Posts by hoola

Apple said to be removing charger, headphones from upcoming iPhone 12 series

Re: spare tire from your trunk/boot

VW UP!, we bought it to replace a much older one that had a real (full size) spare wheel & jack. Previous runabouts had all had one as well, It never occurred to me that the place for the spare wheel would be filled with a sodding speaker! WTF.

Son is learning to drive and he managed to clip a curb and with some real bad luck, the tyre had a cut that failed spectacularly the following morning a mile from home. Pissing with rain, I go to take the other car to rescue my wife can get to work and then am left to sort this out. If it had a spare then it could have been fixed in minutes. No amount of tyre sealant was going to make it usable.

Capita Consulting ditching more than a quarter of its workforce 45 days after consultations with consultants

Revenue Below Expectations

So things go into meltdown because revenue is below expectations. Surely profit (or loss) is the more important figure?

It is no use having stonking revenues a 1Bn if you are losing 20p on every pound.

The good news: Vodafone switches on first full-fat, real-life 5G network in the UK. The bad news: it only got sent to Coventry

The Future

Maybe this is linked to the announcement that Coventry is the next City of Culture. Perhaps all the 5G goodness will enable the cultured residents of Coventry to download more cultured stuff.

Coventry -> culture, is that an association that only I am struggling with?

In the current situation there is bugger all live culture happening with no realistic timeline as to when anything will start. I supposed the only thing that will have benefited at the moment is the porn industry. I would hazard a guess that quite a lot of the seedier end will not have been to worried about the long-term health of their "performers" as long as the money kept rolling in.

Microsoft takes tweaking tongs to Windows 10's Start Menu once again

Re: CLASSIC/OPEN SHELL !!

All well and good but in the corporate world you get what you are given and very rarely have the luxury of installing such things. Even back-room IT professionals get lumbered with the same restrictions that standard users get at our organisation.

UK space firms forced to adjust their models of how the universe works as they lose out on Copernicus contracts

And I think one of the key points is the continuing uncertainty. This has been the case since this fiasco started with all the endless internal bickering in parliament and the courts. Uncertainty has probably caused (and still is causing) more damage than anything else has and nobody has the foggiest what sort of clusterfuck we are going to be saddled with at the end of it.

Boffins baffled as supergiant star just vanishes – either it partially blew itself apart or quietly turned into a black hole

Maybe I am wrong but if it collapsed, does that not spew out gravitational waves or a huge pulse of X-Ray?

If it has collapsed into a black hole then one would assume that light from more distant stars will now be bent. If it just disappeared then theoretically there should now be new things visible behind it. This of course is possibly beyond the observing power and instrument resolution we have.

Never knowingly under-digitally transformed: Retailer John Lewis outsources tech function to Wipro

Partially correct, the other huge problems are the tax arrangements that Amazon have and the fact that they appear to be untouchable by the relevant authorities to be accountable for a realistic tax settlement.

One of the ways the likes of Amazon can be sorted out is a complete overhaul of the business rent/rates system. It has been abundantly clear for some years that warehouse and distribution centres are pay far too little in rent and rates. These sheds are put up on greenfield sites for peanuts, leased from some holding company and then have in real terms, bugger business rates. All retailers needs these facilities but the big background costs are in shops. Rent and rates for these facilities need to be dramatically increased and then traditional retail premises reduced. You could also do some sort of offset to try and level things a bit more so that if you have retail shop space, its rates are reduced to counter the increase in the warehouse. Warehouse and distribution facilities should also be rated based on volume, not anything that can be massaged like floor area, etc.

I worked for JL in the late 80's and 90's and then they were innovative. The problem is not just limited to JL but throughout much of the UK where there is this obsession with "Graduate Trainees". These are usually totally clueless individuals that are fast-tracked into management positions. This becomes a self perpetuating cycle as more and more of the pillocks occupy more senior positions in the management change. Very occasionally you will get a good one but for the most part my experience has been that they are a liability but because of the way the system works, it is self-fulfilling. You reap what you sow and that lack of real business skills, common sense and long-term planning has been lost.

You've accused Apple of patent infringement. You want to probe the iOS source in a closed-room environment. What to do in a pandemic?

Re: I've often wondered...

I would have thought that the risks of tampering with the material and being caught far outweigh the implications of any court outcome.

If this tampering of evidence or material were to be uncovered the penalties are probably greater as well as the impact on any future cases that the company may bring. This being Apple, the likelihood is that then need to protect their reputation as being squeaky clean because this will not be the only litigation they they are involved in.

The internet becomes trademarkable, sort of, with near-unanimous Supreme Court ruling on Booking.com

Re: Once again

And that is the fundamental problem with .com, as things have evolved is has become a status symbol and a country-specific organisation uses it when in reality it should not.

Whatever this is going to turn into a wet dream for lawyers.

Brit police's use of facial-recognition tech is lawful, no need to question us, cops' lawyer tells Court of Appeal

Big Brother is watching

It is always far more difficult to undo something than put a sensible framework in place first. The fact it facial recognition does not work now is a complete red herring. There has to be a robust set of regulations and rules around this because it is open to so much abuse.

We are very rapidly approaching the point where technology is become cheap enough and sufficiently powerful that these sorts or systems become viable. All the big-brother scenario films are close to becoming reality and whilst I believe that generally UK police are reasonably trustworthy it is something that can change. They are increasingly becoming a political tool with elected commissioners (or whatever they are called). The fact that the the politicians are becoming lest trustworthy, more likely to lie and the increased status of the special advisers leads me to believe that we should be very worried about this.

After 84 years, Japan's Olympus shutters its camera biz, flogs it to private equity – smartphones are just too good

Re: Sadness...

That is the crux of it, for 95% of people they could not care less about the physics.

The phone camera is used to take snaps and videos that are consumed on a small screen where the actual quality is pretty much irrelevant now. Being able to upload compressed images quickly is of greater importance than the last smidgen of colour gamut or focus.

Software (lovingly labelled as "AI") can so all sorts of things to make these images more appealing to the eye and the devices they are being viewed on.

I do some astro-photography and for that I need the RAW images. I happen to have a Canon 1100D that has had the IR cut filter removed as these were easier to convert. Generally Canon and some Nikon are used in this field, I don't think Olympus comes up that much but it is very niche anyway.

Fintech biz Wirecard folds into insolvency like two pair against a flush. Good luck accessing your chip stack

This is brewing up into the Iceland banking fiasco where the Internet, Google and perceived better returns meant people put their money in with no understanding that it was not protected.

Also, given that this appears to have then been used as a rebranded service for other cash cards further increases the complexities of ownership, liability and compensation.

Fasten your seat belts: Brave Reg hack spends a week eating airline food grounded by coronavirus crash

Re: As a child of the 1970s, I have a fear of savoury dishes involving fruit...

A few things stick in my memory from early school years (First and Middle school back in those days:

Rice pudding or semolina with a blob of red jam (ink and wood chips), it went a gorgeous shade of pink when stirred.

A sponge cake which had lemon curd trailed on it before cooking so you had a canal of lemon. It was surprisingly good.

Faggots! On those days the big aluminium water jug always went back heavier than it started. They were truly awful.

Re: COVID-19 decides. And CO2 decides.

You only have to look at the pictures from Brighton, Bournemouth and then in Snowdonia back in March to see just how people react. Add in all the recent marches and the large parties/raves and it paints a fairly depressing picture.

Is it stupidity, ignorance or being selfish? I don't know but the behaviour is clearly widespread in a sufficiently large amount of the population to be a major problem. Just look at all the rubbish that is left where people have their picnic or chucked out of car windows.

As you say, some people will talk about CO2/Climate Change and then in the next breath be talking about their holiday in Thailand. This is the fundamental crux of the entire problem, a growing number have no social or collective responsibility and I believe a lot of this can be directly at the always on drip feed of minutia that is Social Media.

The wake up call will come when a variant of COVID19 or something similar appears but this time wipes out millions from a single country. Only then will people start to think, but again it will only be short term. Humans are the smartest, most selfish and most stupid animal on the planet.

Containers to capture 15% of all enterprise apps across 75% of business by 2024

And pay subscriptions to do so.

I have lost count of the number of times management have had their calls with Gartner to decide on technology recommendations from the techies doing the work.

We're no longer helping UK Post Office persecute postal workers with our shonky system, says Fujitsu

Can gongs be withdrawn? If so then regardless of any other outcome it should. People accused of theft and fraud took their own lives, lost their livelihoods and has destroyed families.

That is not exactly "Service to the Post Office.

Ex-barrister reckons he has a privacy-preserving solution to Britain's smut ban plans

Re: Mind of a teenager

Loads of applications now run in the user profile anyway so don't need admin rights to be installed. This is one of the bigger issues and there is very little you can do about it. At my son's 6th form it ran from year 7 (I think) but the Internet access was filtered at the lowest level for everyone. This effectively made it useless for the older kids as legitimate content was blocked. They started using VPNs on phones so a cat & mouse game then ensued as the techies tried to block them on the WiFi. The only plus is that a combination of location and a building with a lot of metal in it meant that mobile data did not work.

This is a classic case of excessive restriction actually making the situation worse.

Skype for Windows 10 and Skype for Desktop duke it out: Only Electron left standing

Re: Oh Jesus, why?

And it is now automajically installing itself as parts of Office even when you don't want it, have no intention of using it for personal stuff and don't want to sign into a Microsoft account just to get into Windows.

I assume it came as part of the Office package or maybe it was Windows Update. You have to go and tell it not to run.

GitHub redesign goes mobile-friendly – to chagrin of devs who shockingly do a lot of work on proper computers

Re: It's not just micros~1

It is fashionable at the moment to have dynamic menus constantly flashing in and out as you move the mouse. The bit you want is there then not there or some sort of top menu bar on the page keeps getting taller so every time you think you are in the correct place it has then moved.

Then this stupid obsession with shades of grey and no edges to anything. Websites that has allegedly passed accessibility tests are unusable because of piddling little fonts in grey on grey.

And it is not just web sites, who the hell thought that in Window 10, Explorer should not have an edge? All this is designed and tested by a bunch of "graduates" who simply have no notion of what is actually useful. Management love it because it looks pretty so it must be okay.

Here's a headline we never thought we'd write 20 years ago: Microsoft readies antivirus for Linux, Android

The long game

Microsoft is doing a lot to embrace Linux with the new features in Windows. At some point I fully expect to see a Microsoft licensed distribution of Linux that will have all the Powershell stuff crammed in. Licensing to start with will appeal to companies that maybe have a small Linux footprint and currently either use commercial distributions (RHEL etc) or open source with no, or limited support. It will be commercially beneficial to use the MS distribution because it will be bundled with any existing MS agreements. Companies are used to dealing with Microsoft so market share will increase. In education commercial Linux distributions with support are very expensive when compared to the Campus agreements Microsoft put in place.

Once it is in, it will become increasingly difficult to get out. Microsoft are then in a win-win situation where it does not matter which OS you use, they will still get your money.

For better or worse, commercially Microsoft could end up being dominant in both Windows and Linux.

Things that make you go foom: Destruction derby as NASA and SpaceX test rocket components to failure

Re: I know this one

Or the wrong duct tape.

Has anyone else noticed how difficult it is now to get proper duct tape that sticks to anything, does not peal or tear when faced with a (not remotely sharp) object.

There are so many cheap imitations on the shelves that the real stuff has disappeared because it was "too expensive".

We used to use miles of the stuff in the flooring industry.

CSI: Xiaomi. Snappy Redmi Note 9 Pro shows every fingerprint, but at least you get bang for your buck

Fingerprints

Any phone that has a glossy finish (and to be fair, most other finishes) show every fingerprint. It is irrelevant who the manufacturer is, the problem is the same. This appears to be a dig at Xiaomi because it is cheap.

Besides, most people use some sort of case anyway.

Facebook accused of trying to bypass GDPR, slurp domain owners' personal Whois info via an obscure process

Re: Outragous

Exactly, Facebook, the Zuck and everything they stand for are utter scum. The will do absolutely anything to hoover up as much data as possible so they can make money. It is a cultural issue and they simply believe they are immune from any sort of regulation.

Folk sure like to stick electric toothbrush heads in their ears: True wireless stereo sales buck coronavirus trends

Re: Wired

"Yet another thing to charge"

Each with it's own case, some Micro USB, some USBC, some take so little power on the charge that a powerbank will not work as it keeps turning off because it thinks nothing is connected.

A wire may break but compared to something running out of charge it is almost infinitely less likely to stop working.

All these earbud things are useless for me as they simply will not stay in, no matter what you do.

I have had the misfortune of suddenly needing hearing aids and that brings me to the next issue:

Ear buds are useless if you have impaired hearing as the devices driving them simply do not have the control to shape the response, particularly if it is lopsided (L to R). Most headphones are also useless as they:

Sit on the ear so are very uncomfortable & the hearing aid pick up all the noise from outside

Sit over the ear and press the buttons on the aids and, even with closed back, still pick up outside noise.

Given that everything is done in software why is it so difficult to make a balance control?

This takes us back to square one where control on the device would enable the aids to be muted whilst benefiting the quality of the headphones.

The aids I have will stream music over bluetooth and it is not bad, some tweaks in an equaliser can get some of the low end back but it is still light years away from decent headphones.

We were already secure enough for mass remote working before COVID-19, boast IT pros

Twaddle

There was so much "Just make it happen" from manglement that normal security protocols were sidelined. I am sure we were not alone in this. Yes, there is work to go and mop up some parts of it but the entire driver was to keep people working at any cost (not financial).

Who comes up with this stuff?

Big Tech on the hook for billions in back taxes after US Supreme Court rejects Altera stock options case hearing

It's a scam

Stock options are always a scam to avoid someone involved paying tax. IT also has a vested interest in the stocks rising in value, something that until very recently has been considered normal for tech stocks.

Correct me if I have misunderstood but staff are given an option to buy stocks at a fixed price, some point in the future, regardless of the value at the time it is purchased.

Value last year 5

Current stock value is 10

Option to buy at 12 in 3 years time

Value in 3 years time 20.

If it was not a large corporation doing this it would be fraud.

IR35 tax reforms for UK freelancers glide through committee stage: D-Day set for 6 April 2021

Correct, a contractor has to earn more in real terms than a permanent employee to cover all the things that are included in the latter's terms and conditions.

If being outside of IR35 is so advantageous then clearly the current tax/company arrangements people are using are perceived by HMRC to be underpaying. One cannot get away from that. If HMRC felt that people were being reasonable it is unlikely they would have spent so much time on this. There may have been some lobbying but at the end of the day, if those doing the engaging feel that they are are risk of HMRC attention then they will take IR35.

Small is always going to be an easier target than big corporates but the figures they are quoting are substantial. Tax mitigation using companies, dividends and all the other options to reduce tax paid and avoid NI is all well and good but don't be surprised when people who do pay all of that are not hugely sympathetic.

Both permanent and contractors in this forum are going to be well above the wage median for the UK. Money is not everything and I actually prefer being able to reliably commit to things out of work time on a regular basis and not spend hours commuting all over the place.

I have said this before:

If as a contractor being outside of IR35 is so advantageous from a tax perspective then it rather supports HMRC in the belief that a significant number of contractors are not paying the appropriate tax. We have had contractors on 3 month to 24 month assignments and bluntly, they should have been a fixed term, or short term standard employee. I know there are arguments about pension, holiday and sick pay BUT this is abuse of the system by both the employer and the contractor.

If one is currently paying all the appropriate bits of tax it should end up being not far off IR35 or PAYE. Yes, a contractor is paid more because of the uncertainty, but that is not an excuse to avoid paying tax.

I have been a contractor and moved to a permanent position as I got fed up with all the admin needed to run the business, or end up being at the whim of some sort of agency. The end result is that I am more or less in the same financial position overall when everything is taken into account but have a significantly better work/life/family balance.

Health Sec Hancock says UK will use Apple-Google API for virus contact-tracing app after all (even though Apple were right rotters)

Re: Privacy?

That is the fundamental problem , the App does not allow you to lead normal lives. All it does is provide some sort of contact awareness that enables people to decide if they should get tested and isolate based on an alert.

If someone has the App and is infectious then the App knows about them. One would assume that if the person is responsible they they would not be out if they have tested positive anyway. Those who are not responsible will most likely not use the app.

Re: with respect to the UK app

A lot of flak for the Government and NHSX here.

How many times have we all been in meetings, product road maps, etc where all sorts of stuff is pushed by techies as being the next great feature?

IT techies and developers in particular are their own worst enemy in claiming something is possible, even showing some sort of POC but then failing to deliver.

The Government may be at fault but somebody in the chain said it was possible.

Also, just what is wrong with starting something and then taking the decision that the approach is wrong? At the moment I don't think there is a great deal of evidence that an App is going to be particularly effective. Singapore keeps being used as an example where an App worked. That is not the case as it does not have sufficient take up to be useful so they are looking at wrist bands.

Technology has a place however all to often it is seen as a solution to something where it is inappropriate. To work an App has to have a high take-up (I believe in excess of 60%) and be accurate. There is nothing technology can do about garbage-in-garbage-out. If that 60% are the least susceptible in the population then in reality the take needs to be much higher.

Latest Xeons land in new Huawei server despite looming US ban

Re: > 18 months stockpile of essential chips

China will continue to do what they have already shown they can do:

Develop their own manufacturing base for alternative products currently sourced from the West.

Look at the long term losses and gains (this is where the UK & US are particularly crass as the financial markets demand returns "NOW" regardless of whether it is in everybody's best interests).

Will build on there existing expertise (e.g Huawei are leaders in 5G)

Will take do with other Far-Eastern nations to the detriment of the West as what China will produce will be cheaper.

China has always played a long game and the argument that they steal technology etc is thin. Industrial espionage is a global business and anyone at the cutting edge of a field is going to be both a target and be targeting others. The West is largely the creator of this situation by offshoring vast amount of manufacturing to China because it could be done cheaper and companies could make more money.

A memo from the distant future... June 2022: The boss decides working from home isn't the new normal after all

Re: New Normal?

Home working suits some more than others but in the rush to push the benefits it is easy to overlook the pitfalls.

It can be very isolating and this has been exacerbated by the current situation as so much social contact has been stopped.

If you are working from home you have to have appropriate facilities. Most people who are working from home do so because they are computer based. If you have a proper office, desk and IT equipment then then transition from a practical/technical sense is easy. DSE and other guidelines have been pretty much abandoned to try and ensure the companies can still be productive. This cannot be an excuse to allow poor working conditions in the long term simply because an employee is working from home. It is very easy for a company to see home working as a cost saving but then overlook everything that exists in an office to make that work acceptable.

The same regulations apply, office or home-office.

If you are now working from home that changes the use of your property. How does insurance, utilities etc all work? You can argue that most will already have an Internet connection anyway so that cost is irrelevant. Just substituting commuting costs for utility costs is only a benefit if your commuting costs (and time) are substantial.

What impact does it have on the other people in the household? Try having a call when there are kids doing stuff in the background. Do you keep telling them to be quiet every time there is a call. Is the space where you are working from also used by others?

Finally having spent all day in the home-office, things one might have done in the evening that involved the computer are now a chore.

The final thing that I find is that having spent all my work hours in the room with the computers.

I can see the benefits, but it is not a magic solution for everything and the overall advantages can easily be very heavily weighted to either empolyee or employer.

Smartwatches win the consumer tech sector for Q1 2020 as locked-down folk take up fight against corona-carbs

Smart?

All I require from a watch:

It tells the time without having to do anything

It is properly waterproof

Has as a sapphire glass so it does not scratch when you look at it

It does not have a battery so is kinetic or solar (aids the previous issue)

Uses the radio clock signal so you don't have to keep adjusting it when DST changes.

A smart watch fails at many of these.......

Winter is coming, and with it the UK's COVID-19 contact-tracing app – though health minister says it's not a priority

Re: Well that aged well

The danger with ANY app is whether enough people will use it. Be it centralised or decentralised most of the public do not care. Some will use it many won't and a significant proportion can't.

Given that 25% of contact tracing attempts fail as well I am unclear how any App is going to make a significant impact. You are correct in that there is COVID19 and lockdown fatigue but we also live in a society where a large enough number of people simply don't give a stuff.

Look at the crowds on beaches, queues for shopping and the demonstrations.

Ironically I expect many of these people also have kids that they will not send to school because it is "not safe".

Electronic health records firm Epic Bristol bags £454m in UK deals as creaking care sector chases digital transformation

Re: another closed system with no upgrade path

Which begs the question why they have to develop anything. Unless if have missed something, surely this is not far off a turnkey solution, a patient records system should have the same requirements regardless of the hospital.

Epic may have interoperability issues with other systems but the one thing it should be able to do is integrate with itself.

Tens of millions of Internet-of-Things, network-connected gizmos at risk of remote hijacking? Computer, engage shocked mode

Re: lol

That is all well and good however 99.9% of the people with an Internet connection are simply:

Without the technical knowledge to create a vLAN.

Have hardware that cannot be configure in such a way.

Are not bothered.

Re: 'tip' time

The same for Leicestershire and by all accounts there are still people queuing for hours even though they don't have an appointment getting pissed off when they are refused entry. Maybe these are the same people that queued for hours just to get a Big Mac.

You really cannot help some members of society.

NY Attorney General warns Apple, Google to police COVID-19 tracing apps in their souks – or she will herself

Re: tracing apps

Why does it even need Ads in the first place?

If the authorities want people to trust them and trust these (in my opinion currently not particularly useful Apps) then be more open about what they are trying to achieve and don't make it an advertisers wet dream.

It's June, and you guessed it! Pork barrel time for resellers as £500m public sector framework gets go-ahead

SME

So much for opening the market to the smaller and medium sized providers.

The tenders will have been crafted such that it is simply impossible for an SME to have any chance of being successful. All that happens is that a few big and largely incompetent corporations continue to survive because of the tax payer.

Given the number of very public failures the likes of Capita, Serco, Fujitsu have in their inventory just where to the good references come from? For every public failure there has to be ten times that hidden away.

There's no accounting for TITSUP*: Beancounters bemoan Sage cloudy sync software outage

Re: "our equipment is used for COVID-19 drugs"

This is what happens when you buy a service. The trouble is that smart marketing and sales people convince directors that this is the way forward.

This is going to continue happening across the board because those involved believe the marketing BS and once you are signed up there is nothing you can do when it is broken.

Not so nice, we investigated them twice: EU opens double whammy of inquiries into Apple's biz practices

Re: 30% is outrageous

This is what happens when a successful company becomes so arrogant that they believe that whatever they do, people will just pay because it is "Apple".

If anyone other than Apple (or a similar US tech company) were to take a 30% cut people would be screaming about profiteering. Look at all the flak direct against petrol stations when oil prices change.

On streamed music Apple take a greater percentage cut than is returned to the artists.

Couple wrongly arrested over Gatwick Airport drone debacle score £200k payout from cops

Re: I have to admit...

For whatever reason, driving at excessive speeds is considered okay and worse, acceptable to brag about it. Speed cameras are seen as a tax on the motorist and the penalties are not really a sufficient deterrent. A smart legal-eagle can easily bamboozle a magistrate (as the boss of a small business I worked for managed to do).

Where I live we have a 30mph limit and speed surveys taken by the county council give an average of 43mph. There are regularly cars in a field or hedge on a double bend however as nobody has been killed, nothing is done. We had one of those community speed guns for a while but the people who ran it got so much abuse they gave up.

Oh crap: UK's digital overlords moot new rules to help telcos lay fibre in sewer pipes

There is also the issue of clearing blockages. Given the amount of stuff that clogs sewers up (including some seriously large tunnels) this can only end in disaster. The high-power jets that are used to break up blockage can cut stuff up. There is only so much armour you can put on a cable before it becomes either uneconomic or two heavy to manage.

Whilst I can see why this might appear it is yet another attempt at doing infrastructure on the cheap. We are spending will over £100 billion on HS2 with dubious benefits to put it mildly. Why the hell do we not just put in some larger, universal ducts that people rent space in. One could also (perish the thought) have a national infrastructure that was coordinated between all the interested parties.

Nah, never going to happen, too many vested interests and short term profit requirements.....

What could possibly make a cranky crocodylomorph more terrifying? How about one that chases you on its hind legs?

Clever Stuff

These discoveries are always interesting and I find it amazing how the scientists can deduce so much from footprints and some bits of fossil. Some of the more recent discoveries where evidence of feathers and so on are fantastic and show what can be done with modern techniques and equipment.

I also think it is quite scary that there are some egomaniacs out there with enough money to believe that trying to genetically engineer some of these beasts back from the dead is a good thing!

Science and money is great but science, money and stupidity is bonkers.

Remind us again, why work for AWS? Petty Amazon sues marketing veep after he defects to Google Cloud

Re: non-compete

I would have though that in this field and at this level a person would be unable to get any new employment when subject to such a clause.

They are effectively making the employee work 18 months notice for no pay.

But hell, nothing surprises me now with the lengths these huge tech companies will go to manipulate things. They simply believe that they are above any law that does not benefit them directly and if you through enough lawyers and money at a problem it can be buried.

Scottish cops dangle £6m for help understanding 160TB treasure trove of structured and unstructured data

Re: This will not help

The consultancy and marketing BS lost will be wetting themselves with this. You can do some basic scanning to find out the contents of some documents that may give you a clue as to what is in it or where to move it.

Ultimately it does not matter how much tech or money you throw at these things the only person who can actually identify the data is the person(s) that put it there.

All the same 160TB is not that much.

UK spending watchdog blasts £792m STEM school scheme over low student numbers, deficits, education quality

Re: Quasi Private Education

Add to this where students (didn't they used to be pupils?) are routinely discouraged from doing subjects where they may not gain top marks because it will affect rankings.

STEM subjects are challenging and for years these has been a cycle of kids not doing it because there are easier options. This is compounded by the obsession of everyone going to University to get a degree. This, by its very nature has spread resources ever more thinly as the expensive courses cost progressivly more.

Cold hard cash: Cloud data warehouse spinner Snowflake gains $8bn in nominal value since Feb as IPO nears

Why?

This is the perpetual cycle of venture capitalist funds support by the morons that buy the stocks. It is all virtual money, it does not exist, it is just "the market" (whatever the hell that is now) pushing numbers round computer systems.

There used to be a time when a company was valued according to real assets.

An Internet of Trouble lies ahead as root certificates begin to expire en masse, warns security researcher

Re: "I would be perfectly happy with a five-year update cycle for my refrigerator"

Or just open the door and see what is in the fridge

This obsession with tech is the cause of so much of the waste we produce. Food waste is simply horrific because of a date, best before, sell by, display until etc.

Millions of tons of perfectly good food are binned because people are seemingly unable to assess that it is still okay. Some things are more susceptible or dangerous than others, meats and fish for instance but for heavens sake, just give it s sniff.

Millions of bits of tech are binned, mostly because there is a new, better, faster flashier model out, not because they are physically worn out.

Rant over.