Posts by David Hicklin 1572 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Sep 2007
> No: you need different levels of documentation, even experienced users need documentation - but about things that would mystify a novice user.
Most of my "how" to guides at last $JOB were written in the format of a simple checklist of the steps to perform with links (they were all online) to more detailed explanations if you wanted to know or needed them.
It kept the main page of the instructions simple and clear but the details were there if needed
A lot depends who the intended documentation was intended for - was it just end for the "end users" or was it so that should someone else take it over (he was the sole developer so subject to being run over by a bus) that they could understand the product and its coding.
The former needs "press z", "enter y" KISS documentation, the latter the War and Peace book set.
> "If the button is not mentioned in this guide, do not push it"
Which means it will be pushed.
As an apprentice (yes a very long time ago - late 1970's) I was put on charge of a semi-automatic lathe with an instruction of "don't pull that lever". Of course at some point the machine stopped mid-cycle and just sat there with the job piece turning around quite merrily. After a good search there was nobody around I could report it to and after sitting there for quite a while I quite naturally pulled that lever !
And found out why not to pull it as it advanced the program (a series of metal tabs on a big revolving drum at the end of the machine) to the next step which which resulted in the tool rapidly traversing towards the chuck, it left a lovely deep spiral grove on the inside of the job before the load became too much for the machine and it cut out.
Of course I never pulled that lever , oh no never.not me !...it just stopped and then suddenly started up again all by its own.......
So that's my "who me" back from the mechanical ages done!
> When I pointed this out, the LLM produced an apologetic response - but it always does, regardless of correctness
That's the problem with LLM's, they have incorporated the Genuine People Personality (GPP) from the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, hence why they are always happy , cheerful but nearly always wrong
Every waterfall delivery is a series of agile steps with the final one ( a fully working, bug free product *) being a little waterfall.
we all know that the current "agile" software is never finished so it is little different to a failed waterfall project
* stop laughing at the back there.
From my experience there is a lack of committent and involvement of the organisation buying the ERP solution to walk through all the modules/functions with the people who will be using them to see what does or does not fit the way we do it - and then agree what can the org change can do to fit or what absolutely must be customised
So many times we read that the idea was to change the way things are done to keep it all standardised but instead they customise the hell out of it blowing the budget/timescale - I think this was Birmingham's problem of intentions from the top meeting immovable departments at the bottom.
Personally I have taken part in one ERP migration and it was a success because it was fully walked through and fully tested end to end by all departments before going live, and yes they changed the way things were done (and many were improvements)
As for UK councils - they need a UK council ERP system which is the same from council to council as they have pretty much have the same core functions, if years ago they had got together to write one it would have saved a shed load of money by now. Yes some may have some edge cases but once that "module" is developed others could use it.
Yes I know I am seeing unicorns for the last paragraph but it riles me to see our tax money being spaffed out on failure after failure - with NO lessons ever learned or they would have solved it by now
> W11 in a corporate environment
I managed to retire a few weeks before I was going to get a w11 one so have no corporate experience of it but at my last $work they had an update manager that would give you several hours warning that updates had to be applied rather than just doing them, and we could defer them (up to a point) or apply now.
The only pain was logging out on a Thursday afternoon (my weekend started then) to go home and having a monthly update start and you are still plugged into the docking station....
> Forget AI. I'd like to see the most simple of web site search tools just work properly with a basic boolean search.
Have an upvote
What really annoys me at B&Q (and other retailers) websites is where you have a range of filters that you can apply, so you merrily go ahead only to find that the results no longer match reality and the only way to find the stuff you want is to wade through it item by item
> AC is better as it can transfer higher power over longer distances
I know that is true of overhead power lines, so curious why subsea interconnects are usually DC- DC..
I can partly guess as it is unlikely that UK/France are synchronised grids (!) and there is some fancy interaction between AC cables laid close to each other (you have to de-rate them)
> but I wonder whether higher frequencies (I think aircraft use 400Hz) and voltages might be more efficient.
ICL kit in the 1970's ran of 400Hz supplies and my first job after school was at a manufacturer who built 50Hz to 400Hz motor-generator sets for them. Plug your 50Hz mains on side and get 400 out the other.
Just don't do it backwards....
> Nvidia was talking about 1 megawatt per rack by the end of the decade. Sure hope the bubble bursts before that or here in the US we'll be dealing with electricity prices 4x higher than today and regular rolling blackouts like we're some kinda third world country.
With that amount of heat in a single any failure in the cooling system will have things melt down far faster than any protection system could reach
I was thinking how hard it would be to cable that but realised that if we do reach that point then power would be coming down busbars - just don't drop that spanner!
> the battery had to be "registered" with the ECU.
I understand that a lot of modern cars have some communication with a chip on the battery to monitor its health, I think the idea being to give warning if it is about to die.
Usually the first you know is when the battery announces it by dying suddenly , thankfully the AA patrol had the kit to register it at the roadside after fitting a new battery.
As an apprentice in the late 1970's I was often put on the train to hand deliver tender documents to London (especially the government based ones).
On one occasion I had to fly up to Aberdeen from East Midlands Airport. I had a DC9 from EMA to Glasgow, an HS748 from Glasgow to Aberdeen, taxi to place - drop off docs - taxi back to airport.
Then a 737 down to Heathrow (!) and then another twin engine turboprop back to EMA.
Suffice to say my ears did not appreciate all that up and down but it was a fun day
> but ultimately additional debt increases the money supply and causes inflation
But where does it come from? The banks (other then countries central ones) can't simply print more money, they in turn have to borrow it from somewhere else.
Which is fine until you do a 2008 and complete the circle
> Then look at the smaller transistor based ones compared to when ICs came along
Which is now running into real world physical limitations, and it is getting harder and much more expensive to get the manufacturing tech to go any smaller - I think the transistors are just about as small as physics will allow them
They really should have stopped with Vista SP1 aka Windows 7, that was the last good one for me.
Problem is that companies have to have product line refreshes and updates very now and again or they will be perceived as boring by the stick markets. And don't forget the Wintel alliance of forcing hardware upgrades when there is no real need to do so any more.
I do wish places like the EU had really got down hard on environmental computer tech waste - it would have made the win11 TPM move a lot more difficult (or expensive)
> are trying to move everyone to a subscription type service where you rent access to windows monthly, it stores all your data in a m$ cloud, and forcing you to continually pay m$ for access to your own data
That is the M$ wet dream - a guaranteed regular income, users locked in and no pirated copies
> them to travel first class to Rio de Janeiro to proffer damp handshakes and gurn their sincerity about climate change in front of bored audiences of fellow travellers
welcome to governments and politics, I guess if they had *not* gone then they would have been criticised for ignoring it....
> Alternatively, and this might be very old-fashioned, have some form of physical write-protection for the mobo flash so that user has to enable it.
My older (much older !) self built tower systems have a physical jumper on the motherboard to enable/disable updates. One (and one only) even had a read-only backup chip that could be used to restore the runtime one if you screwed it up.
Problem with this approach is that it makes centralised management impossible and companies have been sold this as a dream. I guess you could have a function key sequence to enable it once but them the malware writers would use this to get around it , so maybe that shadow return to factory default chip is needed again
> That said, the SMB firewall space is one that unfortunately seems to suffer compromises with alarming regularity - Watchguard, Fortinet and Cisco have all had serious vulns/compromises in the recent past,
And what have they all got in common?
Answer: software written and systems configured by humans who make mistakes and this no software can ever be considered totally secure - maybe just harder to get into but don't forget the $5 wrench approach.
Not trying to defend them as they often make stupid mistakes in the rush to get it out of the door - and that is even before AI LLM's get involved.
The number of companies getting breached is getting monotonous, clearly they have not learned that anything that can reach the internet is at risk.
I think you have misread the article: it's not so much about cost per se but instead the much vaunted promise of the cloud spinning up more capacity as you need it is not being kept, and the part of it they do get is not enough to run whatever they are doing, thus it has to sit idle (costing money) until more come available.
Sometimes it doesn't and all the efforts (and cash) have been wasted.
and it promptly get stored as icantbelievewe
at the last job we had an application that I had automated the hell out of the installation by writing a script for it, it would even set up the account the service used (this was windows server world) which worked fine except some genius in the past had used punctuation in the password and it would have been a real pain to change it.
For those edge cases the instructions (yes I even wrote a guide on how to use the thing!) were "use anything you like" and change the password manually before starting the app or you would lock the account very quickly.
> Yes my password manager password is a lonnnggggg passphrase but its muscle memory now and I change it every so often.
depending on where you store it, if they have access to try passwords against it, then that could be the least of your problems.
Mine is fairly simple and easy to remember but then again is on my local NAS, if someone is trying to hack that then my entire home network is compromised.
I have my own email domain and can use <anything>@<my domain>, so for any company I deal with I use <company name>@<my domain>
Had one or two confused sounding people when doing something over the phone !
Along with unique passwords (thank you keepass) if I get any spam on one of those addresses I know who it is immediately (unless of course they are trying to frame a rival co)
> It encourages users to create simple passwords they can remember and/or write them down and store them someplace handy
I had that as well , used a combination of postcodes and car number plate numbers . they were actually 1 character short (7 mostly in the UK and I needed 16) so a number or $ got added to pad them out
> How can you perform an upgrade of OS without knowing that you are installing something that is obsolete.
As I mentioned earlier, in the world of the government it takes years just to get a plan approved and financed.....and would take years more to get a new one planned and approved again leaving them on win7 for even longer
Now I don't *know* that this is the case but based on my limited exposure to supplying to government "units" in the past it is probably is.
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