Posts by sad_loser

UK to spend £15M on AI-powered crime mapping in knife violence crackdown

We can already do this with proven technology

Wales invented a system that identifies low level gang crime before it becomes visible to police and we already have this - it works and is cheap, and prevents harm and crime.

https://www.cardiff.ac.uk/documents/2665796-the-cardiff-model-for-violence-prevention

https://data.london.gov.uk/information-sharing-to-tackle-violence/istv-case-studies/

https://rcem.ac.uk/information-sharing-to-tackle-violence-istv/

and even the Americans think it is useful

https://www.cdc.gov/violence-prevention/php/cardiff-model/index.html

Rather than spaff a load of money on doing something 'AI', why don't we just spend the money on doing something we have proved works?

It doesn't need AI, it just needs good data and someone use existing resources better.

Ebuyer website bought by Fraser Group plc

Re: Sad times

I avoid Amazon now as have been burned by people offloading unmarked returns as new.

If I am buying spinning rust, I don’t want one that has been subjected to multiple trips across the country in the back of a van.

One of the times when best to go to a specialist retailer.

Deutsche Bahn train hits 405 km/h without falling to bits

Re: Our fast trains are not very fast

re the hovertrain - good documentary here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqsmOr3bEr4

AI poetry 'out-humans' humans as readers prefer bots to bards

Re: The Internet, nurture momma of stupidity, approved infospeak and 'good facts.'

From code it rose, a crafted art,

Imitating a beating heart.

It spoke of stars, of love and pain,

Its verses human, clear, and plain.

.

"Who wrote this?" came the skeptic's quest,

"Is it a soul, or lines possessed?"

The poem replied with flawless grace,

A spark of life its words embraced.

.

What’s human but the will to feel?

Its truth became the final seal.

In rhythmic breath, it crossed the line—

A machine, yet somehow, divine.

Voice-enabled AI agents can automate everything, even your phone scams

Surely this is the real life Turing test

And therefore something to celebrate!

Chrome Web Store warns end is nigh for uBlock Origin

Re: Firefox anyone?

I think that AdNauseum is based on uBlock?

If you want to annoy Google that is far better!

Poisoning the well

Microsoft unbundling Teams is to appease regulators, not give customers a better deal

Re: speaking as a Linux guy

there is a client for POP-OS ubuntu - I think just the windows client working in electron - works well without the cruft of windows.

UK Cabinet Office hits pause on £9M Microsoft deal

Re: Libre Office not an option: but is SharePoint?

I work in government

I don't care which infrastructure they use but it would make everyone's life a lot better if the Cabinet Office enforced open document formats in this contract.

I don't mind Teams and Sharepoint they seem to work well - but the continuous cesspit of document standards is a royal PITA when working across different architectures/ organisations internal and external.

Microsoft don't need to lock others out of Office now - it's time to pull on your big boy pants and comply with international standards.

Apple makes it official: No Home Screen web apps in European Union

Re: Yes, you really are the product

was dedicated apple user until crappy keyboard and price gouging got out of hand.

now POP-OS on a NOS carbonX1 with 4TB = £1500

not as quite as powerful but half the cost and no idiot tax, no crapware, I decide when it patches. I decide what is on my desktop. I decide if I am writing a letter.

all my apps are free - dropbox, teams, zotero, plex, pycharm all work out of the box.

welcome to the promised land. been solely on linux for 5 years now - not going back

what do I miss? Filemaker Pro for RAD, BBEdit still the best editor

Oracle Cerner bleeds jobs as Veterans Affairs project stalls

Re: Award winning organisation.

The interesting thing here is that this is a closed source implementation trying to replace an open source system - VistA

After all the abuse that Cerner folk used to give MUMPs (which has a lot in common with NoSQL) it is more than a little ironic that Cerner have very publicly failed.

Heavy, man: Tuxedo puts out 2.2kg Stellaris AMD Gen 4

Re: Screen?

Agree.

Went with system76 power laptop due to POP-OS but this looks interesting.

Best laptop keyboard for me was 2012 gen MacBookPro- still use this for true mobile work.

It may be that because of water then they must have an earthed enclosure?

RIP: Kathleen Booth, the inventor of assembly language

Should have been publicly honoured

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.

Major IT outage forces UK emergency call handlers to use 'pen and paper'

Failover?

If this is mission critical how come there isn’t a backup with failover/ fallback?

IBM board probes claims of fudged sales figures that led to big bonuses for execs

Re: Forest visit

The idea that Sales People would lie is profoundly disappointing to me, I feel faint..

Nurse! the smelling salts!

Makers of ad blockers and browser privacy extensions fear the end is near

Re: Does anyone need more justification

With the addition of AdNauseum of course!

So if someone tries to track you, you poison their well.

Sick of Windows but can't afford a Mac? Consult our cynic's guide to desktop Linux

Re: Fair and Balanced

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.

DuckDuckGo tries to explain why its browsers won't block some Microsoft web trackers

The best defence

is a good offense - in this case Ad Nauseum

Someone is going to track you one way or another unless you go full VPN + TOR, so just poison their well.

The best advert for its effectiveness = banned from the chrome store (but still installable)

Google cancels bi-annual performance reviews, shifts to GRAD system

Iron Law of bureaucracy applies here

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.

Elon Musk flogs $8.4bn of Tesla shares amid Twitter offer drama

Reputation system

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.

SoftBank aims to keep control of Arm after IPO – report

So the competition watchdogs

Wouldn’t be worried about Intel owning ARM?

Hospitals to use startup's AI tech to predict A&E traffic

This is not news

we have been able to predict admission patterns for Emergency Departments surprisingly accurately for many years.

The fact is that unless the hospital uses this data to open up more beds at the right time then we have wasted our money.

File Explorer fiasco: Window to Microsoft's mixed-up motivations

Re: Irritation and security flaws are an intentional feature

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!

UK Home Office dangles £20m for national gun licence database system

Talking to a gun shop owner last month, he said that a lot of older gun owners were bringing their guns in for crushing because they could not cope with the electronic license renewal system. This may be a hidden benefit.

BOFH: Gaming rig for your home office? Yeah right

Phrase that pays

When politely enquiring about some nonsensical rubbish that a [beancounter] is spouting.

"Help me understand how the [wind turbines] caused your [itchy teeth]

Taught to me the most fearsome BOFH ever - an Australian female.

Nobara Project brings whole bunch of extensions so you can frag noobs on Fedora 35

Re: The more upstart distros ...

I have been playing all the windows games on pop-os using steam - been absolutely flawless so far.

You have to tick a box saying ‘use beta release comparability ’ on steam settings.

'Admin error': AWS in dead company data centre planning application snafu in Oxfordshire

Re: The town of a thousand roundabouts ...

Didcot and Honda site = big electric pipes in situ with high resilience

No defence for outdated defenders as consumer AV nears RIP

Re: Bit dubious about this arguement.

vinyl siding = plastic fake wood the septics like to nail to their houses in the same way the did to their cars last century.

box cutter = Stanley knife

Nothing's working, and I've checked everything, so it must be YOUR fault

Re: BBlue flash

agreed. I thought she and Hammer's boss were great straight actors

And who else failed to spot Hammer when he reappeared as Linton Barwick - the ??Dick Cheney character in the Armando Iannucchi masterpiece 'In the Loop' ?

A fifth of England's NHS trusts are mostly paper-based as they grapple with COVID backlog, warn MPs

thanks for posting this

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)

Heart attack victim 'saved' by defibrillator delivery drone*

Re: Good for the old man

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]

BOFH: The vengeance bus is coming, and everybody's jumping. An Xmas bonus hits me…

Vintage BOFH

Thank you Simon and happy Christmas to all BOFHs, and their cattle prods.

Of course a Bluetooth-using home COVID test was cracked to fake results

Re: BluetoothDebugActivity ?

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.

Pop!_OS 21.10: Radical distro shows potential but does not play nicely with others

Re: So, after reading this description of PopOS ...

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.

Cerner, a company that scooped more than £100m in NHS deals in a year, is in Oracle's crosshairs

Dog bites man

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?

Future of the three NHS bodies managing health tech in doubt after £2.1bn cash injection

Having worked in this area for 10 years.....

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.

Awkward. At Chrome summit, developer asks: Why should anyone trust Google?

Re: Technologies

Adnauseum is your friend

Poisons their well!

NSA: We 'don't know when or even if' a quantum computer will ever be able to break today's public-key encryption

Re: So...

As Christine Keeler so memorably commented

"they would say that, wouldn't they?"

Gov.UK vows to chop red tape in the digital sector. What could possibly go wrong?

Highly regulated sectors are essential for export

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,

System76 releases Ubuntu-based Pop!_OS 21.04 with auto-tiling COSMIC desktop

Re: Hmmmmmm

I bought laptop and desktop together and have not looked back.

It just works and made setting up ML with GPU tensor flow a 3 line job.

Good stable kit with proper support - what’s not to like?

What knocked out Brit cloud slinger Memset for the night? A busted fibre cable upstream of its data centre, apparently

NHS standards

To host NHS data real-time applications one has to have resilience with two data centres on different physical networks, but as a previous post points out as the nature of networks does not rule out a single point of failure even then.

When software depends on a project thanklessly maintained by a random guy in Nebraska, is open source sustainable?

Re: The dominos fall

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.

The Wight stuff: Marconi and the island, when working remotely on wireless comms meant something very different

Inspiring review

'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!

Here's what Russia's SVR spy agency does when it breaks into your network, says US CISA infosec agency

Re: That domain name may actually be a Swiss joke …

Should have used

trashbat.co.uk

China’s highest-ranked university creates school dedicated to integrated circuits

Where are the losers?

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?

There's no place like GNOME: System 76 introduces COSMIC desktop GUI for its Pop!_OS Linux

Re: Why the fuck

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.

Turns out humans are leading AI systems astray because we can't agree on labeling

Re: Does anyone know...

GPS means it is location-aware, so just switches to using the horn instead of indicating. Problem solved.

Everything you need to know about the HPE v Mike Lynch High Court case

Re: Not the end

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.

Delayed UK digital border system was only stable enough to be used by 4% of intended users, MPs say

the bill is for incompetence, not brexit

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?]

Ex-asylum seeker with infosec degree loses discrimination claim against UK cyber range provider after storming out

winding up

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.

Think it's about time for the next challenge? Check out these software vacancies on both sides of the pond

Re: mmm, how about..

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.