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Comment: Re:Antique website (Score 1) 230

by ray-auch (#43629141) Attached to: UK Benefits Claimants Must Use Windows XP, IE6

If they'd written HTML instead of IE6,

RTFA - site was developed for, and supports, a range of browsers, not just IE, not just Windows.

All the browser versions supported are ancient - but then so is the site. It's effectively a deprecated site only used for some benefits that are being phased out anyway - so why throw money away on updating it ?

Comment: Re:*facepalm* (Score 1) 445

by ray-auch (#42202519) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Do You Still Need a Phone At Your Desk?

When "internally" is a bit bigger and covers multiple sites you'll find that you typically don't get multiple POTS lines + a PABX into each site like in the old days, rather the VOIP is routed internally to one (or more, if you are lucky) exit points which do have multiple POTS lines. Same as most likely applies to internet connectivity.

Unless you happen to be at the exit site, every call internal or external (and all internet activity) is going over the site to site WAN.

I'm sure someone somewhere has decided this saves money, and it doesn't seem uncommon. Centralised monitoring and logging is also a reason though...

Comment: Re:*facepalm* (Score 1) 445

by ray-auch (#42202245) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Do You Still Need a Phone At Your Desk?

Why is it that just because a bunch of younger people have gotten used to a different way of doing things, that somehow makes the way older people do things evil, wrong, out of date, etc.? The office phone is not there so you can twit your friendface and blog the interwebs: It's there for business. It's there for all possible meanings of the phrase "your call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes." It's there because it won't shit itself when 500 people decide to visit a Youtube video about a cat. It has no dead zones, doesn't need you to take the battery out if you try to load too many apps, or the SD card wiggles loose, etc. It. Just. Works..

I haven't worked anywhere this century where the office phones have not been VOIP.

They are subject to exactly the same issues as the office internet connection, if that happens to be s**t then the phone dammed well does go down (or reverts to unusable quality) when 500 people hit youtube.

And no matter how much people twiddle with QOS parameters, if the underlying conncection is s**t then QOS just means "what quality of s**t gets assigned to phone".

The fact that the office phone has gone VOIP is what will, in the end, lead to its demise. It can be replaced by Lync / Skype / etc. at no loss of quality, and a great improvement in convenience - your phone follows you without having to login to another device for a start.

Comment: Re:Ban power users! (Score 2) 125

by ray-auch (#41570943) Attached to: Spreadsheet Blamed For UK Rail Bid Fiasco

Get all those stupid computers off people's desks! Things were much better when you had to go to a programmer in order to get software to do anything!

And (not incidentally) it would eliiminate all the productivity that's lost to Slashdot!

Your sarcasm is unwarranted. This is a nice story for us programmers because it's just the kind of anecdote that makes businesses seriously consider hiring more professional programmers. Nobody is suggesting you need custom software for everything.

And you've missed the point.

It is just as likely that the accounting model was incorrect rather than the implementation. If the spec is wrong (or unclear or incomplete) then you will get garbage out whatever tools you use - excel, c, c++, c#, haskell or real programming in Fortran (assembler if you must). If you don't test and cross check your outputs then you risk not spotting implementation mistakes - whatever tools you use.

Essentially, someone's built a wooden shed the wrong size and in the wrong place vs. the plan - and now they're in trouble for it. The submitter is saying "that's what happens when amateurs use wood and nails to make buildings, if they'd just hired us steelworkers to do the job properly using steel, it wouldn't have happened".

Comment: Re:You Tell Me If You're Too Old; What Is Your Goa (Score 1) 418

by ray-auch (#41566961) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Am I Too Old To Retrain?

43 and when I started work it was on Vaxen (real ones with washing machine sized disk packs) with Fortran and DCL. And some Coral 66, which no one will have heard of and is as old as it sounds. Some guys had to put up with a very poor text editor on the vax because their dept. wouldn't pay for the CPU cycles for the better text editor.
PCs, with diasywheel printers, were for secretarys, and only in the executive offices. Us engineers had to write up by hand and send it to the typing pool. Seriously.

Later at Uni it was IBM Mainframe and then HPUX boxes, with X and a mouse, and Emacs (18 I think). Modern luxuries then.
PCs were DOS and not useful for real work. [I do not regret never learning 16bit segmented memory programming - I learned about it, that was enough].

Thinking about it, yeah five years later and all that was long gone. MCC or SLS or the new Slackware which actually had a fancy installer, and you were good for real work on a PC.

Dude, you missed out.

Comment: Re:Been using the RP over 3 months now... (Score 1) 436

by ray-auch (#41478917) Attached to: Even Windows 8 Users Prefer Windows 7

-Having to move the mouse all the way into the last 1 or 2 pixels of the corner to active the Start screen, and worse yet activate the charms bar is very annoying. I would rather there be a visible button to click for each corner, yes a return of the Start button would not be out of the question so long as it just brough up the Start screen and not a menu.

Relatively easily fixed. I've done it - I found myself moving mouse to start button area on auto pilot and launching IE so often...

Step 1:

Create a file startscreen.vbs (yeah I know, powershell nicer but too slow to start up). Contents:

set oShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
oShell.SendKeys("^{ESC}")
set oShell = Nothing

Step 2:

Create a shortcut to startscreen.vbs on the desktop.

Step 3:

Open properties on the shortcut and change the target property to:

C:\Windows\System32\wscript.exe C:\Users\[[my user name]]\Desktop\startscreen.vbs

Change the drive location & path to script as required.

Step 4:

Still in shortcut properties, change the icon. %SystemRoot%\System32\imageres.dll has a windows icon in it. Close properties.

Step 5:

Right click the shortcut and "pin to taskbar". Move it to left hand side. Job done.

Comment: Re:This Poll is Dumb (Score 4, Informative) 436

by ray-auch (#41478099) Attached to: Even Windows 8 Users Prefer Windows 7

> Could you please list ONE big improvement?

Well from my experience so far (only since RTM):

- I thought I'd miss aero / glass - but the new flat window chrome etc. has grown on me very quickly, clean and less distracting (takes you back to twm days).
- Some bits of the UI and standard dialogs are much improved - new task manager is a _massive_ improvement for one
- Explorer has an "up" button again. One of the biggest issues I had with Win7 sorted (no, "back" is _not_ the ****** same...)
- It's faster and more responsive. Noticeably. The new start / metro screen even comes up faster than the old start menu on same hardware (and with same programs installed - in-place upgrade).

But biggest plus point for me so far is Hyper-V. Full ring -1 / bare-metal hypervisor performance on your local machine without the stress of (lack of) driver support for server 2008 on laptop / desktop hardware. It's a massive massive improvement on virtual PC or even VMWare workstation (now consigned to trash).
[ and yes I know I can do that with Linux for free with Xen / KVM, but Linux isn't an install choice for the works machine, and we're comparing windows with windows here ].

Not so good: Metro apps, charms bar etc. - meh. But I can see some of it might be nice on a tablet if I had one.

Comment: Re:a priori (Score 4, Informative) 164

by ray-auch (#39449173) Attached to: Megaupload Host Wants Out

It's definitely happened before with physical goods in the UK, not sure about US, probbaly wouldn't be much different. One take on it is here (make sure you read down to the second half):

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1222777/The-raid-rocked-Met-Why-gun-drugs-op-6-717-safety-deposit-boxes-cost-taxpayer-fortune.html

Essentially a bunch of innocent people had to spend a lot of money on legal action to get their stuff back. Not all succeeded. Of those that did, mostly we don't know because to get their compensation they had to sign gag orders - can't have people talking about the law f**king up now can we....

Search warrant stated 90% of use was illegal... later estimates reckon 10% or less.

Comment: Re:Don't go there... (Score 1) 671

by ray-auch (#39242471) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Using Company Laptop For Personal Use

> Where is this accepted?

Every company car I've had and everyone I know who's had one.

The minute you are given a company car "to take home" [see post above], as opposed to driving to/from work in your own car and picking up a pool car from work for business miles, then you are on personal use, by definition.

Here, you would also be immediately on the hook for tax based on list price of the car, precisely because you've been given a car for personal use.

Saying "take this car home, here's the few thousand tax bill because we've given you a car for personal use", and then saying "you are not allowed to use the car for anything personal" simply makes no logical sense.

Comment: Re:Two mostly similar choices (Score 4, Funny) 467

by ray-auch (#39013809) Attached to: Dealing With an Overly-Restrictive Intellectual Property Policy?

At least in academia most places let you separate your work on the side. If you want to use your work on the side as part of your research work well that's where you get into your situation.

I wouldn't trust that to be the case everywhere - my recollection is of research grants / studentships coming with "everything you do while you get this grant belongs to...". Plus you had to co-operate in patenting it if they wanted and sign over the patents. etc.

That was a lot of years ago though - maybe it's all more enlightened, less money focused and less bureaucratic in academia these days...

Comment: Re:Dangerous of course (Score 1) 222

by ray-auch (#38823439) Attached to: MIT Media Lab Rolls Out Folding Car

More likely this one: http://www.southwalesguardian.co.uk/archive/2005/02/09/Ammanford+Archive/4258471.Bus_tragedy_parents___life_sentence_/

Not quite how I recalled, coach and a truck, and the crushed car was noticed quickly. Although various reports have the truck driver initially believing he'd been hit directly by the coach, not realising there was a car crushed in between. A Galaxy is around 16ft long, normally.

Amazingly, two people in the car survived. I suspect they and the front of the car were pushed under the truck in front, while the back pf the car was crushed. The kids in the back all died.

Comment: Re:I'd start by shooting the Captain.... (Score 5, Informative) 416

by ray-auch (#38760292) Attached to: What To Do With a 1,000 Foot Wrecked Cruise Ship?

Wrong. And not beacuse I'm american - I'm not.

Sully could have left the cockpit with his lifejacket and got out the front door as fast as he could before the plane sank (which it could have).
He actually supervised the evacuation and went back through the length of the plane to check everyone was off. Twice. Before he got out.

There's captains and there's real captains. Hero ? I think he would jsut say he was doing his job.

The costa captain, however, was just doing a runner. Having spectacularly failed to do his job.

Stay the curse.

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