Posts by hoola 2525 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Mar 2013
The trouble is that the majority of people using these do not actually need the tech. Just like all the other wearable shite they have them because they can and think it is cool to use them.
They should just be banned outright and to sort it properly put punitive fines on the platforms or shops that sell them.
Whilst you are correct sadly in IT from the very beginning software has only been a right to use the product with no guarantees that it works. That has morphed into pretty much any other digital content that people "purchase". The reality is that with all this digital content most don't care until it does disappear then the bleat on Facebook for a bit before spending more money.
This should also apply to software where you have physical media but it is activated online - Yes, I am looking directly at Adobe. What they did with older versions of Acrobat is simply disgusting but there is nothing you can do about it. I had a similar issue with Google Play Books, they are supposed to work offline however I discovered that some older books I had not read for a while would not load because the license would not verify. The book is downloaded to the device and it was not connected to WiFi at the time. It is offline most of the time. There are solutions to this that resolve the problem and risk so I now have copies that do work and will not just disappear.....
The financial companies that loaned all the money are where the buck stops.
Silver Point Capital and Elliott Asset Management effectively control Thames Water. They bought debt, ramped up the debt, took the dividends and the interest payments and are not going to hold the Government to ransom.
If they just shut Thames Water down and closed the doors turning everything off like a normal failed business what is going to happen?
I give it less than an hour before the Government caves in. They know it which is why big (mostly foreign) money should never ever have been allowed near UK utilities.
Basically we are screwed and the lenders continue to laugh.
Now factor in that the Government is proposing to partner with outfits like this to use pension funds to invest in infrastructure. It is just insane.
Drones cannot be used to intercept & discourage Russian (or any other aircraft) that come into UK airspace. You need aircraft that have similar or better capability than those they are monitoring. An unmanned drone is next to useless. It is not fast enough, too small and could just be removed from the scenario with minimal impact. There is no pilot so the game changes.
I have to use Visio and this is only made available to us through the Web browser. When you open it you are presented with a load of Copilot shite that adds no value, does not make things easier and bizzarly also believes I should type shite in to start a new diagram.
"What do you want to do today?" When it then opens PowerPoint I really don't understand how this adds any improvement to anything.
It is also forcing me to use it.
Now try and understand how public sector procurement works and why it is impossible to prevent events like this.
It is a game of whack-a-mole that the procurement teams cannot win as the private sector use every trick in the book to take advantage of the process.
Successful - don't deliver or just increase the cost, no problem, blame the government/council etc and shrug shoulders whilst continuing to take millions in payments.
Unsuccessful - sue the public sector body because you think you have been treated unfairly.
Just like Fujitsu.
If they had been binned then Palantir would simply have taken the government to court. That is the way it works and why it is so difficult to get this companies out of public projects.
The private sector just see the public sector as a cash cow to be stripped of as much money as posisble.
The problem is that many of these outfits have very deep pockets.
You missed a couple out,
All the Academy Trusts with their own contracts, highly paid management, executive heads, business mangers contrasting with the minimum wage IT support people working with knackered equipment
PFI legacy with onerous contracts siphoning millions (billions?) into the pockets of the private sector.
And pretty much guaranteed that the solutions will involve paying even more for cloud services than they are now. More useless work schemes put together by people who have no concept of what is actually achievable with the time, resources & money available.
Private companies are making a killing on provide these work schemes that are sold to non-teaching execs that have no clue about anything other than their fat pay packet.
Married to a teacher as well & I get the rants when then tech is broken and the work schemes pointless.
It is the way public sector procurement works.
You cannot use anything that is not in the tender response to evaluate otherwise the companies responding can sue.
It is something that has been at the core of so many failures. The companies bidding know this and will put any crap into the tender response to get the contract.
The procurement process is mostly to try and protect the public body from being sued by vendors that were unsuccessful.
It is ridiculous and until there is wholesale change the game will continue. The loses are ultimately the tax payer.
Basically it is two parasitic private sector companies continuing what they do best, fleece the public purse for as much as possible.
Yes the document should not have been sent but neither outfit are saints and certainly have regular failures that then always wriggle out of.
Yes the document should not have been sent but Sopra were already going down the legal route.
Fleecing the public sector (Tax Payer) is similar to insurance fraud where those involved see it as victimless. Clearly that is not the case as we all end up paying.
You are assuming I voted "Leave"......
The way in which Remain approached this and many Remainers continue to hurl abuse at people they believe voted leave is so much of the underlying problem.
If you go back to the beginning the outcome was confidently predicted as a Remain win. Remain sat on their arses arrogantly assuming "They were right" until it was clear that a win was not assured. Then instead of countering the Leave campaign with facts they attacked the Leave campaign with all sorts of lies and wildly inaccurate claims.
How about:
House prices collapsing?
Millions jobless within months?
Food shortages?
All complete baloney that never happened.
I stand by my comment however ElReg is full of the very people that believe insulting others means they are right and the those they are insulting are some how of lesser worth. It is exactly why many chose not to vote "Remain".
Equally what Remainers forget is that instead of campaigning on the good things of being part of the EU when the poll results looked like a win was dicey they chose to attack leave, often with more lies.
Now add in large businesses writing to employees telling them to vote "Remain" you get what the great British public always do, exactly the opposite of what they have been asked.
Both sides of the arguments for and against leaving the EU created this mess. It winds me up when people constantly "blame" Brexiteers" for the outcome.
Ultimately if one want to apportion blame it is with the politicians on all sides of the political & EU spectrum starting firmly with Cameron.
At that time too many arrogantly assumed a Remain victory was assured once the stupidity of holding a referendum was accepted.
Whilst not defending Microsoft as they clearly should be in a position to forecast growth trends however one wonders if the issue is down to the availability of hardware and datacentre space.
Although again one would have thought that Microsoft along with the other hyperscalers will be at the top of the list in procurement and reserving production units.
Yay - common sense (Ha Ha) prevails.
The problem is that all the existing data (ie the bulk) has already gone and been hoovered by by Palantir.
This is what far too many just cannot comprehend about cloud computing, data platforms & AI.
The chances of forcing Palantir to delete it and sign an agreement to say they have don't will be ZERO. The NHS data is simply too valuable to them.
What I still don't understand is who is liable when an accident happens.
Is it Waymo Execs that can be jailed, face fines & points on their driving licenses or the disposable minimum wage human in the driving seat.
I suspect it is that and it is utter exploitation whilst all those who are making the money and are actually responsible can ignore all the failures.
Equally the next question is "who is using them?".
They are as much a part of the problem as those who provide the service.
Now explain just how you replace M365 with open source. All the integrations and everything required to run it.
Just saying "use open source" is worthless.
Now all the bits and pieces of equipment that are locked to the Windows OS or the client is only supported on Windows.
Open Source is more than "Use Linux OS and Libre Office".
I still have in a box of junk:
An old DIN keyboard adapter for PS2
PS2 to USB
A collection of (mostly indeterminate) wireless keyboard widgets.
The last is a pain in the arse because something labelled "Logitech" is not guaranteed to work with a all the assorted collection of mice & keyboards.
I am not an Apple user but I thought an AppleID was needed for everything? This fixation on the need for an account winds me up but it is NOT a Microsoft issue. People will quite happily use a phone and not complain about the need for a vendor account. They will also be signed up to many other services or websites without a complaint.
Update- - iOS has them as well
Pop-Ups - it is a pain in the arse and unlikely to get any better. Expect other OS to follow
Reboot - this is rubbish I have laptops & desktop OS VMs that will quite happily hibernate without issues. If it is crashing all the time the likelihood is there is a third-party software involved
Crash - they do not keep crashing, see point above
Virus - this is a user issue and not the OS, if you use a device such that it is "riddled with viruses in 24 hours" then you have a serious issue with the websites, software you use and your general IT hygiene.
Functionality - other than some of the well documented Windows 11 changes (particularly on Explored), yes it does happen but for 99.999999% of users is not an issue.
This argument about drivers on Windows is dodgy to say the least. For something to not work it has to be a real edge case.
This will also be the same for Linux.
Even then as long as there is a display (there will be!) and some form of network connection (very unlikely not to be on a new device) then you can fix it.
If it is the only device you have then it begs the question why you have something that is so far removed from standard hardware in the first place.
One of the reasons they can fix stuff "For free" is the huge margins that Apple have.
You pays your money and takes your choice however this is retail users. For businesses it is very different.
In my experience if one is using decent business quality hardware then the actual physical failures are few. If you compare a cheap laptop at with an expensive laptop of any type things break, the OS is immaterial.
My experience is with HP and it has been excellent. Based on what the End User Teams say on an estate of 20k devices the Apple ones are no better than the HP.
The OS is a different issue, we have Windows, iOS & Linux. The ones that cause the greatest issues are Linux and that is because of the type of users/iOS. They are incapable of just using the device and persist in tweaking stuff or needed "special cases" that increase the overhead or risk of issues. Apple laptops were seen as the "go-to" device originally because they were not managed, once they were managed people stopped requesting them and the proportion compared to Windows dropped.
Server, yes, particularly easy with VMs, and should already be in placr. End user devices, no. At best the data in common location and a profile is protected but the actual OS, no. It will only be in vary rare exceptions.
More commonly nothing is backed up, it relys on profiles, drive mapping and OneDrive all of which mean if the device will not boot it is just reimaged.
The biggest issue is having to use million pound anti aircraft missiles to shoot down a single-use drone that costs around a thousand.
The ships cannot carry enough, ground based can in theory but there simply are not enough available. Anti aircraft defence was never about swarms. Back in WW2 Flak was used to throw up a curtain of shrapnel. The drones are smaller so it becomes more challenging.
Dragonfly is better suited but is not available.
It is just like Afghanistan - take out a million pound helicopter with an RPG that costs next to nothing. No funky infrastructure, just hide behind a rock and KABOOOOM.
Whilst I agree the entire business about tracking is largely irrelevant. Most just don't care and are pretty much tracked in everything they do anyway.
It is the principal of having an ID card they object to.
This is something that appears to be uniquely British in the same way similar the behavioural traits that gave us Brexit and will likely give us a Reform government or at the least Reform holding the balance of power.
There I believe you are wrong.
The public sector in the UK is tied to some of the most ridiculous procurement rules you can imagine.
Most are the to prevent parasites in the private sector sueing when their bid is unsuccessful.
More interesting is that many are baser on EU rules but just like anything else to do with the EU, the UK has always followed these rules to the letter and more to the detriment of UK suppliers and the country as a whole.
This endless deployment of patches is not just Microsoft. It is a symptom of the wider malaise we have now in software where quality and testing is optional.
I see this attributed to two things:
Pushing development out to countries with the lowest cost.
Agile methodology.
I am sick of the crap that comes out of Agile development but it does not appear to matter how poor the quality is the mantra "fix it in the next sprint " is used. The outcome is another pile of shite that is barely functional.
With you except for the barbed comment on ignorance.
It is some Linux fanatics would do well to realise that for corporate uses there is no choice and the majority of consumers there is a choice of Windows, iOS or Android.
They simply cannot deal with the issues of switching to Linux when in reality they are faced with an incomprehensible variety of distributions that their current soft will not run on.
What is straightforward for an IT professional or Linux fan is not for the majority.
What many do not realise when talking about UK oil and gas is that it is very expensive to extract.
There is an assumption because it is "ours" it is cheap. I agree that it would be better not to put money into the pockets of most oil producing states.
Backhanders and doing deals so that they do not pay the same energy costs at the expense of everyone else.
This us yet more if this crap, inept government baring it's backside to apease the orange one and the US tech companies.
Let's be honest, AI datacentres are not and never will be strategic.
Equally who are the completely clues idiots that use them.
With so much of the IoT and wearable crap it really does not add much value except for the people who want to show how up to date and on trend they are.
It is why we are in such a mess with privacy.
This is everything that is wrong on public sector procurement. These huge companies just suck billions of tax payer's money out for poor value. Then when they don't get their way the sue. Heaven forbid if they don't deliver, nothing is the company's fault. I hope the tender evaluation Haa been done properly (documented and due process in evaluation) and Sopra Steria lose .
Whilst that is correct a human read, understood and made use of that data. The sources will have been referenced & credited. Royalties will have been paid when books are purchased.
What the AI & LLM engines are doing is scraping huge volumes of material regardless copyright, ownership or accuracy. These companies have no care for anything other than amassing as much material as possible then using it to spew out dubious answers.
However today email is a very tiny part of that collaboration suite.
It is also the easiest to make work.
Now add in all the stuff people have ( not saying actually use it all) with M365 and you see the problem. We moved from Teams to Slack corporately and it is a total abomination. I was surprised at how much better Teams is in comparison.
