and their siblings, KEEP IT AT HOME, SECURELY LOCKED AWAY!
</Rant>
Paris Icon, 'cos sometimes I think the whole world has her mental capacity......
I replace peoples compuers all the time, if i took a picture of all the mucky ones I'd be there all day. The worst one I think we ever had wasn't dust related, it was 'drink' related.
Several (at least) cups of some form of brown beverage had been spilled on the desk and not cleaned up properly, we nearly had to get a crowbar to prise the PC from the desk.
Pint icon because after thinking about that PC I think I need one.
Govornment says "We think it's good (we can probably tax it some more), so you're going to get it whether you like it or not, and you are going to have to pay for it"
Sounds like the death bell for a LOT of smaller (and often more interesting) radio stations.
Looks like Caroline may be making a comeback......
We don't get paid just to be shat on, and belittleing them once in a while shows the others that their oh-so-important problem maybe isn't quite as important as a site outage by one of the more major servers. (been there, got the T-shirt - although belittleing managers is the best, like the call centre who insisted the screen was broken until I turned up the contrast, or the same guy who was convinced htere was a system problem because the screen he was working on wasn't getting any response - due to the fact the system needed UPPER CASE and he'd left the CAPS Lock off).
Beer - cos that's often the only resort after a long day
Whem the T-Orange merger occurs, since T-Mobile are a contract carrier for a lot of other "networks" such as Virgin and carphone Warehouse's offerings.
How do they intend to play this if the user choses a Sony/Erricson phone?
A lot of questions still unanswered (and probably will never be answered)
You have absolutely no sense of humor, as most of those TV PROGRAMMES you listed are considered COMEDIES, ie of a comic or humorous nature (even Eastenders at times). The content of comedy programmes does not show a reflection of the moral fibre of a society, merely something that the programme makers think we might find amusing.
An interesting comment if the US stations decide to air them as well isn't it?
We need a two faced icon here....
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
