Posts by Peter Galbavy 350 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Feb 2010
Local councils can be seen exactly as businesses. Their Chief Execs are the landed gentry or factory owners and their raw materials are the electorate, the work done my employer labour or outsourced to the cheapest or most convenient friend, and they make a lovely return from their estates for their personal aggrandisement. The forecasts and other financials are worked out much the same on a spreadsheet as for any other business.
Apart from the one mention of the Microsoft experiment, very little about heat / energy recovery - and I assume that's on the floor, rather than the lack of coverage in the article.
Some people are missing opportunities to innovate. Oh, no, wait... let someone else innovate and then steal it! Better,
They are also very much into sharp practices themselves; A friend ordered one of thier products which was not delivered "next day" as promised, but weeks later. In the meantime the credit company they farm this stuff out to - if you choose that way to pay - refused to acknowledge the late delivery and the rejection of the goods and threatened (in very bad faith) a bad credit rating if she didn't pay the due installments. Since then the unopend product was eventually picked up but Emma washed their hands of the credit issues and now the whole thing is detined for the Ombudsman as Emma blames the credit company, credit company blames Emma and meanwhile my friend is both out of pocket and has "bad creditor" ticked for refusing to pay further installments for a product never accepted.
Yes, GDPR and other legislation is *supposed* to help here, but it hasn't yet.
Simple advice: avoid this lot like the plague that they are.
I am assuming this is the sinking floor in Hendon Lane.
The original Demon offices where a converted church hall (42 Hendon Lane) and the large space at the back of the building was slowly transformed into a machine room with aircon etc.
What no-one bothered taking into consideration was the effect that the weight of literal tons of rack mount equipment would have on the old suspended timber floor. It slowly, and then not-so slowly sank. We first noticed when someone asked if the skirting board was badly fitted and was it supposed to be so high off the floor?
Hmm.
I had by then moved on from cable-monkey work (these hand almost single-handedly wired all the rack-mount modems and pop serial cables up to and including the 640 Energis lines) to more esoteric desk bound labour and only was involved in the recovery at second hand. It was a fun time - everything about it was a fun time.
There are many stories. I wonder if my demon.announce posts are still around - we were quite honest about failures in those days.
As someone who was one of the initial tenner-a-month group and went to work for Demon Systems in 1994 - Demon Internet didn't have the budget quite yet - I moved into a world of crazyness and long hours and fun. I am not sure any other organisation, in any business sector, had the net growth rate that Demon did for those first few years - 15% *net* new subscribers per month was typical. This meant innovation, expansion, and a stubborness that explempified Cliff in so many ways. He knew how to get the most out of his staff and make us feel it was a privilege, which did wear this something but with hindsight was a wonderful time.
I ended up thinking about UUCP in the shower this morning, probably because of this sad news milling around my mind over the weekend, and thinking that the kids today never had it this good :-)
On a personal level he helped me buy my house and pretty much forced me to pass my driving test and I will be eternally grateful to him for both and so much more.
Use an AI guessing to train another AI and lie about "evidence". Nice. Just what some politicians need.
Event logs are very often used as evidence - not necessarily the legal kind - to establish the sequence and timing of events, who/what was involved and responsible. Tampering with those event logs is just like any other record tampering, even if it's tied up in a nice red bow and a gift tag that says "With Love from your favourite AI".
THen the side note about logs being used to train AIs is in itself suspicious. If you use fake records to train an AI then all you are doing is reinforcing whatever bias you decided was important to you.
Is there a rotting fish icon?
"I fail to understand the fucketty fuck why any outfit running charge points uses anything else than a simple contactless debit/credit card for the primary means of payment."
It's simples. All the charging network operators are focusing entirely on market valuation and floatation and M&A and not on providing a service anyone wants to use. Apps allow customer acquisitions and the MBAs know that numbers of customers downloading your app is a great metric for the prospectus.
I thought I had stumbled into a BBC comments thread on electric cars for a minute. The rampant, deliberate and mischievous trolling by "gammons" is amazing.
I've been driving electric for about 6 1/2 years now, first an Outlander PHEV, then a Leaf (both on lease) and now a e-Niro (on PCP). Yes, they are expensive - but then all new cars are expensive and what is only just starting is a proper used car market. This is mostly old style Leafs and some others, but it is there. Given the number of "marque" cars in my part of the world, North London, a typical EV is not expensive at all.
The report in this article seems to be balanced, sensible and quite broad and align with my experiences overall. I am lucky enough to have my own driveway, yes, and I rarely use public chargers. There will have to be a shift in availability, pricing and capacity if electric is going to be widely and positively adpoted. At the moment the planning rules allow developers to install "passive" EV charging in new build houses and retail etc. (this basically means the ducting for someone to later actually install cabling and equipment) which is pretty useless as it's a pure tickbox exercise. More "active" installs, required for planning approval, still don't have any other conditions attached. They don't need to be made available, turned on or maintained after build - like a recent tennis club thing near me - a row of chargers for their members, but they are not turned on.
Currently (see what I did there?) EVs work for a portion of the driving population and this report does, very politely, stick the boot in to remind governement and local councils that they will actually have to take positive action if they want things to progress.
"So, what recently aroused your suspicions around spyware?"
"Well, they pulled their app, DJI Fly, from the curated Google Play Store (while leaving others there and updatng) ande failed to explain why - instead requiring users to side-load the app via their own website and then requiring updates from iside the app."
Hopefully the CMA will see through the nonsensical veneer, especially from Amazon, about "taking action when we are alerted" as it is effectively impossible to report both fake (or seemingly fake) reviews or sellers contacting reviewers who give honest but negative reviews and offering incentives to remove or edit them. Last time I tried I found a specific email address (for Amazon UK) that in itself was well hidden and then returned "this mailbox is not monitored".
"The main reason for coming to this conclusion is that there is no longer a technically equivalent specification in the public domain, as it was the case originally,"
Uh huh. Embrace, extend, extinguish. "We invited the public standard in for dinner. We had the public standard FOR dinner. Chianti, anyone?"
Standards bodies are orders of magnitude more experienced at weasel words than humans and so what did we expect?
Of course only 0.01% of things were reported as counterfeit. Amazon (UK in this case) make it close to impossible to report listings or sellers as "dodgy". Unless you buy something - fulfilled by Amazon or Prime - there is no active way to report anything. I have tried. I found obscure email addresses in notional policy and help pages that can only be found via external search engines and then the email bounces with a "the address you sent email to is not monitored".
I have one seller who I posted a 1 star review for contacting me via direct email offering me money to remove my review. I tried really hartd to report this. No dice.
Amazon is a world bestriding ostrich.
Slowly, far too slowly. is a responsibililty creeping up on the mainstream software industry to produce functional and error free products. It's only going to be with more legal precendents being set - and awards that have any significance - that attitudes will change and the "MVP" approach may start to wither and finally be consigned to the grave it doesn't even deserve.
I love my Nuraphones - expensive but excellent tech - and I bought the less good Nuraloops just because they seemed a good idea - great audio, crap design, maintainability and controls sadly. Both measure your hearing and build a profile and paired with a good set of drivers and their haptic "immersion" bass they deliver. They have an ambient mode too and I have mentioned to folks before they would make a cute alternative to hearing aids for some, but...
If they are able to recover records from backups then that sort of puts paid to the whole deleting-illegally-retained-personal-data stuff doesn't it? I mean, you sue the police to delete your records when you are cleared of a crime, order is granted but then even deleting the live record just removes the current version, no? Perhaps the background here is an effort to allow backups to be routinely restored in the future?
I used to pay them money, but they kept offering a new tier of service about once a year and, silently, donwgrading the performance of the lower tiers - not just the extra storage or features of the new ones. Number of API calls per second / hour / day etc. and their support just pretended that there was no changes. I stopped paying them money and instead just use an S3 bucket (yes, protected) with rclone for out-of-home backup with another on Backblaze. The cost works out a little higher but both of those publish their performance commitments.
Served my inter year at Unisys in Uxbridge a couple of years after the Sperry/Burroughs merger and they rebadged a variety of UNIX mini systems. One was originally called the Arete (accents optional) and as I didn't speak any French the staffers had to explain to me why the source company had to change the model name once they started selling internationally. Memory is a little hazy.
Ah, found a reference to "Arete Systems Corp" from that era: https://www.cbronline.com/news/unix_banns_plexus_arete_agree_a_merger/
My understanding, and information is a little vague, is that Serco are involved the the NHS Trace and Trace *system* (the one with the virtual call centres that have people doing nothing) but that the app is NHSX and is wholly an internal project and doesn't involved either Serco or Deloitte or Crapita..
Would welcome reliable references either way.
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