Posts by Terry 6

With that above mentioned one-click unsubscribe.

I have spam filters that automatically junk certain (otherwise legitimate) senders. Because to unsubscribe from unwanted bulk emailing from their marketing dept you have to log-in to an account you didn't even know you had with a username and password that is a total mystery to you, perform a short but illustrative dance routine, sign an affidavit in blood that you no longer want the emails that you never wanted in the first place and sacrifice a chicken. And then wait for a period slightly less than the heat death of the universe for your "preferences" to take effect.

That makes no sense. There's all sorts of reasons for printing in colour. Because there are still all sorts of documents that need printing and need to be in colour. You don't use monochrome for a poster that needs to be eye-catching, or a menu, or an invitation, or a warning sign. etc........

Re: This feels like an own goal...

Since they seem to gravitate to buying shit from thieves by choice, this does actually seem to support the contention.

Re: never again

Yes, and I. Brother. Whenever there's a printer story it's a boost for Brother,because so many people applaud them.

Re: I actually wouldn't worry all that much about this

And if we consider how easily criminals can obtain kits to get inside car locks and nick the Pride and Joy it's likely that this knowedge will get shared pretty quickly- probably happening inside one of His Majesty's finishing schools as we speak.

Re: Problems and solutions not welcome

"Folks working in councils “sometimes” do not understand their own processes well"

More to the point "folks working in councils" and everywhere else do usually understand their own processes extremely well. Including what they need to do, how they do it and why it doesn't work as well as it should. What's broke and how to fix it.

But no one ever gives a shit what the peons say.

And certainly senior council officers are usually pretty clueless about what council frontline staff are doing. Let alone what would help/hinder getting the job done. And usually have an eye on what stuff looks like to the members ( councillors) and the public. So reality is less important than the semblance of efficiency and doing it right.

The stupidest example I can recollect was the parking voucher nonsense.

As council staff visiting schools we used to be able to place an exemption notice on our cars, and park nearby for free. Partly because this had been abused by some senior officers for parking all day round the Town Hall there were Complaints from local businesses. As in "Why should council staff get free parking when we have to pay"? Which is one of those things that seems sensible until you look at it.

But if you do look at it- employees of those businesses don't have to pay if they are on company business- the company should. And council staff (who are actually) on council business would get parking paid for by the council in the same way

The sensible answer would be to stop the abuse, then explain to the public that the exemption could only be used for official business- which had to be authorised . And that it made no sense for officers to be claiming money from the council to pay to the council.

Instead we had to use part of our budget to buy batches of parking vouchers, which diverted part of the money that the council had allocated to our service to do the job the council wanted us to do, into a part of the council (parking services) that it hadn't been allocated to, while diverting staff time away from our jobs to sort out buying, collecting and securing these vouchers. Then instead of spending seconds putting the exemption card in our car windows we had to constantly worry about having the right vouchers for the place we were visiting that session, select the correct voucher, carefully scribble off the date and time and make sure that the voucher was clearly displayed. Which took time. Particularly because if we made an error in our haste to get into the school and start a session we'd get a fine we had to pay ourselves. Those few minutes might not seem much, but across the borough it will have amounted to 5 or 10 hours a week cumulative teaching hours lost and a bit of extra disruption for the school,since class teachers couldn't just fit their work around our timings.

If the senior officers had understood what this meant and had been honest with the public an awful lot of public money wouldn't have been wasted.

Re: Anyone with a brain would provide a single, central, authoritative system

Exactly.It's mostly bills out/tax in, bins emptied,streets cleaning scheduled,staff hired,library membership/loans/book stock, school budgets, public health and so on. And some councils may do more, have more services than others, but there are a finite number of these. And the basic principles of how they function are pretty much the same from authority to authority- even potential variations are limied ( e.g. free garden waste collection, subscription garden waste collection or no garden waste collection).

Re: Go back to the future.

More to the point. Freedom of movement didn't. Border controls were still there and EU passport holders still had to present those passports. EU citizens were allowed equal status with UK citizens ( and vice versa), but the controls remained. Schengen style passport-less travel was only ever raised as a straw-man alongside all the other anti-EU lies. (Anyone remember that bus with the money for the NHS btw?)

Re: Problems and solutions not welcome

It's also factually incorrect. First there are all sorts of general purpose trucks, from big buggers with rows of enormous wheels to low loaders and things that are just glorified vans, as well as dumper trucks and so on.

Second there are all sorts of specialised vehicles that are basically trucks that are designed or modified for a specific job- like the ones that receive crops from harvesters in the fields etc. But in essence they're trucks. Even if they have a fancy name.

Re: Sounds like management all right

AS OP Simonlb points out. This is managers holding on to a process at the expense of solution. I guess all managers have to do that to some extent, to stop people freewheeling all over the place. But an even half-decent one knows when the rules needed to be broken.

That's just nonsense. Nothing I've said precluded using search to launch a programme.

But eliminating a menu does preclude finding a little used programme that has a strange or unmemorable name (which is soemthing that happens, however much you think it's an "edge case" though without any evidence I suspect).Despite your slightly strange idea that the search would locate programmes via metadata instead. A kludge if ever there was one. And if you've received the same response previously, then maybe it's time you reevaluated your assumptions.Starting with the one that clicking on a search box and typing a name is somehow so much better than clicking on a menu's icon and visually scanning for a programme group.If you live your life by the command line that makes perfectly good sense. Mst people don't. It's why we have a GUI. Otherwise we'd still be using MSDos ( or equivalent).

Using search is a remarkably stupid way to launch programmes unless the user has a small number of them that they use regularly, or they all have memorable names.

There are an awful lot of programmes out there. And a good many have stupid and unhelpful, let alone unmemorable names. So using search to find a programme that you use very rarely, and has a weird name is going to be a rather poor experience. I have "Freac", "TDmore", "Openshot", "Krita" and a whole bunch more. I group them in the Win10 Start menu according to function ( because I know how- MS made it pretty difficult) so if I want a DVD copying programmes, say, I know where to look. Yes a Win 3.x programme manager would be fine. Because Win 3.x's devs knew the value of grouping programmes according to function.

But until search can use some of that imaginary AI to find me the video editing software that I use twice a year- and offer me a choice if I have more than one- it's of very limited value.

Re: First hit is always free-ish.

But possibly also the one least likely to need sharing cross platform. I'd be very wary of any kind of collaborative work (e.g. training) that relied on a shared PowerPoint. But either way, I'd be surprised if there were many use cases.

Re: First hit is always free-ish.

These kinds of things always made me wonder what they want of a staff member. When I looked at changing jobs and the application process seemed unconnected with getting the right person I just didn't want to apply. i.e Did they want expertise or sheep*.

*In my experience....sheep.

Re: First hit is always free-ish.

And since I never needed anything more complicaed that a 2 or 3 page report that seems to be where I've stuck for a few decades. And I've never, to be fair, worked with anyone who did anything else, in my day job.

Re: Trying To Stem The Tide Of Defections To LibreOffice

2010 for me. And LO is my usual programme anyway. Ironically, it's mostly Publisher that keeps me on Office at all. As I've said on numerous occasions, it's Publisher that SOHO users need for the small posters, little invitations, displays, menus, adverts and so forth. Stuff too limited and/or ephemeral for a proper design and print job. So of course that's the element that MS don't include for the SOHO editions and want to eliminate. Fucking morons!

Re: Laminate everything

We would have been much better served with a big button on the lecturn that just put whatever was showing on the machine there up on one of the projectors and turned everything else off. Since, you know, that's what everyone actually did with the room anyway.

Of course. However, if you start with the Use cases and rank them in likelihood you quickly see what needs to be provided on a regular basis. It's essentially a risk assessment. i.e the risk of being unable to work out how to use the bloody thing.

Then you can have a laminated sheet with a flow chart for the more complex ones and a big red button for the rest.

Gregg's staff seem happy working there. I don't go in too often, because no need. But when I have the staff all seem surprisingly happy to be there.

Re: Coincidence...

The volunteer/hobbyist nature of FOSS does tend to lead to stuff that works, for most people most of the time. But if there's a glitch or a use case that doesn't interest the devs it will never get resolved.

Which in one sense is reasonable. OTOH when I've dome volunteer work I've done all the jobs needed, not just the fun ones. Yes, as a volunteer in the Community Library I worked with the public and sat on the committee- which I enjoyed. But I also tidied the shelves and cleaned the kitchen. Which is boring but has to be done

Re: Coincidence...

On what basis *should* that be much of a priority (ignoring all the twaddle about "year of Linux on the desktop" from a small number of strangely shouty people and lazy headline writers)?

Ironically, I sort of agree.

If 'Nux using/making devs were to simply say, "We're the OS for the IT pro and the uberGeek- get off our lawn" and just make stuff too complicated for anyone else, good luck to them.

But they don't. We see on here,all the time, a good range of commentards who'd like 'Nux distros to replace Microsoft.

But if they want distros that replace Windows then they have to create distros to replace Windows.Which to my mind means having both the out-of-the-box simplicity to open, run and store programmes and data how and where they need to, and the possibility of finding clear, consistent help to do stuff that's a bit more complex. Layers.

I'd be saddened if there wasn't user-land Linux for ordinary users who want to escape Microsoft. But I get irritated when the user-land distros lead users astray, getting then started, but then when they want to take a next step leaving them stranded. i.e. If you don't want to lead them on a full journey, don't take them out onto the moors.

Re: Coincidence...

It seems to me that Windows used to do things that ordinary people wanted it to do. Including letting them arrange programmes and files to suit their own workflow. At least within the capabilities of software at the time. Successive versions of Windows seem to be removing people's options- simplifying to a lowest common denominator only version, mixed up with what MS's marketing dept.happen to think is the right way..

'Nux however, and I've tried a few different versions, seems to do things that techies and (particularly) the devs want. Making things easier for ordinary users doesn't appear to be much of a priority.

Surely there can be something that sits between these two. That builds on decades of knowledge of what people use computers for and how they use them. That allows users to do everyday operations out of the box- but with standardised, easy to find, ways to do more complex stuff, for those who want to do something more. Not by becoming 'Nux command line experts, but by following instructions that let them achieve what they want. Zorin and Mint seem to work by giving the users a very narow safe path to follow, to do the most basic tasks, But no more.. I should have been able to click on the "Windows Network" icon that was sitting in the Zorin file manager and see the Windows shares that have that permission. And without spending several hours navigating through pages of unhelpful, irrelevant or contradictory advice. Followed by performing several command line incantations until eventually Zorin let me see my shares. I should have been able to navigate directly to those shares by seeing them in a GUI instead of entering a path ( let alone, as some of the advice was telling me, the IP address of the remote PC or creating a folder to "mount" the remote folder/s into). I should then have been able to select thumbnail view and inspected the images to locate the ones I needed.

Should because these are just ordinary, simple activities that a user ought to be able to do* without jumping through techie hoops. But as soon as users of Zorin or Mint depart from a very narrow path they're lost and sinking in The Great Grimpen Mire.

*When my younger daughter was a kid doing her homework she was once able to navigate from her Windows laptop to the main family Windows PC /Photos/ folder share and find the stuff she needed for her homework. It shouldn't be so much more difficult if the laptop is running 'Nux.

Re: Total confusion

Possibly not everything

Re: Thunderbird is the replacement for Outlook Express

When I was using Outlook for work I relied on its message sorting, which is way more sophisticated than TB's. And I do miss that. It's the only thing I do miss.

Re: "Microsoft has warned that those days will be coming to an end"

I agree. While I was locked into Outlook for my calendar ( and email) I was locked into Windows. Once TB had a decent (enough) calendar and sync (add-on) facility I was able to dump Outlook. And now I have a mix of 'nux and Windows machines. It's only Mrs 6 that keeps me on Windows for the main (desktop) PC. My laptop is on Zorin and my Lenovo Yoga convertible will get switched to Nux too at some point, too.