Posts by Sir Sham Cad

BOFH: If the meatbags can't agree on aircon, AI will decide for them

Re: The only real solution is...

I work in a place that is a permanent temporary building which is Modular so each floor is three separate modules with the only chance for air to mix between them is when someone opens the fire door to the stairwell.

The HVAC is set to maintain a pre set (but changeable) *average* temperature across the three floors. Not the same temp on each of the floors, just to maintain the average.

It works as well as you can expect.

The building was designed by and for a now defunct .gov.uk Department who never used it because they realised they needed a bigger boat.

NHS staff resist using Palantir software

Re: Exactly why we did the Opt-Out form

Back in 2002 one of the first things I did was make our clunky, internally built, EPR system, securely available for local Primary Care (GPs) so they could access their patient's records from our Secondary/Tertiary work. Apparently and according to the emails and letters we received, it was a massive time saver for the GPs and their Admin team as well as the patients.

It's 2026 and I can confidently say that, across the wider patch that I'm involved with, we're, er, getting there with the joined up data sharing between Primary and Secondary/Tertiary Care orgs.

We can all share data but, to paraphrase Eric Morecambe, we're sharing all the right (patient) notes just not to all the right people.

Re: Wouldn't matter who it was

Wow. I'm not sure how much more wrong you could be.

When we were going through the NPfIT (later changed to Connecting for Health because of the need to emphasise this was a Healthcare thing not an IT thing) almost every supplier pulled out including Fujitsu. BT were fronting Cerner (now Oracle HealthCare and soon to be not-Oracle) and the other was Epic.

There was no Union involvement or chatter. The issue was the .GOV procurement process which was fragmented and too open. One company created the Spine and all other bidders with their own proprietary and often non-existent EPR systems needed to talk to the National Spine for authentication and patient ID (not always successful). That was fatal for a lot of the bidders. This is why NPfIT/CfH was so delayed.

The whole point of it all was to improve Patient outcomes and reporting/accountability and it has worked very well compared to the pre-digital times.

By the way, the NHS is run for our patients. Not everyone agrees on how best to do that but I can promise you that it is and every day I see people run off their feet, pulling double shifts (24 hours) to ensure Safe Staffing levels. I see even IT people working all night in event of a P1 outage and then coming in the next morning because it matters. Because our clinicians matter because their care for our patients is everything.

I dunno if this was the rise to your bait that you were looking for but yep, I'm gonna bite.

BOFH: Are you ready to raise our expense account limits now?

Re: Did somebody say #1974Cortina$$?

It's Friday. Get your laughing ghia around one of these --->

HP stuffs OpenAI LLM into new laptops in bid for small biz

Re: As if we needed another reason...

Yep. We and other partner orgs either get the manufacturer to ship it with our base Gold image or we do it when it gets to us. We must have control over what's on our kit.

Enterprise PCs are unreliable, unpatched, and unloved compared to Macs

Re: Edge

"Chrome is often being removed leaving Edge as the only option."

Yes we do this but, because Healthcare Applications tend to get updated once every Solar Cycle, a lot of sites are in I.E. Compatibility mode with all the lovely security "features" that come with it.

PwC will say goodbye to staff who aren't convinced about AI

Re: A completely rational stance for a CEO

From experience with some ex-Accenture people what will happen is those humans who are good at their job but get fired due to AI aversion but have good relationships with a portfolio of clients will form another company, let's call it CwP, and nick a lot of the customer base who are not wanting to trust ClippyPilot with their super important, legally required and deeply informative of their own investor happiness documentation.

Nose. Face. Spite.

Royal Navy races to arm ships against drone threat

Re: With AI now there should be no excuse for wargaming ommisions.

Firstly, have you seen the movie?

Secondly "Hey Grok, devise me a defence strategy in case a hostile nation decides to throw thousands of drones at us last weekend"

Server crashes traced to one very literal knee-jerk reaction

Re: Zebra

I once (briefly, thank FSM) worked for a small, independent finance software company. The "IT Room" was a bunker in the basement full of boxes of old, knackered bits and cards. And the production server which was a tower unit. Situated next to the door. The power button sticking out nicely as if to say "press me!" It was not covered. I managed to hit that power button accidentally, downing the whole office, twice.

Despite my requests to be allowed to cover the button it remained prone when I departed several months later. Because they, er, didn't want me to make any changes to the server.

Microsoft boffins figured out how to break LLM safety guardrails with one simple prompt

Re: the i in LLM is for intelligence

Predictably they did and, yes, I used the line.

Re: the i in LLM is for intelligence

I'm about to go into a meeting ^W sales pitch with M$FT and I'm definitely stealing that line when they try to tell us all we need is shitloads of Cop Ilot.

Capita pension portal 'fiasco' forces Cabinet Office into damage control

Re: Quelle Surprise

When they change the way .gov.uk contracts for services are Tendered.

House of Lords votes to ban social media for Brits under 16

Re: We would be able to play Snake or Quake in peace

I know you were using the Joke icon but, seriously, that sounds great to this old git!

Majority of CEOs report zero payoff from AI splurge

Re: GOOD

Slightly over a decade ago we were implementing a new Electronic Patient Record as part of the less than well managed NPfIT. All staff, regardless of role, were required to take a training session and pass a web-based test.

One right-click-view source later I noticed that the code for the options actually specified which of the options was "correct" when the test form was submitted. Yes I did tell the entire of my training cohort.

Of course it was such a well thought out and not at all rushed job that one of the required fields in the training environment for a Hospital EPR was "Species"

Capita tells civil servants to wait for chatbots to fix pension portal woes

Re: What the hell

The part of TFA that I picked up as the main take-away was, basically, this:

!) Capita lost the contract because they were, er, Capita, and were replaced by MyCSP

2) MyCSP contract ended and a Public Procurement Exercise to find a new provider was undertaken.

3) Fuck it, Capita it is again, then. They've pinky sworn to be better this time.

The reason the same bastards keep getting these huge contracts is because they know how to complete a Public Procurement Tender rather than actually provide the service.

European Space Agency hit again as cybercrims claim 200 GB data up for sale

Re: honest question

In my experience it's a couple of factors and this is deliberately simplified:

1) Beancounters and bosses don't see the financial benefit of taking the time and spending money on something that, at best, you won't notice the benefit of as opposed to shipping code or spending the money on something they can see.

2) The bad guys have to get lucky once, and they are trawling with a large net, and we have to get lucky all the time. Sheer weight of numbers means someone is going to run out of luck very frequently

3) Yes, I know this is one more than a couple but if it works in the pub... people who actually, properly understand infrastructure-to--code security are like hen's teeth and most places don't have 'em so the rest of us are following Principles and doing Audits and Learning Lessons.

The most durable tech is boring, old, and everywhere

Re: In the raw

Oh god, FORTRAN is a good shout. Evil like that never dies.

Uber and Lyft rolling Baidu robotaxis into London next year

Re: bringing another safe and reliable travel option to Londoners

The Docklands Large Rollercoaster is always out. Usually "of service"

NASA tries savin' MAVEN as Mars probe loses contact with Earth

Or it's been on the Pan-Galactic Gargle Blasters whilst daddy wasn't watching

UK.gov doubles hardware spending framework to £24B in 6 months

Great in theory - hard to access

Two problems really:

1) When we Procure via one of these Frameworks we don't get access to fixed pricing so any savings are either impossible to quantify or non-existent.

2) We don't have the money in the system to buy in anything like the theoretical value of the Framework. We're looking at this locally rather than nationally with more modest but realistic value ceiling.

Re: How much of that £24 billion ...

Funnily enough, during the last Government, the husband of a sitting Cabinet member set up an IT Asset disposal company, fronted it with a separate company with an NHS-friendly face (we'll give you lots of money back or donate to your Hospital Charity if you give us exclusive access to all your stuff) and was aggressively selling those services to NHS vertical.

We all told them to fuck off once we spotted the scam and corruption.

JLR: Payroll data stolen in cybercrime that shook UK economy

outsourcing critical cybersecurity functions

To people who don't give a shit as they have no personal skin in the game.

It works the same if you replace the word "cybersecurity" with any other "business" function.

Welcome to America - now show us your last five years of social media posts

Oh well.

I called DJT a Cockwomble on Twitter a few years ago so that's me banned from Leftpondia forever.

In the immortal words of Hercule Poirot: Dommage.

UK tech minister vows more whole-government megadeals after £9B Microsoft pact

Lack of competition problem

See, if you take it and spend £9B on making it Policy then it ceases to be a Problem. Easy, this Government game.

Apply here to win a Microsoft Ugly Sweater. It's uglier than ever

Microsoft Vs Internet

Users: We want to text chat over the Interwebs, how can we do it?

mIRC: Choose me!

pIRCh: or use me!

ircii: Terminal based? choose me!

Microsoft: What can we do to get into this market? I know! let's create Comic Sans!

Palantir plots NHS skills drive for its controversial data platform

Re: Meanwhile...

The cutbacks are nothing to do with "AI" in the sense of a general GenAI CoClaudeGrokPilotGPT style LLM replacing desk jobs, it's because there's a lot of duplication of effort across different, non-clinical organisations (ICB's, NHS England, DHSC) which, aside from the duplicated costs in Pay, causes operational inefficiencies.

That said, everyone I deal with across the local ICB and NHSE are highly supportive, experienced, skilled, knowledgeable people who do not deserve to lose their jobs.

NHS left with sick PCs as suppliers resist Windows 11 treatment

Re: LTSC

The irony is that, even if they are on the LTSC they show up as Windows 10 on an audit and count against us for DSPT compliance. Network segmentation for these devices is the best way to manage this problem (some of these devices can't even be patched, ever, because that would constitute the Registered Device being changed and, therefore, fall out of Registration compliance and cease to be a certified Medical Device).

Our fantastic Medical Devices team do work well with us and it drives them mad too.

Most medical device companies typically operate on a 5-10 year refresh cycle

We have this situation at the moment. Some of the manufacturers do have devices/software that can run on Windows 11/Server 2022 but they can't sell them to us/upgrade existing software until MHRA issue a Medical Device Registration and that can take years.

This is one of the reasons NHS England negotiated a roughly 50% discount with Microsoft on the Win 10 ESU at the last minute having previously said they wouldn't (wanting, instead, to push us to upgrade rather than be lazy and throw taxpayer's money at the ESU)

Healthcare lags in Windows 11 upgrades – and lives may depend on it

There are some bits of kit, especially Certified Medical Devices, that you literally cannot patch because then the OS will not be the one that was accredited so the device falls out of Certification and can't be used.

Yes, this does count against us for the out of date OS count

Techie ended vendor/client blame game by treating managers like toddlers

Re: Who to blame?

This is even more fun when there are two Vendors involved in the system. It's basically that meme of the three Spider-Man cartoon characters all pointing at each other.

Vendor 1: It's definitely an issue with Customer network

Vendor 2: No, we checked that, it's definitely an issue with Vendor 1 widget

Customer: It's definitely one of you two. Or if it isn't it's IT's fault

Me: Girls, girls, you're both ugly. Here's some evidence I gathered earlier (wireshark, netflow etc...) now let me know if I can help you with anything else.

Microsoft crams Copilot AI directly into Excel cells

Re: Creative

At just north on 4m USD to roll this out across our user base (yep, I know not everyone needs it but they all apparently need it because AI) I doubt shareholders (in my case the taxpaying public) would like the numbers regardless of how much Steroid Clippy hallucinates them.

Voice, vision, pen: Oh dear. Windows boss says Microsoft is again reshaping OS

Just have done with the charade

Just call the bloody thing CopilotOS and save the marketing money.

Sorry but Keyboard/Mouse interface aren't going to be replaced by "I'm sorry, I didn't catch that" because life isn't an R&D lab. My work lappy is a hybrid touch screen laptop and very heavy "tablet" if you do the screen 360 flip thing. My previous laptop was the same. I have remembered that I could do touch things on the screen fewer times than I can count on my toes and I have the regulation 10 of those.

Windows RT is not a thing (and never really was) for a very good reason. As one commentard has already mentioned "those that cannot remember the past..." well they'll actually probably purchase a 3 year ESA and tell the C-suite that "We got that AI you wanted"

"Recovery" can't come soon enough.

Hyundai: Want cyber-secure car locks? That'll be £49, please

Re: Game Boy-like gizmo worth around £20,000

It'll probably run DOOM. Then again so could the car. Oooh. Idea for the next OTA software update!

Exif marks the spot as fresh version of PNG image standard arrives

Re: Re:MNG issues

Don't get me started on .webp

*shakes fist at cloud, mostly google cloud*

Re: What the web needs

Is obviously a merciless file format pronounced "ming"

There's no international protocol on what to do if an asteroid strikes Earth

Didn't we solve this in 1979?

All we need is a triangular spaceship that shoots little white dots!

Pew pew pew!

Microsoft's plain text editor gets fancy as Notepad gains formatting options

Re: Wordpad

There's a perfectly cromulent word for this and it is often used on this esteemed site. They (arseholes) have Enshittified Notepad which I have used to turn "Documentation" into CnV Config.

Copilot Enshittification incoming.

Notepad++ FTW I still hope.

Cook'd: Judge says Apple lied to court in Epic case, asks Feds to mull criminal charges

Re: Wow.

Hear Here, as the Audiologist's sign says.

Palantir suggests 'common operating system' for UK govt data

"optimize procurement, among other things."

I can assure you that anything that centralises Procurement into a one-size-fits-all Blob/Procurement IT system will do exactly the opposite of optimisation.

Currently going through end of financial year contract renewals for critical IT Infrastructure licencing and I can tell you this is why Daddy drinks.

Patch procrastination leaves 50,000 Fortinet firewalls vulnerable to zero-day

"internet-connected toothbrushes " should have been the end of that story right there.

Best thing I have with "Fortinet" written on it is a keyring bottle opener I got from an InfoSec trade show years ago.

Edited to add the bottle opener is not internet-connected.

Dude, you got a Dell, period! RIP XPS, Inspiron, Latitude, Precision

Dell Pro Max Premium sure is easier to say than XPS. Well done Marketing.

Also, thanks Dell, just as we're trying to do a multi-organisation hardware convergence by comparing catalogues.

Eight things that should not have happened last year, but did

Technically, Crowdstrike didn't have an outage, they just caused everybody who used their product to have an outage. Totally different, you see, as anyone responsible for their uptime 9's will tell you.

NHS major 'cyber incident' forces hospitals to use pen and paper

Re: Not the first

To answer your first question: Yes.

There's a lot of work across local Integrated Care Boards (the new CCGs it seems) to try to do more joined up thinking. However, each organisation (GP, Local Hospital Trust, wider Hospitals Group) are individually funded and run with different levels of Technical Maturity/Technical Debt and different clinical priorities which directs or diverts funding/attention. I can say that it's getting a lot better with, for example, NHS England, paying for Windows E5 licences so everyone can at least get MDE on the desktop and server environment and provide assistance from the NCSOC. Everything else is the wild west.

Re: while scheduled procedures are canceled

With respect, no they wouldn't. The issue is simply that, when the IT system(s) stop working, Business Continuity (going back to pen and paper in many cases) slows down the process back to those Matronic levels which means not as many patients can be seen, tested and treated in any given timeframe so the backlog, usually in Critical Care settings, increases and can get to a point where the A&E doors are closed. Cancelling non-urgent care, as bad as it is, protects the Critical Care services from getting so clogged up they need to shut.

China starts building world's largest fully steerable radio telescope

Re: the reasoning.

Biggest! More Big than theirs!

The workplace has become a surveillance state

Re: Motion detection

When I'm in the office I have the same issue but the motion sensors are hidden behind pipework and climate control units so actually have a limited field of view. This means often needing to stand up and wave like crazy (not in a calm, Jedi, 'credits will do fine' way, like 'help, someone's drowning over here' kind of way). I'm assuming this is my employer just checking that we're still alive. No need to pay the 'leccy bill if the employees are dead, I suppose.

Meeting about meetings

I thought that particular nonsense was bad before the Covid Times but now every meeting is a virtual one it's so much worse. I swear people now think everyone else is just a floating head on a video screen and don't exist outside of that context.

Another 'major cyber incident' at a UK hospital, outpatients asked to stay away

Re: paper records

Aside from anything else, there are IT systems required for tracking paper records. Yep. I know.

Almost 20 years ago I remember seeing paper records strewn all over the place as a building that was sold off to be turned into flats was just abandoned. I was just there to pull out the network kit. I hope to FSM that those records had been digitised first but I have my doubts.

Re: Whether or not ...

We know that Healthcare is being targeted by Nation States. The main issues in critical infrastructure/services is that you don't get downtime to patch the huge IT infrastructure estate (even though NHS England require resolution in 14 days or SIRO risk signoff) so can remain vulnerable for months.

Anything InfoSec: they need to get lucky once, we need to get lucky all the time.

A year after Broadcom took control of VMware, it's in the box seat

From information I've gathered from similar organisations, the Broadcom licensing change has increased costs up to 1300%, mostly around orgs with smaller VMWare footprint than my lot. The thing is that it's those smaller footprint orgs that are being gouged that are more easily able to migrate so Broadcom may be only getting a very short term boost here.