Posts by Terry 6 6269 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Jul 2009
Hint from the trenches: Using a Victorinox hoof pick for it's intended purpose will cause your pocket knife to rot/rust out before it's time
That;s where Victorinox' lifetime warranty comes in.
£5 plus outward postage for a simple service. £10 for anything more.
Used to be the UK distributors, nice little firm. Now it's Victorinox own service dept. that receives them.They used to send them to Switzerland. Don't know if they still do.
Precisely.
This and the comment by Bullchut ( or whatever the name was) encapsulate the issue.
BS corporate language is used to sound impressive and managerial while not betraying inadequacy by actually saying anything. They want to rally the troops and sound important while actually being hollow barrels.i.e. Inside the words there is nothing of substance. These are the people who are quick to spot the newest trend and jump onto it, forcing others to join them- but more importantly are the quickest to spot the end of that trend and the start of the next one, jumping across at the first inkling while leaving the poor sods who followed them to take the consequences.
Education managers and Local Authorities' management are full of this shit. I have quite literally seen careers ruined for teachers and LA staff who have been dragged into some such nonsense, committed their careers to some Next Best Thing that the senior managers were promoting strenuously while spouting high-sounding but meaningless jargon, then had been left high and dry when the political support, funding and commitment suddenly dried up.
Does that sound angry? It should. Because I have in mind one of many of these, who was brought from the other side of the world to promote some such scheme that was big back home* and we were going to implement here. Then found that before she'd even got her bum on her chair they were already backtracking and suddenly no one wanted to speak to her.
Several times through my own career we'd had to fight off the local authority hijacking our team to support some new idiot scheme that would solve all problems and mean our team's actual work would no longer be needed. It never did, of course.
And we witnessed one such luminary who'd been promoting some scheme or other with biblical fervour turn up one afternoon ( with her PowerPoint of course) to explain how some new system was the right one, and that it had been obvious for years that the old scheme was not fit for purpose. The scheme she'd been advocating as the only way forward less than two weeks earlier.
*It wasn't rocket science and we'd already read up on it and worked out that it was impossible to implement without increasing teacher, advisory and support staff numbers by about 30%
My impression is that Microsoft is driven by existential fear of missing the Next Thing, as so nearly happened at the start of the internet. That and internal politics ( including shareholder value in the short term, but that’s endemic these days) is what motivates them. Creating user friendly, secure and reliable software is at the bottom of the list, if it's even on it.
Share value increases in the short term because flogging off the assets increases the cash in the coffers. It does fuck all for the future, but they don't give a shit about long term health.
This is just how corporate finance seems to work now. Assets are for stripping. (Or sweating to death, the other side of the coin).
For a couple of years I had an office to myself. And a Win 95 PC that worked well. Half the week I was out in schools so when they increased my staffing by1 they put her in the same office- using the same PC. But she was forever complaining that it kept crashing. Putting on my IT support hat I checked everything I could. Nothing. It worked fine for me. Kept crashing for her. Until the end of term.. Her school that day was closed for some reason or other so we were both in the office. And as I ws typing away she walked past and crash .
So we rebooted and tried again. Every damn time she got near.
The answer; The room had a dry atmosphere and she had a liking for those thick woollen sweaters with lots of sticking out strands.She was a mobile Van de Graff Generator.
My Fire Marshall training, a good few years ago now, was simply--If you are between a small fire ( a litter bin was mentioned) and the exit with an accessible extinguisher to hand you may attempt to extinguish the fire, if you've had the training .
Else just get out etc.
What you don't do is stand fighting a small fire that's between you and the door- if you can get past it just go!
(This is also why there are rules about keeping exits free of inflammable items!)
If a FOSS company can take responsibility for maintaining a FOSS application that it needs, from another source, should it need to, because the original developers go belly up (if corporate themselves)quit/retire/die (if volunteers or a combination) then that makes 100% sense.
If however they don't have the capacity/funding/skills to do that then proprietary s/w may be the only safe option.
In my experience there's consultants and Consultants.
The former are doing practical jobs; passing on experience and/or knowledge, e.g. organising disparate groups so that they can work together or advising on a new methodology that the organisation has already concluded it needs like better record keeping or improved use of available data, or reducing carbon foot print through improved recycling/renewable energy and so on.
Whereas Consultants are just salesmen ( and women) who earn big fees by persuading organisations to implement the latest management snake-oil fixes to problems that may not even exist, or if they do, won't be amenable to quick fixes and probably aren't even in the place these parasites are directing them to look.
I've benefitted from the former and suffered the disruption of the latter.
The first clue to decoding which is which is whether you already thought there was a problem that needed solving, based on available data, or whether they are promising to fix something that actually works pretty well. The second is whether they are looking at real issues that exist or selling a generic method. And the third is whether what they're saying is cosy for mangement and uncomfortable for the poor bloody infantry.
7 doesn't exist. Non-participants can feel smug, but from management there will only be resentment. I've had my card marked enough times to know this. After some ineffective or even disastrous, expensive project has ground to a halt the people who promoted it will have jumped ship, with plaudits still ringing etc etc.It probably will have faded out rather than being cancelled, so no one will associate them with the failure- except in postmortem examination, which almost never occurs.
The hold-outs and critics (muttering "I told you so") will be remembered for not being supportive, not being team players, or just generally resented.No one will be complimenting us on our foresight,experience or analytic thinking.
The "good" consultants don't cease trading. Because.....
...good in this context means being nimble enough to hop off the trend and onto the next one, ready to reap the rewards of promoting that pile. Education is even more full of these bas**rds than industry, as far as I can see.. Internal end external, and combinations thereof. And as well as wasting precious resources they fu** up real people's lives, because they get them tied up in the latest scheme, then when they have them committed they jump ship, as they always do. Leaving the starry eyed followers behind- often with their jobs gone and sometimes careers wrecked. And sometimes the stuff the consultants and advisors briefly promoted was actually good. Which still doesn't stop them jumping ship and letting it float onto the rocks when some new fad comes along.
More than once I've seen good teachers recruited from across the planet, setting up home here to work on some new trendy project from their home country that's been imported to here, only to find that the fad here (and there) has faded before they’ve even unpacked. (OK usually my sympathy is limited because it was always a load of b****ocks so serves then right- but then many of them were genuinely well intentioned, if slightly naive).
, which may involve things like car maintenance.
Of course, and I've heard many a request to borrow stuff for such purposes.
And I think in every single case the borrowers would be falling over themselves to say why.
As I "Can I borrow your pliers, I'm swapping the battery......etc"
Not just university.
This applies through public service; schools, hospitals, police stations. Pretty much everywhere.
Politicians equate " efficiency savings" with cutting administrators, not administration.So the academics, teachers,nurses, doctors, constables etc etc spend time filing reports, two finger typing slowly, when the should be doing a professional job.There will always be some admin, (work notes do need to be recorded) but it makes no sense to give front line staff backroom work if avoidable.
Shortly after the Local Authority implemented central purchasing for external teams we bought a laser printer. Instead of me sourcing and installing it we had to get it through the IT guy responsible for this. Who brought it along and insisted on setting it up. In those days they were bloody expensive too.
And he didn't have a clue how. I could see he was struggling to instal the toner cartridge. ( it wasn't difficult and I'd done a few). Next thing I knew there was black powder everywhere, the drum was sitting on the window ledge in the daylight and he was using the only vacuum cleaner in the building to try and get the black power out from inside the printer.
Amazingly it worked once he'd actually put it together* But the drum didn't last long- and they denied responsibility, of course.
*I think it was a Brother
More to the point; be alert for anomalies. If a marketing type wants pliers it ought to be an automatic response to wonder--and ask-- why?
Because there are only two acceptable answers, draw them or photograph them. No use of pliers for any other purpose could be expected.
So any other reason would be suspicious.
Yes. I had Gmail set up to send to Proton. Mostly trivial stuff like Masto notifications that went first to my Gmail addy. But they weren't arriving at my Proton account. Somewhere they were being silently dropped. I think that was Proton's fault - my fix was to switch the originating email address directly to my Proton one (effectively downgrading that one to disposable).
To an awful lot of people they are an integrated system. This long predates Outlook. Your calendar, email and address book are your organiser software. Whether they go together logically is questionable, even to me and I am a user, but to plenty of people like me they go together emotionally. They feel like they belong together. Which is why TB gained the Lightning add-on that then became integrated.. TL:DR answer. People consider these should go together. I consider these should go together.
As yet there's no native Thunderbird app for iphone. So I use Outlook.com on my iPhone with TB add-ons on my PC to sync my calendar (TB Sync with Provider for Exchange Active sync -it's beyond my skills to know why it needs two apps to do one job).I guess anyone who doesn't sync a calendar between a (Windows ?)PC and iPhone won't have this problem (do 'nux machines' versions of TB do this better? I should try to add mine to the mix and see).
Beyond that, though reluctant to keep using Microsoft’s Outlook.com for my phone calendar, it's all worked beautifully for me. (YMMV- version changes in TB can screw up Active sync and/or TBSync and it relies on the devs having the time and will to keep everything updated- always the problem with relying on FOSS)
I notice that the official line in training materials used to introduce the public to these LLM "AI"s always seem to have a preamble to the effect that they're already using AI, with examples like those.
Part of the sales pitch seems to be to broaden the definition of AI to the point that people accept it for the sake of the other "intelligent" software they use. In effect anything that integrates and analyses data is now an "AI". Apparently.
Only a slight drift off topic here.
Years ago I called out the RAC. My car was running very unevenly. It was obviously something electrical, because I could hear the interference on my radio- perfectly in time with the engine. As I accelerated it went up.
The RAC guy insisted it was something to do with the fuel lines, and kept saying "It's nothing to do with the radio" And ignoring me when I said, "I didn't say it was the radio, I said you can hear the interference on the radio". Instead he treated me like an idiot who thought the radio made the car run unevenly. And insisted on towing me to a garage.Where the following day they replaced an HT lead and charged me a fiver. Just two days of my life wasted. For something he could have tested in 10 seconds* and replaced in 10 seconds more.**
*I subsequently bought a little tester for a couple of quid. Never needed it, it never happened again.
**I complained and had an apology with my membership refunded "As a goodwill gesture".
A lot of very good work was done in the lead up to Y2K on important systems.And a lot of money, including ( maybe particularly) public money was wasted paying for obvious nonsense work. We had a bunch of stand alone (no internet) laptops that had to be tested, at our service's expense so paid for out of our teaching budget. This was mandatory, by the local authority. Machines that were used to type stuff up in WORD and then printed. Nothing else. The worst that could have happened? I suppose they may have refused to boot for some arcane reason, We'd have had to borrow a couple of machines to tide us over for a day or two while the IT guys remediated the issue at the start of the next term ( when, by the way we probably wouldn't need to use them much for at least another month or two). But that seemed unlikely to the point of ridicule. None the less we had to fork out for this.The machines were by no means system critical. But the mandate was all machines. No exclusion for non-critical aging laptops. No risk-assessment ahead of the work, which would have saved a bunch of public money.
Yes. For a friend who's a wheelchair user it's brilliant. And there's a lawn mower equivalent for outside too.
But for us- even though we have a similar bamboo floor, there's joining strips between hall and kitchen ( slightly different level) coat stands with spindly legs, rocking chair, all sorts of dumped bags and of course the Fox Terrier pup.
I know users behaviour can be a pain and seem like stupidity.
I supported IT for my team of specialist, brilliantly diagnostic teachers and I've had all of that and more. But they can't be blamed for all of it.
*"There's nothing on the screen". We assume they’re being literal:They assume we mean the stuff that ought to be there (Windows usually) and the strange words that might appear on the screen aren't anything they think should be there. If we ask "Are there any messages/Is there any writing on the screen?" and they still say "no" that is a different matter
*Turning off the screen rather than the actual PC. As I said already, and we've said on here many times. To many users the computer is just a TV that does stuff. And the box is where the work goes to. And you turn the TV off: Not some attached storage box
*"Yes it's plugged in" when it isn't. Less excusable, but to some, perhaps many, it's been plugged in and working for months or years, and the tangle of wires looks the same as it always did- so of course it must be plugged in still. The idea that it might have come loose at the back is probably not even considered, because most everyday appliances don't have a connection removable at both ends, let alone become unplugged ( and they just don't think of the few that do, assuming they do have and are aware of such).
*"The email isn't working" when the whole PC is off. Actually I can't excuse that one. There are limits.
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