Posts by sad_loser 161 publicly visible posts • joined 25 May 2010
A sad opportunity lost.
It’s all very well putting Turing on banknotes now but we the political establishment have been allowed to hijack the honours and Lords to be a cesspit of cronyism.
The scientific / biotech and medical industries are things we do well, and need to do better, but as Dame Bingham’s book illustrates, the people with the power are scientifically illiterate and still believe in fairies.
Agree
Have used all of these distros over the years for server / hobbyist use, and 4 years ago migrated from Mac to POP-OS for my work computers and would not go back.
OSX lost its way and got bloaty and confused but at least didn’t suffer the data rape of windows 10 pro which came with one laptop I bought.
Ended up buying desktop and laptop from system 76 and use some paid apps (pdf master, softmaker office, Dropbox) and it just works, with no cruft.
I like the values and design philosophy of system 76 and wanted to support them buy buying their products.
https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
However a simple quick semi-structured quarterly review with direct reports can and should be a pleasure, not a pain. It is only when the HR people start trying to own it and the outputs that it becomes problematic.
A corporate turnaround guru I know always fires the HR department first, because if they were good at their job, he wouldn’t need to be there. He says just doing that significantly lifts morale on its own.
The other thing it needs badly is some sort of reputation system like Slashdot. Unfortunately slashdot stopped evolving in about 2000, but could / should have become the ‘tech Twitter’ and could have moved into non tech.
Link micropayments with reputation management and a bit of curated content / newsfeed bought in from an impartial source eg BBC and you are printing lots of money.
I think it is so that in future they can release the OS as freeware (bloatware / adware) and then you get to pay to turn the ads off.
This increases their user install base from which to hoover data and provides a google-proof stream of advertising revenue.
A high end laptop I bought came with a premium 'professional' version of Windows 10 installed and while I didn't mind the UI, it refused to let me remove the MS nagware / spyware / ads etc so I scrubbed the disk and installed POP-OS and have never looked back, especially with Steam playing all the Windows games I wanted to play.
I am not a privacy / tin hat person by nature but I do get the feeling that MS is doing its best to turn me into one!
It's good to hear that some things are going in the right direction.
A lot of what you experienced is the result of good practice at a local level that the IT supports by enforcing good practice - doing the boring stuff well prevents major cock-ups e.g. checklist manifesto by Gawande.
One barrier to progress that most people do not understand is that all the IT contracts are held by individual organisations, not the NHS, and this means that individual hospitals each pay the system supplier to do the same work (which is outsourced to low-income countries)
Great story - shovelling snow is a classic way of getting a heart attck
https://health.clevelandclinic.org/snow-shoveling-a-real-risk-for-heart-attack/
and in many countries there is a legal duty to keep your pavement/ 'sidewalk' clear.
But two important points:
1. You don't have to be a doctor to do CPR and you don't need to do a training course.
You won't do any harm.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vXPo7lNYzk
2. We teach primary school kids to use the defibrillators : the defibrillators tell you exactly what to do - you don't need a lesson to use them.
You won't do any harm.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFvL7wTFzl0
If you watch these two videos you will be completely equipped to do what this doctor did.
You won't do any harm. You don't have to kiss the patient. JFDI !
[IAAD and teach CPR to medical students]
But more than that, this is a device that is being sold that is making a medical claim. Performs / interprets / sends a medical test
Therefore falls under ISO13485, 27001, and sound like must fail both.
In the U.K. and Europe:
Failure to comply = unlimited fines+ criminal prosecution
Fill your boots!
Medical IT is, along with aerospace, military and critical infrastructure the most tightly regulated and you don’t want to play unless you really know what you are doing.
If you are comfortable in Gentoo then you are probably not a System 76 target customer, whereas I am - I have been using linux since redhat 5.1 and generally like cut down forms of linux, but for a desktop system I want something that 'just works' and POP-OS is the first linux desktop that does this for me, and it specifically does not have any cruft on it- very lean out of the box.
the ability to install tensorflow with gpu support in three lines of code is epicly simple as I had previously spent several days trying to get different generations of code base playing nicely together, and mostly failing.
The hardware is good quality and I like the values of the company - yes I pay a bit of premium but it's easily worth £1 a day it to me because of the time I don't waste trying to work out how to configure stuff. I want to use my time to do interesting stuff and earn money, not spend hours on stack exchange trying to deal with incompatible versions of software that don't play nicely together in the sandpit.
But the author is correct about the dual boot - it is PITA and I have also been caught out by this.
I have gone over to S76 hardware 3 years ago so I had linux on the desktop and it works fine - teams / zoom / evolution even plays nicely with office365 etc.
So is this saying that one company with an outdated product portfolio and a reputation for ruthless harvesting of cash from its customers is looking to take over another company with an outdated product profile and a reputation of ruthless harvesting of cash from its customers. Or am I missing something?
NHSD got pruned back in 2018 and is now boring but competent, more often than not their apparent deficiencies are as a result of being hamstrung by policy they did not create.
NHSX was created to be an internal consultancy, not bound to any other part of the organisation, but has turned out to be a cesspit of weapons-grade incompetence, staffed by ignorant strutting wastrels, many of whom were refugees from the original CfH train wreck. It makes the Covid PPE procurement look like a paragon of public-spirited transparency,
NHSE thinks it knows what it wants, but doesn't. There are a lot of people in charge who want shiny stuff to show ministers and don't care about whether it is actually true or not. So we have glossy Tableaus coming out of our ears, fed by random rancid data that is months old. And people are wondering why the whole thing has fallen over in a chaotic heap.
The root cause of this is that when the NHS created its payscale, IT folk were put on the administration/ clerical paypoints, rather than the professional / technical ones, and as a result anyone remotely competent has left for a proper salary, bar a few true believers.
They are not thinking this through.
The low value tech e.g. IoT is going to be owned by the far East who can do cheaper and faster.
The only areas that is going to be of interest is the highly regulated sectors - military / aerospace / medical / automotive / civil engineering. This is where the value driver is quality and safety.
I hear ARM is doing a load of work on this e.g. medical to try to get IoT linked up from sensor e.g. SpO2 monitoring for Covid - all the way to the medical record - because this is what people want and need. This sounds like the sort of thing Apple / Microsoft and Google are also pursuing.
For UK companies to be able to sell products and services overseas we need aligned regulations,
This is why there is very little OS in highly regulated organisations like the NHSD - that and the FUD from existing players.
What do I do? I have annual subscription to POP-OS but that is only $12. I would quite happily sign up to donate £500 / year to a foundation focused on good quality OS products.
Meanwhile I show my support by buying System76 products.
'Its dignity is arguably undermined by the proximity of a tea cup ride, a dinosaur-themed crazy golf course and the Dino Jeep Safari'
Makes me proud to be British.
We may have cocked up our Covid preparations and facing a mega-recession, but when the chips are down, we have a language that lends itself to magnificent understatement when this is what is called for.
Hurrah!
Incremental improvement requires dedication and thoroughness, which strict hierarchical systems can select for.
Radical, visionary and transformational change requires “knight’s move” thinking and non-conformity.
Who in a rigid hierarchy would have given a dropout loser like Steve Jobs a second glance?
I bought a desktop and laptop because I got pissed off with apple and I am now in a corporate environment where I can choose my own kit as long as I can maintain it, and with POP- OS it is easy. It is so much nicer not having to constantly upgrade apps with built in obsolescence and irrelevant feature creep. Stuff just works.
Will definitely buy again. Good quality hardware and software with imaginative design and good values- thanks y’all.
Doesn't this just come down to Caveat Emptor.
If I was going to drop 10bn of someone else's money on some magic beans, then I would want to know they were very magic.
I don't think the trades descriptions act exist in publicly traded companies, even ones trading in magic beans.
As most of the value of this purchase was as in the hope of future earnings and growth, they obviously thought this would prop up HP's balance sheet and save their skins.
For HP to then write down the investment so fast is pretty potent evidence that the original assessment must have been less than accurate.
Mis-specification and poor project management are usually skulking not too far below the surface.
The root cause for this is the government insistence that IT jobs are clerical and therefore on a low payscale, rather than a professional level like accounting / legal / medical.
[reg needs a peanuts icon?]
Because it is so difficult / expensive to sack a dysfunctional employee in the UK, winding them up so that they leave (as might be construed in this case) is entirely rational behaviour.
With Brexit, the only way we are going to become more competitive internationally is if we row back on some of the employee protection and have a rather more dynamic workforce.
the first one is for the NHS which has always put computer operatives on the clerical rather than the managerial scale.
This is why the NHS wastes such a lot of money on computers - the people at ground level are often people who could not get good jobs elsewhere.
If we paid a bit more we wouldn't have the train wrecks that are common now.
I work in public services and I applaud the fact they have published this.
If they had published this in the summer they might not have endured the needless backlash of a poorly informed public who have now fuelled gradepoint inflation on an industrial scale.
I always used to take pride in the fact that the UK had been quite immune to grade point inflation. No longer.
All must have prizes.
[I can understand this approach in primary school but by secondary school, they should have pulled on their big boy pants and be ready for the fact that the world is difficult and based on assessment of merit that may not always be fair or just.
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