Replace with AI? Hahahahahahahahahahahaa
I presume they haven't actually *used* any of the stuff around at the moment masquerading as AI.
474 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Apr 2010
Indeed yes. And wondered at the time (and still do, just less regularly) who the hell thought squishing the entire set of functions of the computer down into one button bottom left was a good idea in the first place.
Perhaps it wasn't and it was just "another thing we can try to protect by patents". And the computer-user world lapped it up.
... overprovision the room, beds and staff a bit, and in particular let the staff have some downtime, R&R, look after their own health and not feel like they're running off their tits for 14 hour shifts.
I'm absolutely convinced the cost will be about the same, or perhaps in the (very big) round, less, and the department will be able to cope with the peaks when they come just by having slack.
The obsession with JIT is pretty flaky in industry. It doesn't need to be the case in things like healthcare.
I agree with you entirely. A fact I was introduced to a couple of years ago, and have had cause to check again recently that I wasn't horribly mistaken is that the NHS costs, from the public purse, per person, LESS than healthcare in the US.
Again: from public funds in both cases. That's before any insurance, deductibles, bankrupcies, gofundmes and ofc loads of people actually not being entitled to treatment in the states.
They're paying more per capita in taxation for healthcare than we are, and ours is ostensibly "free" at the point of use.
If one sits and thinks about that and what it means is going on, it's utterly mind boggling.
Or brand spanking new. I used to deal with early Cisco callmanager stuff that couldn't do a lot of what long discontinued PABXs could handle fine.
It was like some dudes had just hacked together some code that was a bit like a PABX, bigged it up massively, and then sold the company to Cisco to handle the fallout.
Also time critical shizz on windows 2000? Do me a favour!
"Far be it from us to wonder exactly what sort of software stack requires such power in order to populate that 84-inch screen"
And of course you'll still occasionally spot animated stuff running at 2fps, cos the software devs have been racing hard to keep up squandering all that hardware horsepower for the past 30 years!
I think quite the opposite.
Yes they've perhaps made some bad choices, and when they discovered and decided to move on from those bad choices, they didn't move quick enough to remove anything that still leans on the bad choices (the well documented power inadequacies, the "DC" made out of storage containers)
However if I have a service that is basically one set of stuff on one server, I always run the risk that if it breaks, gets nicked, goes on fire, or a plane crashes into the building, it's gone. 100% gone. Not that it might come back or is backed up somewhere by someone who's not me, or will get restored in good time. That it's gone.
That OVH is doing all this crazy reclaiming/cleaning/rehousing is - in most cases I understand - beyond what they're on the peg to do, and that's good for those that bought a service that might evaporate into thin air, crossed their fingers it wouldn't when they really ought not to have, and then their thing did indeed evaporate into thin air.
That there's people with services - critical or not - that they've not been able to yet rebuild elsewhere is striking. Not even a backup?! In fairness I have a service like this, and should it go pop it will be proper inconvenient, but I will cry to myself not to the provider.
That there's a high %age chance their data at least will be available once again to do something with seems to me to be very good service. I could easily see something like 1&1 or HostEurope going "ahh well there's that lot gone, sorry about that" and inviting you to start afresh with perhaps a few days of contractual service credit at best.
I agree but I don't think that lesson is for OVH tho. They have another 24 DCs around the world in 10 locations. If you're hosting your stuff in one of their locations, your DR is automatically in another location, possibly not even with OVH, in case they have some kind of business-oriented problem.
Or... you don't have DR, which in itself is a DR strategy.
Does make me wonder though about all this "dual power supply this" "UPS that" "multiple internet feeds the other". Maybe that's all really really pointless, and host your stuff in at least two different places with as least commonality as possible is the only strategy.
Put your money into making the code handle it, and have bits of the back end infrastructure die regularly as a matter of course, because it has and will be affected by single points of failure relatively regularly. So when the big disaster happens, your code is used to it.
...just on a standalone client basis it STILL can't even work out if it's successfully delivered a message to the other end. I just can't wrap my head around how the code could be so bad as to not be able to definitively work it out 100% of the time.
I think us geeks here are guilty of mixing up businesses with tech businesses.
Most (small) non-tech business I know couldn't give the slightest shit about computers, phones, internet connections, domains, websites and all that malarky. They absolutely know they need such evil things but look elsewhere for that stuff to get sorted out, to enable them to concentrate on what they do & the reason they're in business - plastering walls, preparing food, whatever. For the same reason they're likely to call a plumber if the sink breaks, they're likely to rely on other people or business to sort their tech.
Even though *I* have long held it makes loads of sense to have a domain and at the very least forward your mail to somewhere so the address people know never evaporates, why on earth should we expect a business owner to understand, nay second-guess that this might happen? Or even that it "looks bad" just cos _we_ all know that @talktalkbusiness looks bollocks (and even then, not for any good reason other than we know TalkTalk is bollocks).
Going to someone that holds themselves out as SomethingSomething *business* seems like a perfectly good idea on the face of it. If I'm a business, I've bought a business service from a big place that provides business services. It even has business in the name. Sounds good to me. The likes of us and/or regulation should be holding the likes of TalkTalk to a higher standard.
Of course we also need to accept (I am sure most wont and await mass downvotage) that Windows 7,8 and 10 only actually exist to prize more money out of your hands. Sure there's some back end stuff that might be a bit of hell to transplant, but Win 10 aint actually so far from XP that we've had to fork for 3 supposedly completely new products in the interim.
It's a gravy train and most of us are on it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LhEf6hWAIE (contains swears but none of you are in the office anyway, right?)
God yeah I remember that too. Ridiculous. Talk about unnecessarily naffing off your subscribers that you just acquired at great expense and were already guaranteed to be pretty unhappy.
Mine went further in that (amongst other things) on the day of switchover my broadband went down and stayed down. Along with an email saying congratulations your broadband is up and running! They couldn't fix it, cue lots of "reset the router" "plug into the master socket" etc BS.
There was a litany of mistakes. I remember holding that there wasn't a single facet of the service they hadn't screwed up. I also posted a factually accurate, narky, but clean rant on their message boards in the hope something would happen. It did. They deleted it due to not being within their T&Cs. I was apoplectic.
Sky are a company that deliver great service while you're taking a service, it works without any effort on their behalf, and you keep paying. Any of those things go wrong they are the absolute worst.
Came here to say the same thing. Have an email system that can handle multiple domains, and register the domain with whoever for £15 a year. Whatever the issue is I can't fathom. I can only guess that the corporate branding maniacs have got their hands on it.
Also proves definitively that the big boys don't give the slightest bit of a shit about their customers, really.
Given that huge swathes of people across the world are continually gainfully employed "upgrading" companies from Windows version X to Windows version Y, which are all pretty much just the same thing with many layers of lipstick on, I'd be quite confident to say MS have perfected this gravy train as well.
You definitely can create proper air-gaps though with only-secure strictly-neccesary comms between several systems that understand what both ends want and expect, and then don't blindly execute whatever's been sent across. It's very doable.
Problem is implementing that properly over x-hundred systems is expensive, time consuming and in most delivery cases pretty much impossible without buckets more time, energy and $ going to the people implementing. In hospitals in my very limited experience, the barest minimum of time, energy and $ aren't even on offer, never mind copious amounts of them.
Speed. Any business that considers IT a cost-centre only, I recommend they try to run their business on paper and pen for a month.
I've been in a few businesses, ones that can completely run on pen and paper, and ones that refuse to even put a procedure in place. But even the prepared ones work markedly slower when they're doing everything without a computer.
Does work in the car park situation though, because if the random combination of 1AI1AA IA11AA both come and park in the same car park at the same time, and one of them accidentally enters their registration number wrongly, then how about just letting them off the $2 or whatever it is for the sake of everyone's sanity?
So I believe.... and I'm not certain about both of these to don't kill me....
- Windows got memory protection in 3.0
- While Wikipedia says that they are, I'm not sure how an OS that can lock up such that the mouse pointer doesn't move is pre-emptively multitasking. Surely the system is able to steal back resources to run the code keeping that alive? I've seen that behaviour on Win (lots), Mac (a bit) and in the past couple of days - and very alarmingly - Linux. Maybe I don't quite understand what pre-emptive multitasking actually is. But again, if a 7MHz Amiga can do it, your 1000s of MHz 30-years-more-development whatever bloody well should be able to.
Not the case. A lot of OSes were of that nature at the time and... lets take an example of the "winning" one... new iterations came out over and over adding the stuff needed as the underlying computing power came along.
The Amiga failed due to Commodore being a very shit dysfunctional company, and the companies that tried to take on the mantle of Amiga being even more shit and dysfunctional. That's all very well documented.
100%. And having just read https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/04/on_call/ and some of the comments, I am very glad circumstances drove me to getting one, and having to persist with it long into the reign of the PC. It's a genuinely very slick OS, was a pleasure to use, and while of course now dated, delivers some lessons OS creators have somehow still not learned. I still boggle when certain (thankfully rare) situations cause Windows' or a Mac's fundamental underlying OS processes to grind to a halt while something is busy.
Totally. and especially in Asda. Check out myself on an ignorant machine that undoubtedly will need a harassed and overburdened member of staff come over to sort out at some point? All while having RECORDING IN PROGRESS flashed in front of your face? Don't mind if I never come in your shitty store ever again.