Re: {former NUR member at Derby back in the 1970's}
Same here (London).
Managed to escape to the TSSA despite the Bridlington agreement on grounds that I was going "white collar".
4013 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jul 2007
When I was a member of a union at the start of my career I found that union negotiators would quite happily offset perks of the job against wage increases so that they could claim success.
Typically they would come back to "the members" to say yes, we've got you a really good pay-deal, but management drove a hard bargain and, in return we've agreed to cut some "minor" perks.
For example, where I was, staff had to clock-in in the morning, but didn't have to clock-out at night, which was actually a really good perk for those travelling around, as they could arrange their work itinerary to finish close to home, amounting to several hours a week effectively finishing early. After one particular pay-deal, everyone had to clock in and out. So this wasn't well received by those expoiting that perk. I arrived on the scene soon after this change, and there was a lot of bitterness towards the union because of it.
What this means for management is that they can use the unions as a valuable tool to clamp down on undesirable practices and to deflect the blame onto bad union negotiation. Invariably it would be the unions instigating the negotiation, so management had no need to broach the erosion of rights to workers, the unions did it for them. What you read in the press is what the unions want you to hear, the concessions are quietly skimmed over.
I have found the sysinternals utilities very useful for occasions such as this. You might be able to get the tail to wag the dog. Obv take a backup before acting on hunches though. Typical scenario might be a missing file, or trying to copy a file into a folder that has that file name as a directory name, for example.
N.B. Many IP owners will take the stance that this is reverse engineering, but if that is the case are they offering support?
Providing there is no duplication.
IMHO Better to assess "boundary conditions" are not violated prior to import.
Extra checks need to be performed prior to import? Yes. Oh dear, that's no good then.
This is the problem with things knocked up in haste, corners are cut.
The ideal ways to have smart consumption are either (i) to have two separate power circuits in the house, or (ii) for the generating company to modulate a carrier signal on top of the mains electricity waveform.
(i) One circuit is the "on-demand" electrical supply, the other is for "dumb" appliances where they can be switched on or off according to external factors, for example, refrigerators. This will then smooth out peaks in demand.
(ii) If appliances can be made "smart" by interpreting the injected carrier on the mains this could be used to signal them to run or not run according to real-time loading demands seen or forecast by the generating company.
With (i) everyone's off-peak devices would turn on at exactly the same time, resulting in a surge in demand until thermostats drop out having reached target temperature. With (ii) devices can be turned on in a more targeted way, eliminating the initial off-peak surge.
I've used Groupwise and Notes. Heavyweight maybe, but a hammer to crack an egg in cases I've seen. cc:Mail seemed more responsive. My Email Server of choice is undoubtedly Mdaemon. Not sure how far up the Enterprise scale Mdaemon will go, but they have standard pricing up to 2500 users. Biggest installation I've carried out was 50 users, which replaced Exchange.
Disclosure: I am an Mdaemon reseller.
(DV was not me!)
I agree. In mitigation I *did* mention that this was a LaserJet 4 and the consensus - here at least - is that these were/still are damn reliable printers. IIRC they had a maintenance contract on the beast too. Staff on premises using the pc's on a regular basis were 3, cost of a decent printer in those days was a sizeable cost.
I was once involved with an ambitious US start-up that wanted to setup in the UK, with swanky offices in Chelsea. Interesting company in many ways, but I can't say much more than that ;)
I kitted out the office with everything I recommended and everything worked like a sewing machine.
The only problems they had were when the bosses flew in from America for meetings. They'd plug their laptops into the network and they couldn't print, and then nobody could print. So I'd get a really shirty call from them with the sweeping statement that "nothing is working". One of my support philosophies was/is still to endeavour to deal with situations such as this face-to-face. I'm sure many of you will have guessed the problem already and, sure enough they were up and working within five minutes of my arrival.
The problem was one of paper size, their laptops were instructing the printer to use US paper size, and the printer (HP LaserJet 4 I think) was setup to print A4.
In hindsight I believe the reason for their visit was to blame the UK operation for the poor performance of the company. A matter of months after that the company went down in flames quite spectacularly. (I wish I had more time to write a book...).
I have a feeling that this assertion may have arisen from gmail's high-profile example.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2009/07/why-google-kept-gmail-in-beta-for-so-many-years.html
In gmail's case, the beta branding hinted at the ongoing development work going on to provide a more feature-rich end-result (I typed feature-risk on auto-pilot to start with, hmm that could be a good way to decribe it), but I would think that stability, rather than features, is the priority with this mission-critical project.
That's the ideal solution from the government's point of view..
Use the M25 for the queues - one clockwise, and the other counter clockwise. Lorries are filtered off the queues at random to head for Dover.
No lorry park as the lorries are all moving.
Does this mean that they are then no longer "managed" devices?
There needs to be some requirement that products such as these have some kind of "fold-back" facility which can be used to emulate the "host" end of the link, so that the device can continue to be fully utilised in the event that Netgear are no longer able to support it. Or, if for some reason the purchaser objects to relying on Netgear's portal.
I'm sure many large corporates would want this capability to be demonstrated to them prior to purchase.
It could be the other way round.
Dunkin' Donuts thinking that the locality of the police barracks would be an ideal place for an outlet.
And the woman's fitness centre thought they would get more custom if they were able to ogle the cops whilst exercising.
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Massachusetts? Surely in the context of DD, that would be Mass Chew Sets.
Hairdressers need to be happy people. I wouldn't like them to be able to wield cut-throat razors otherwise.
Edit: Sorry I see Michael Hoffmann has beaten me to that observation.
The question is whether Sweeney Todd was an unhappy barber or whether he actually enjoyed murdering his clientele.
Brings a whole new meaning to the phrase "passing trade".
Whoa, not so fast...
If you received an email from "ebay" or "paypal" notifying you of a transaction of epic proportions, what would you do?
Now be honest, what would you do?
The chances are that the user would flag it as spam without thinking.
Not sure of the current stance on whether proof of sending an email legally infers deemed to have been received and opened.
Someone will challenge the way that browsers display order forms on the screen (I'd be surprised if there haven't been any cases).
How can a company like ebay *prove* that an order form, together with its associated T's&C's looked the way it was intended to do, when presented to a user. There are all sorts of reasons why things might not appear as they should do: Cookie's set, DNS server used, Browser used, client browser settings, such as text and background colours, cacheing, anti-malware utilitiy, pop-up blockers, Javascript settings, which CDN or Cloud node was involved in delivering this content stream, etc. Ebay can infer some things by looking at the raw logs, but in a way adequate to be used as evidence? I doubt it. As the plaintiff they have to go the extra mile in their argument of proof.
My understanding is it is purely to prevent the NHS becoming submerged with Covid cases (which is a political black mark).
Be under no illusion.
The Government doesn't care whether you live or die. It does care though whether, in dying (on their doorstep, as it were), you make the statistics look bad.
All these people who have been shielding can come out to play now. It is no safer than before, mind you, it just means that you're not going to be such a big blip on the chart, should you succumb now.
The official retort to the above is that you will receive better individual attention should you become ill now, as opposed to before, but the cynical view is always good to kick the government's tyres with.
I have a customer I see periodically who does do sorting, printing and mail-merge using Excel. The process still gives him headaches because he does it so rarely, on a variety of unconnected data, so I give him a refresher on the relevance of the steps involved. To give him his due, he is in his 90's!
Even as a staunch critic of spreadsheets, I am prepared to acknowledge that Excel is a good metaphor for *some* aspects of data presentation, but involve Word and mail-merge and it is anything but intuitive for the average man-in-the-street.