Posts by John Brown (no body) 25368 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010
Thanks to inflation, the penny has no real intrinsic value any more. About the only practical use for it is to be given in change because marketers like to price things ending in 99p for psychological reasons, ie they are trying to fool people that £9.99 is actually cheaper than £10.00 by enough to matter :-)
El Reg have decided to standaize[sic] on "North American English style guides. Although why that means using F in this case I have no idea. A very large part of North America standardised on Celsius some time ago, especially since it works well as a word in both of their main languages, English(Canadian) and French(Canadian) :-)
I never really got on with Symphony. We ended up with Smart (Later SmartWare), an integrated suite of word processor, spreadsheet, database, calender, graphing tool and comms package, all intergraded and interoperable via a scripting language which could also call external programmes too. It took some learning, but it did everything would ever need and then some more.
Back in the DOS days, we standardised our directory structures so anyone could sit fown at any computer and find the stuff they needed.
c:\apps was where you found WordStar, SuperCalc, DBase etc
c:\tools was where you find stuff people might need less frequently, like file conversion tools and the like.
c:\utils would have more esoteric stuff for doing thing the average user would only do rarely or never such as Norton Utilities and the like and things like TSRs loaded by AUTEXEC.BAT
Harry walked into the dungeon in search of clues about his nemesis.
It's dark. There are exits to the North, East and West.
"Illuminati" shouts Harry as he waves his wand in front to light the way.
Unfortunately, Harry wasn't quite as good at spells as he thought and two lizard overlords appeared and spirited him away, sucking the life from all his apps
Game Over.
Yeah, but, unless they have different charging scales in the ladies loos, then there's no discrimination there, is there?
I do get, and support, you point about womens sanitary products, but I also see the points others have raised about the fallacy of comparing them with bog roll. I'm not sure I can even think of something men need and women don't, on any sort of "regular/frequent need" basis. Not even razors, since many women also use razors and both can choose not to shave whichever bodily hair the do choose to shave.
I genuinely can't think of a comparison, which makes it all the more galling that VAT is charged on sanitary items, since the definition of VAT is that it's supposed be applied to non-essentials (they used to call it "luxury tax")
It's amazing how people in power can convince themselves of a particular position when questioned about it and soon after do the exact opposite "because circumstance changed or new information became available, so I changed my mind. I didn't lie at the time, I have simply changed my position since then,"
She's clearly a rank amateur. How did she think she would ever get away with this? The Gucci bags and Rolex watches sound like some incompetents way of hiding the money and keeping it from flowing through her own bank accounts. The cars were a bit obvious too.
To be fair, it's the MS market dominance that has caused that in the first place. After all, WHY should LO be led by the nose through the MS hoops? It's different. 100% compatibility is never going to happen. So why not celebrate the difference and be thankful there is some compatibility? It's not as if WordStar and WordPerfcet were competing on who was the most compatible with the other. They were just different and people learned one or the other. Or both.
When did we stop thinking of computers and software as tools to do a job and start thinking of them as Microsoft computers with Microsoft standards that everyone and everything must aspire to match?
"and the others sent on a long ground handling safety refresher course."
Ideally, yes, but as per the article, staffing levels the post-COVID lay-offs and time for proper training. Sounds more like a bit of corner cutting to get back to profitable operations as quickly as possible. I suspect the people on the ground crew were trained, but not as well as they should be. In less critical training situations, I'm sure we've all had the sort of "training" where you get told something once in a course, written, video, whatever, then move onto the next thing, gaining large numbers of "facts" so quickly there's barely time for them to sink in, compared to a properly structured "learning experience" where facts get repeated in different situations and built on and repeated again as the course progresses.
"If there was something to be seen, it would be on video by now."
It is. There are many, many videos of "odd" things in the sky. Unfortunately, of all those millions, nay billions of cameras out there, many of which are mobile phones capable of taking video at 1080p or better with auto focus, not a single user is capable of holding one steady or resting/leaning against something solid to get anything other than a wildly shaky and out of focus image that could be literally anything which emits light at almost any range imaginable. And they always seem to cut out just as the "object" is about to move past something that might give some perspective and a clue to it's size and speed, eg did it go behind or in front of the tree 20 feet away and was it just another blurred moth or flying insect.
"adding that a cash infusion from a space agency could make the tech mature enough to take to Mars."
In experiments, this looks better than MOXIE but we can't be sure yet as we can't yet even build a proper prototype. If someone will supply the cash, we'll see if we are right or wrong.
That's how science works and is funded :-)
"probably staff rather than customers?"
Doesn't matter. They still only need to keep a record that the data has been verified, eg passport could relate the Right To Work, drivers licence for any employ required to drive a vehicle on behalf of the company, but neither need to be kept in their entirety, especially as scans. Even a driving licence should only really need a record of what classes of vehicle are covered against the named employee.
Being a remote worker, my employer requires an annual driving licence check. I send them a scan, they confirm the details, they delete the file. (I actually send them the same scan each year, since nothing changes and no one ever notices or complains :-))
Although now I come to think of it, it's entirely likely that those scans might still be in some email archive. I must ask about that on Monday. Most of our emails default to auto-delete in 2027/8 or thereabouts (5 years autodelete??)so just deleting it Outlook obviously isn't enough.
And for as long as it's been reported in the news, as far back as I can remember, Thames Water have consistently been at the top of the list. When the customers can't choose the supplier, reputation matters little.
I think I read somewhere that Thames Water was not just top of the list, but b y a large margin, losing over 40% more water through leaks than the company ion 2nd place.
*ONLY* regulation can do anything, but that means a properly funded regulator with real powers. Maybe we could start by freezing the executive pay (up 21% in the last year for CEOs) and freezing shareholders dividends for a couple of years, re-investing it back into the leaking pipes problem. My local water company came out top of the dividend league, paying out over £123m, money that could have gone into repairing the pipes.
Is this for internal employees or is this for your entire customer base? How do you handle it when someone fat fingers something and you have automated emails going to someone who should not be getting them? How does that person raise a ticket?
I had an issue with a bank sending me monthly statement notifications for someone else with enough PII in it to make it a GDPR issue. I had a hell of a time getting this bank to take notice of me as I am not a customer. No email addresses on their site, just a "Contact Us" form that had REQUIRED fields I could not completes, not being a customer and not having account information. The sales people dealing with new customers didn't seem interested enough to respond. I eventually got a response after I spammed various likely email addresses like security@ fraud@ etc suggesting they contact me ASAP or wait for a letter from the Ombudsman, ICO or FCA.
"Only because Russian designers are morons. If you actually wanted a usable vehicle along these lines then i'd start with a mobility scooter and add a half inch of armour, enough that it's bullet proof. Then add a small turret on top with your choice of weapon."
Then add the RC equipment and the servos to operate the steering, replace the wheels with something that won't be stopped by a low kerb or any sort of debris in it's path and you very quickly reach the point where it's cheaper and easier to start from scratch with a purpose built device rather than a Heath Robinson contraption.
And never forget how long it took the Daleks to learn how to "negotiate" stairs!! Even poor K-9 had problems on anything other than a smooth studio floor :-)
It could be me, for all I know. I was under the impression that a season ticket, used 5 days per week breaks even compared to buying normal tickets for that journey, at using it 4 days per week, ie it's about 20% or so cheaper than paying daily. So if you buy the season ticket and only use it 3 days per week, you "lose" one return journey per week. Travelling into the office 3 days per week, buying daily tickets because that's cheaper than the season ticket, still means you are paying more per journey so in effect are "out of pocket".
Maybe someone here who uses annual season tickets on the trains could clarify based on the current prices?
"The latest decision has been to "encourage" (vs. earlier "compel" or "mandate") people to work in the office Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. The offices will be more or less closed on Mondays and Fridays."
The problem for many who commute on public transport is that the "season tickets" or monthly bus passes are only economic when you travel there and back every day. Travelling in three days per week can work out more expensive in some cases and far less convenient having to keep buying return tickets every day you travel.
Public transport doesn't seem to have realised that the world has changed and vast swathes of commuters have drastically changed their travelling habits. If they introduced new payment schemes, eg buy 50 journeys rather than a specific number of weeks so people can travel at the same bulk discount rates when they want to, not every day. Same applies to bridge and tunnel tolls.
"As ex-IBM I would have no qualms in telling them to stick their money and go for broke in court, with full disclosure. I wonder just how much the payoff is that no-one has yet done this."
I wonder how much IBM have saved by firing all these older workers and how much all the "settlements" and legal fees have cost them? What will happen when the process moves into the deficit column?
"My wife settled a life-changing personal injury claim after 4 years, because the repeated medical consultations, court appearances and repeatedly going back over the accident was effectively putting her life on hold."
And, of course, even if you are determined to hold the offender to account, when the offender has deep pockets and REALLY doesn't want the information to come out in court, on the record, they will keep increasing the settlement amount until you go away. I hope, after those 4 years of added trauma, your wife got a much bigger settlement than she was likely offered at the start of the process.
I suspect a major part of the bid was the delivery date to. Everyone was after laptops and people were willing to pay stupid money to get anything that worked. Add in government procurement processes where an undotted i or an uncrossed t gets you kicked out of the process with no chance to re-submit due the the urgency of the process and it's quite possible to end up paying vastly over the odds to some company who didn't expect to win so put in a "silly" quote to show willing, and then scrambled to supply "at any price" while still making a huge profit.
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