* Posts by Ken Moorhouse

4013 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jul 2007

Google contractor HCL America accused of retaliating against unionized techies by shifting US jobs to Poland

Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

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".

Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

Union Negotiation

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.

The next time Microsoft 359 craps itself, at least it'll be easier to hunt down help

Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

office.com

Perhaps office.co.uk should take over the domain name.

They know a lot about rebooting.

Typical. Museum of London Docklands display would be ready to set sail were it not for no-show cast member

Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

Re: but without the source code we can't investigate.

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?

What a Hancock-up: Excel spreadsheet blunder blamed after England under-reports 16,000 COVID-19 cases

Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

Re: If this fails then try to parse it as a local date.

Nice to have it confirmed that this is not something I imagined when encountering this in a spreadsheet I was troubleshooting recently.

Oh to see the comment-annotated source-code of Excel.

Ken Moorhouse Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: A recursive acronym: Dido In Disaster Out

My nomination for Prize Comment of The Thread.

Doc Syntax shines again.

Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

Re: If the last record is OK, proceed.

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.

Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

So long as Parliament don't ask for it to be sorted...

But I suppose it will be ok, if they Save As first.

Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

Spreadshit

Is this the elephant in the room?

Are we too polite to mention the sh*t word?

Come on, admit it, we all want to call it a SPREADSHIT.

I love my electricity company's app – but the FBI says the nuclear industry bribed politicians $60m to kill it

Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

Smart Consumption

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.

Where are we now? Microsoft 363? 362? We've lost count because Exchange Online isn't playing nicely this morning

Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

Re: The only truly viable enterprise alternatives for Exchange....

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!)

Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

cloudy productivity services

Oxymoron springs to mind.

Help! My printer won't print no matter how much I shout at it!

Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

Re: But that's a terrible single point of failure

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.

Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

American company with UK office

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...).

First-world problems: The pumpkin spice latte is here, but the Starbucks loyalty card app has wiped my balance

Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

Coffee Break

A new meaning for the phrase...

Brexit travel permits designed to avoid 7,000-lorry jams come January depend on software that won't be finished till April

Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

beta is a standard labelling practice for a digital service that is fully operational.

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.

Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

Re: Isn't that particular car park called the M25?

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.

Azure DevOps Services reminds users that, yes, it really is time to pull the plug on Internet Explorer 11

Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

IE11 browser would remain supported while also urging users to nuke the thing from orbit

If they can do that for IE, why couldn't they do it for Windows 7?

UK ICO fines biz profiteering from COVID-19 crisis by sending unsolicited marketing texts to Joe Public

Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

Re: "feather its own pockets"

Brings a whole new meaning to "What togs are you wearing today?"

The standard of the English language is going down. Duvet care?

Microsoft leaks 6.5TB in Bing search data via unsecured Elastic server. *Insert 'Wow... that much?' joke here*

Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

Re: I bet the internet bill for those two people is massive.

What those two people would be more concerned about is if their drug-dealing, bomb-making searches have been uncovered.

Before you buy that managed Netgear switch, be aware you may need to create a cloud account to use its full UI

Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

When Netgear End of Life this Product Line (or die/get taken over)...

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.

How do you solve 'disruption' at the UK border after Brexit? Let's call Peter Thiel! AI biz Palantir – you're hired

Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

Brexit freight system 'won't be ready on time'

"But the government now says "beta" is a standard labelling practice for a digital service that is fully operational."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-54172222

No Comment

Behold the Bloo Screen of Death: Bathroom borkage stops spray play

Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

A common problem with the older devices

The prostate process hogs all the memory, leading to output problems.

Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

Interface

Whatch out for the nozzle interface mounted at head height on the device.

Dunkin' Donuts drops some dough to glaze over lawsuit accusing it of covering up customer account hacks

Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

Re: One on every corner: Cause/Effect

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.

===

Massachusetts? Surely in the context of DD, that would be Mass Chew Sets.

Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

Glutens...

...for punishment.

Is Little Timmy still enthralled by his Leapfrog tablet? Maybe check he hasn't sideloaded an unrestricted OS onto it

Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

When I were a lad...

...we were content with dead frogs.

Some kids didn't get the point, but the more dead frogs you had, the more platforms and sidings you could have.

Worried about bootkits, rootkits, UEFI nasties? Have you tried turning on Secure Boot, asks the No Sh*! Agency

Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

Give me s PC with a traditional BIOS...

...any day.

Geneticists throw hands in the air, change gene naming rules to finally stop Microsoft Excel eating their data

Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

Re: Little do you know that there really *is* a gene called fucK

It would appear from the link that the use of a codon is mandatory for reproduction to occur.

(IANAB)

Microsoft wants to link satellites to Azure – but it should probably fix its cloud first: Cooling outage hits UK COVID-19 portal, other sites

Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

Re: So the UK government hosted the COVID-19 information portal in a single availability zone?

They wanted to stop the spread (see my previous comment).

Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

Temperature Check

Does the Azure data centre have any other symptoms?

Failure to smell burning as it goes up in flames perhaps?

Three middle-aged Dutch hackers slipped into Donald Trump's Twitter account days before 2016 US election

Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

Ashley Madison?

Now let me see.

He might first have tried to use PENIS as a password (no can do, too short).

Then he tried BIGPRICK, only to be told that was too obvious.

Bork, Beer and Breweries: Three of our favourite things

Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

Big Chief I Spy...

Would have given extra points for spotting a RAM error on a BSOD at a well-known brewery in Wandsworth.

Ghost of Windows past spotted haunting Yorkshire railway station

Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

Selby

If we were talking about Windows 10 I would be making a quip about Sell By dates.

But as we're talking about W7 I won't.

Salon told to change ad looking for 'happy' stylist because it 'discriminated against unhappy people'

Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

Sweeney Todd

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".

Borking all over the world: At home or abroad, you're never more than 6ft from a BSOD

Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

opened its first line back in 1979. Stations were added during the 1980s

Sounds like a train set I had when I was a kid. Just a circle going round and round, round and round.

Then my parents bought me some platforms (Airfix kits I think), and some 4mm/ft people to populate them with.

Teen charged after allegedly taking food delivery biz for a ride: $10k of 'fraudulent refunds for stuff not delivered'

Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

Let the punishment fit the crime...

Porridge in his case.

So... just 'Good' then? KFC pulls Finger Lickin' slogan while pandemic rumbles on

Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

It's Toe Good...

It'll knock your socks off.

Trucking hell: Kid leaves dad in monster debt after buying oversized vehicle on eBay

Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

Re: The "victim" claimed no notifications from EBay or PayPal

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.

Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

Re: AmExs are unlimited.

AmEx Charge Cards have no pre-defined limits. Payment has to be made in full by the due date. It is not a credit card.

AmEx Credit Cards I believe do have a credit limit.

Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

Some day...

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.

If you can't understand how Instagram 'influencers' make millions, good luck with these virtual ones doing even better

Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

a fake person can earn more than an actual person doing daily work

Um... are we forgetting Donald Duck?

Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

Re: that's also why you should pour tea from the pot at a great height into the mug

It has the potential to make it taste better.

Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

Re: All I know is that I like fruit teas,

Start a new sub-niche of influencer.

Call yourself an infuser (if you say it in a way that makes it sounds like "influencer", people will wonder what you put in your "fruit teas").

We've heard some made-up stories but this is ridiculous: Microsoft Flight Simulator, Bing erect huge skyscraper out of bad data

Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

Time to rebrand BootNotes...

...as Tall Storeys.

Outage: Faulty UPS at data centre housing London Internet Exchange causes grief for ISPs and telcos alike

Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

The Reg has to commend for giving some wonderfully descriptive updates

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

You mean this kind of descriptive?

NHS tests COVID-19 contact-tracing app that may actually work properly – EU neighbors lent a helping hand

Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

Re: Why is the life of someone that would die of COVID more important

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.

British Army does not Excel at spreadsheets: Soldiers' newly announced promotions are revoked after sorting snafu

Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

Re: s/it/they/g

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.