Posts by hoola

Users complain of missing data in UK wills search service

Re: Special characters

Even better was some web management portal (I think for PlusNet) who changed the password requirements so enforce length and complexity including special characters. Now as an existing customer I did not know this.

I came to login one day to do something and could not get in, WTF....

Check the password, it is correct, retry, still "incorrect username or password"

Check router is logged in and when it last dropped and reconnected, all good.

I did not do "reset my password" because I knew it was correct. Phone them and get through to someone who tells me the password needs resetting because I have forgotten it.

Okay, reset set the password and put it back to what it was to humour them.

Still cannot login.

Continue phone call and get through to someone who is technical.

In the end they ask for the password so okay, I can reset it again, it is random, no issue.

He then says, oh, you cannot use that password because of this character.

So this takes us full circle, they changed the requirements and had a list of excluded characters that meant you could not log in, however you could change the password and use one of the excluded characters.

IT technician jailed for wiping school's and pupils' devices

Re: On the bright side…

All the cloud storage that is offered is much of the problem. Because the data is either not on the device or is synchronised to a cloud service people believe that it safe.

If you are using Outlook or Teams, the default is the entire device. I don't know about Google as I have not had to interact with it.

Anything that requires specialist knowledge is of no use to the average (and in many cases more advanced home use) person.

Good luck on that with a hard-pressed school budget.

The only times there are school devices per pupil are when the tablets have been given to the school.

Most likely is that they have installed the Education Office365 license for the college on personal devices (so that they pupils could work at home) and that had the corporate security policies enforced on the device. Teams will be the prime mover on this.

One of those allows remote wipe. This is not madness to the average person has they have very little understanding of the implications.

If they do then the likelihood is that it is assumed to be okay as it "will not happen".

UK pins hopes on 'latest technology' to whittle down massive National Health Service waiting lists

Re: Stop Worshipping the NHS

Contracts, it is all about contracts.

GPs are paid lots of money and now many surgeries are run by third party companies that are nothing to do with the NHS and everything to do with making money.

Then we have the patient data grabs.

Okay, so I know that a GP has spent years training and that once in a surgery (practice now) they have overheads however many are taking the micky, particularly with Covid.

I simply do not understand how a practice can pretty much refuse all in-person appointments, refuse a home visit for someone who is bed-bound etc.

On the latter when they did finally agree it was a third-party service provider and it reached the point were the situation had been left so long an ambulance had to be called. A relatively straight forward issue that (even allowing for travel time) would have taken an hour, was delayed by nearly 24 hours because of the third party provider. They turned up shortly after the ambulance.

Re: Reading Recomendation

Yes, read that as well...

Based in the US but an absolute hoot.

Gomer (or is it Gomere)

The "O" or "Q", when they reach "Q", they never come back.....

Re: As one of the 300,000

Getting rid of the ridiculous internal market will save millions.

The other video nasty is all the swanky PFI funded hospitals that are costing over 6 x would they actually should and are a constant drain on resources due to fixed maintenance contracts.

The buildings are generally not actually that good, they looked great visually when they were new but many are barely fit for purpose.

Re: AI says no

I think the comment relates to the £350 not the saving by making it tax-deductible.

For many £350 is a huge amount and that only gets you the consultation. If further appointments are necessary, you keep paying. Then if you need surgery or treatment, dig deep, very deep.

So that takes us full circle., private health care whether funded directly or via insurance is unattainable for most.

Re: Best Wishes

Yes, I read the book recently and it is a very interesting insight.

I have a friend whose daughter is about 3 or 4 years out of medial school as a doctor. Her ambition is to complete her training as a GP however this is the real killer:

t this level a doctor's salary is around £40k however the NHS has a chronic shortage of doctors. What now happens is that a junior doctor can now earn £80k as a locum filling in the gaps where there are insufficient NHS doctors. She has talked about the moral issues around this as she want to continue training to become a GP however those numbers make the decision difficult.

The same will be happening with agency nurses as well and this is where we have an overall problem.

There is a shortage of NHS staff so the gap is filled using agency and locums. In order to do so, the salary has been increased out of all proportion to NHS salaried staff. This becomes a vicious circle is that difficult to break. Do you pay the junior doctors £80k to tempt them back from locum work?

The outcome of that as there is still a shortage is that even more money will go on paying locums.

We need more frontline NHS staff and have done for years. The pay structure for junior doctors (and that is pretty much anyone who is not a Registrar or Consultant) is fundamentally broken.

What is interesting is that after their 7 years training doctors are one of the few groups that actually end up paying back their Student Loans. On the other side medical schools are expensive to run and although often over-subscribed, that is more due to there being insufficient places rather than too many prospective doctors.

This data center will be Europe’s first with hydrogen backup power

A Step In The Right Direction

At least they are using a fuel cell rather than switching to some sort of hydrogen ICE.

This may only be a tiny dent in thing but as a concept it has to be better. Yes, they hydrogen may not be entirely green to start with however will all these things we have to start somewhere.

Hydrogen may be inefficient however if you and goal is zero CO2 emissions, it is still better than fossil fuels. It can also be stored and overall if probably far less damaging to the environment than battery technologies.

Users sound off as new Google Workspace for Education storage limits near

Re: A lot of research data will never be read again

Whilst I can see why they may have done that, good luck in ever needing to get it back again.

The read costs for that tier are astronomical, bluntly it would have been better off on tape. I know that education gets some preferential pricing however the discounts on subscriptions are nowhere nears as generous as institutions used to get. We looked at this for shuffling around 500TB or stale data off our storage and it simply was not worthwhile.

List prices are just that but at sub 10p for everything else and £6 for archive reads/10k ops puts some perspective on things.

Source

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/pricing/details/storage/blobs/

Your data centre UPS could feed power to the smart grid, suggests research

The housing development does not need electricity, in the same way it does not produce sewage or water run-off.

Then the people moving in have no need for schools of doctor's surgeries. However the builders will have offset some of the environmental damage by planting a hedge or a few trees that invariably die within a year or two. This is what is needed to meet the planning requirements, nothing about the actual infrastructure that has to support it.

This is repeated up and down the country.

Sorry, feeling very cynical about this after going to a Q&A session for a local housing proposal on a "brown field site" that has been growing crops for years. The only time it is brown is when it has been ploughed. Apparently there is (was) some old building on one corner of the land that means the entire site of 3 fields is not "green field".

Am I Missing Something

Just like the articles about how car batteries that are idle at home can be used to power shortfalls in grid supply I have one pressing question.

What happens if you need all that power that should have been in the battery but is now reduced because it is been syphoned back into the grid to make up for a shortfall?

Nobody appears to be able to address this. A UPS is generally sized for a specific load and runtime. That needs to be available at all times to cover an event where the power is lost. What is the use of a UPS that has the runtime reduced because it has been exporting power to boil kettles in the advert break or because the wind is not blowing enough?

To our total surprise, Apple makes adding alternative payment systems to apps 'painful, expensive, clunky'

Re: The proper share is 5%

Maybe but it is easy money and something that most of their most customers appear happy to contribute to.

I know they don't have a choice but Apple set the precedent on this that everyone else followed. To be fair, a 30% profit margin on a service for Apple probably is a pittance but that is simply because the product is priced (and always has been) on what the market will stand. Apple customers (along with quite a few other premium brands) have very deep pockets and are prepared to put they hands into them.

Similarly Corian, Amtico, Miele, Maytag, Dyson, all brands that have products at the top end of the market that don't actually cost the price difference from cheaper products to produce.

There will be plenty of others that people can add to the list. Brand awareness and perceived value is important. Price and branding is as much a differentiator as the actual quality of the product.

Vice Society said to be behind digital break-in at UK umbrella and accounting group

Re: More of the same...

They may have had no other option.

Increasingly companies providing Cyber Insurance have their predefined hit list of what has to be done and the organisations that you have to user.

It is irrelevant whether they provide any value or not, the insurers are covering their arses because of the risks.

Now having been on the receiving end of one of these insurance-appointed cyber security companies it is my experience that they are utterly useless. Lots of hard words and instructions as to what you MUST do to provide information and close the door after the horse has bolted, all to little effect.

However this is a nice income stream for them and they are in an elevated position as "experts" because they have been instructed to handle the investigation and response by the insurer.

In this instance the response we were forced to follow caused more issues and risk than the actual incident (systems trashed due to conflicts of AV, performance hits due to increase in logging that provided more data than anyone could actually use and was so noisy, any unwanted activity could not be found.

It took nearly 4 days to upload 24 hours of zipped logs. Spot the problem there when this had to be done for around a month.

UK science stuck in 'holding pattern' on EU funding by Brexit, says minister

Re: Brexit means Brexit

The average person in the street as no clue as to how research funding works. As for those who did vote Brexit, even if they did understand, would have been taken in by the statement from the UK Government that it would match the lost funding.

The reality is that for most people in the UK research is something that just happens, their only interaction with it is putting some money in a charity box.

Funding

If I understood this correctly (and I may be wrong as there has been so much gibberish), EU research funding was going to be replaced with UK funding from Central Government.

Now I am guessing that what is happening is:

The UK Government has not provided the funding is said it would.

Collaborative research was not covered by this.

Researchers are running out of projects and money.

For research teams to be viable they need a pipeline of funding and research, otherwise staff will just do other things.

The UK has always been really duff when it comes to research funding, relying on industry, charities or the EU to provide the bulk of the money.

It just does not fit with the instant results culture that we have.

Amazon stretches working life of its servers an extra year, for AWS and its own ops

We have some Gen7 BL460s that were purchased in 2011 still running & still supported.

Yes, not for much longer and they are ancient and low powered but aside from a few failed disks they have been faultless.

The down side is that the longevity provides no incentive to replace them if they are still working.

Court of Appeal ruling offers hope for UK umbrella firm workers chasing holiday pay

Re: Good on you, Mate!

I would have thought the most likely outcome is that where the companies do still exist, they will simply decide to fold rather than pay out back-dated holiday pay.

Any money that does exist (and I would have thought it unlikely that there will be much) will just disappear.

Re: Lies

I believe that based on a previous article here, there are many umbrella companies registered in tax havens so there must be some benefit to the operators is doing so that disadvantages HMRC,

Tesla to disable 'self-driving' feature that allowed vehicles to roll past stop signs at junctions

Re: Rule following isn't always practical

Manual override, then the person making the decision can make the correct judgement and if they get ir wrong, take the consequences.

Correct, but programming in bad habits is the start of a very slippery slope, particularly at the moment where there appears to be absolutely no culpability against the people producing the vehicles.

This just shows why the law has to catch up quickly in the area of responsibility. The companies behind this have to be both accountable and be prosecuted.

If there are "X" number of accidents caused by software then increases consequences up to directors being imprisoned, just like poor drivers.

Re: Not a "bug"

In the UK a "Stop" sign is invariably used when the visibility is restricted with the aim hat drivers do not just shoot out without assessing the traffic.

"Stop" means just that, stop before proceeding, "Give Way" mean that traffic on the (usually main road) has the right of way.

In either case if you exit the junction and cause an accident, you are to blame.

Re: Not a "bug"

That this was even considered to be a good idea is beyond scary,

Self driving vehicles have to be perfect in how they operate and obey traffic controls. Programming in behaviour that emulates bad human drivers is incredible.

This just sums up the total free for all in this area and Tesla/Musk's attitude to everything they do. All the automated decision making has to be audited by third parties, if it cannot be or they will not permit it (and this is ANY company involved in this field) they have to disable the entire capability, maybe even lose there license to operate in the case of Waymo and so on.

Instant Ump: HP Inc's subscription ink services hiking prices from next month

Re: Ink?

You can but the the price on the label puts people off.

When there are ink jet printers for under £50 lined up on a shelf and one or two lasers at £250 which one will the average user (not the people reading El Reg) reach for?

Price wins every time. Laser printers are not considered as home use for the average person who will have signed up for Instant Ink. The lower cost of the printer and ink subscription is all about convenience and will win every time.

Re: Do you have to use HP ink?

Also the Instant Ink cartridges appear to have much more ink in than the ones you buy.

I had one cartridge that went peculiar shortly after I fitted it so did not have a replacement and a quick WebChat resulted in a new cartridge sent out next day. No issues or anything.

Re: Ink?

It is much easier to buy an inkjet than a laser, they are usually smaller as well.

Also (I don't know about the laser printers people have commented on) but the colour printer/scanner/copier function is what most people want.

They are cheap to buy (we all know why) and so are the default option. Laser is considered business and for a colour laser printer, hugely more expensive, particularly if you want the scanner/copier.

To be honest I think we use the scanner and copier more than the printer now.

Windows boss Panos Panay talks up 'new era of the PC' – translation: An era of new PCs

Re: "people accepting the upgrade offer to Windows 11 at twice the rate we saw for Windows 10."

Also, it just sneaks itself in as another update unless you tell it not to. Only after the deed is done do you realise what has happened.

At that point the average user is just going to get on with things and not bother trying to roll it back. Techie uses are not going to do the update to W11 unless it is for a very specific reason and as normal users will outnumber techie users probably by 1,000s or even 10,000s it is no surprise the MS are seeing more updates.

Twelve years after Intel was fined $1.2bn for unfairly running over rivals, an EU court says: No need to pay

Re: Brown Envelopes?

There was an article on here not that long ago about Intel getting a bung from the EU to setup a new factory.

So a double bung then,

Now that's wafer thin: Some manufacturers had less than five days of chip supplies, says Uncle Sam

Re: How to strengthen the chip supply chain within the US

I am not sure how making chips in the country the uses them helps if the supply chain is JIT.

Much of this was increased demand for one type, reduced demand from another and then difficulties in prodution.

Moving the point of production only removes shipping delays.

Ad blockers altering website code is not a copyright violation, German court rules

Re: Dont click

Easier said than done when for 99.9% of the population the sequence is:

Type something approaching the website or what you are looking for in the address bar.

Pick the top result that is always an ad.

Repeat until you find what you want or are sucked into using the search on the website you have ended up on.

Amazon is the absolute worst for this.

Search for something and most of the top results are ads are all pointing to Amazon taking you to a pages that tells you item xyz is not available a this price but here are some suggestions,.

Both the adverts or completely spurious link have done their job and sucked the unsuspecting user in. From not on most will just follow the links for the recommendations or use the search for that site.

Then you have the review sites where everything links back to Amazon. Money buys more money and influence.

Re: Great idea

Ah but there you are misguided....

They are placing these cookies to enhance your browsing experience.

Things like ensuring that you have adverts for something you searched on and have already bought or have no intention of buying.

Aggregating 100 year cookies with Facebook

Providing you a tailored browsing experience.

And similar marketing speak shite.

Team behind delayed ERP project was aware of problems but didn't inform Surrey County Council for months

And sadly the most difficult to find and employ......

Then when you do find one, they are usually at odds with the view from high up in the food chain because they understand what the customer actually wants.

Re: Scope Creep

There is also a very high possibility that this is IT/Manglement driven with this result that what IT believes the users want is what goes into the brief.

IT including IT project managers are utterly useless at actually finding out what the end user (or as the a know as "the customer") need to do.

This is repeated with monotonous regularity because the people who are the problem never believe that they are the root cause.

Everything is the fault of the users.

LG promises to make home appliance software upgradeable to take on new tasks

Re: so what do those dial thingies and buttons do ?

The issue is that is is now cheaper to have buggy software and a few push buttons or worse a touch screen than have real switches.

The excuse that is often touted is that it is more reliable.......

What they actually mean is "it is more convenient for the manufacturer".

The robots are coming! 12 million jobs lost to automation in Europe by 2040 – analyst

I feel that many have missed the point.

Society will not become richer as the money will all end up in the hands of a very small number of very wealthy corporations and people. Until the global issue of tax and offshoring is resolved, money will continue to be removed from general society.

If the tax take drops because there are fewer people paying tax then what?

You cannot get more back from the top of the heap because is is a global issue that realistically there is a lot of noise but no agreement. There are simply too many vested interests.

Many of the jobs that are cited are paid for by the state or are providing a service. That requires sufficient money into the state to pay for them or sufficient people paid enough to afford to pay for the services.

The only winners in automation are those are the top, what is happening is that the automation is becoming easier to move both up and down the pay scale job type & job technicality.

Say that there will be future jobs that we don't know about is on the same lines as BJ stating the solution to the UKs Climate Goals are to invest in technology we don't know exists yet.

It is also a numbers game.

What robotics will be doing is replacing huge numbers of the jobs that are currently in the mean wage bracket.

What will remain is the debris at the bottom that is too expensive to automate and an ever decreasing number of skilled positions.

There are only so many "managers" needed. What this is all about is short term gains for the (already very well off) people in the upper echelons of business with increased profits.

This is not sustainable as they will start to lose their market as those who are displaced can no longer afford to buy the products and services these companies offer. The current incumbents simply don't care as it falls under "not my problem".

This is not the same as the mechanisation of construction or replacing production lines with robots. The replacement jobs just don't exist in the numbers required and are unlikely to be created.

Robots replacing jobs is not just a business issue, there are huge moral and social issues as well. Currently in the race quick money the long term issues are being ignored.

UKCloud acquired: Public sector specialist finally bags investment from current chair and private equity after reporting steep losses

Re: A garbage expensive proposition

The problem is that quite a few of those functions are also needed if you run the service in a big cloud provider.

Availability is the responsibility of the provider, backup and DR is not.

These are points that are regularly overlooked in the quest that "Cloud Is Better".

There is always money available to fund management posts, not so for technical specialists.

Part of the reason behind this has been the years of outsourcing to big consulting firms leading to a drain of knowledge.

They you have the issue that generic management drones that are spewed out of every university "School of Management" have been employed that understand almost nothing. However they are now in positions of power so continue to recruit people who are equally skilled in nothing. Skilled technical professionals scare the crap out of them because we understand that these people are useless.

The final nail in the coffin has been that as skills have been lost due to outsourcing they bills to bring in the skills as contractors are too high compared to the sales garbage that is hawked round by the cloud outfits.

A trip for manglement out to Seattle or Redmond is easy and there is incentive.

BOFH: What a beautiful classic car. Shame if anything were to happen to it

Re: Fond memories

My Father had a Frogeye Sprite back in the days when he had just started work (I believe as an engineer for EMI when they used to actually make things). He was always bemoaning that he had sold it when it became impractical due to babies.

Of course the reality at the time would have been that he had no option but to sell it......

It is only year later when they became desirable classic cars.

There was also a story about him and his brother loading a milling machine into an Austin 7 to take back to their Dad's garage. The spare engine for that car lived in the old air-raid shelter in the garden along with all sorts of other "useful" junk.

Google sours on legacy G Suite freeloaders, demands fee or flee

But there are 2 huge caveats (when I looked)

You have to use GoDaddy for the domain

The domain is only used for the inbound emails. Anything you send uses the outlook.com address.

I could not find anyway or sorting the latter out and just gave up switching the friend I was helping setup email for her teaching using this,

In the end I just suggested she pay for a basic hosted service from LCN. Yes it costs but everything just works.

Japan solves 5G airliner conundrum: Keep mobe masts 200m from airport approach paths. That's it

Re: Who stands to gain?

I am not sure it is as simple as that.

The 200m is based on a lower power & the antenna being configured correctly.

Now in the grand scheme of things, it something does go wrong the consequences are potentially catastrophic.

Given that 5G is a new service and it appears that the driver and the organisations claiming that it is safe are the same people, there is a bit of a conflict of interests.

So, is it an over reaction by the FAA? possibly but they are under a significant amount of scrutiny still after the 737 Max fiasco.

At the end of the day, aircraft safety surely has to take precedence of an additional form of connecting phone to data......

Tesla driver charged with vehicular manslaughter after deadly Autopilot crash

Re: There are no red lights on the freeway?

Err, is this not one of the big issues....

All this autonomous driving stuff and the grossly misnamed "Tesla Auto Pilot" is utterly incapable of dealing reliably and safely with the unexpected.

The really big and scary issues with Tesla are:

The marketing is just total bull

Many of the people who buy then appear to be idiots

So far Tesla have had almost no comeback on any of the issues around this. What there has been is nothing more than a minor slap on the wrist.

There is also still no way of reliably apportioning blame to the chimps that design, test and market these systems.

COVID-19 was a generational opportunity for change at work – and corporate blew it

Practicalities

There are many issues at work here and as some background I changed jobs during the pandemic.

At the start we were office based though working from home was a possibility, very few took that option and if they did it was only 1 day a week. Where they did it was usually on a specific day to cover some recurring family obligation so was invariably those with long commutes. In March 2020 we decamped to 100% home working and more recently last year that became the default for support (not just IT) staff.

Now this is where the caveats start to come in. There has been very little effort to ensure that those working from home have a suitable environment and equipment. For some there was already a dedicated "office" or similar space so the transition in terms of DSE etc was easy. However there are many who were just working on a laptop on a table.

Working from home tends to be more successful for those at the higher pay grades because:

They have larger houses so have space.

They are further through the family cycle (if appropriate).

They generally have longer and more expensive commutes so are financially much better off.

For my new position it is remote (WFH) as the starting point with no requirement to come into the office as part of the normal working day. As part of this requirement I had to go through a survey to ensure that I had appropriate space and equipment. As a previous post experienced. if there was a shortfall on the equipment then it would be supplied. But I still needed an appropriate space and there are many who do not have that.

Now take the other side, and this is something that is increasingly a problem. I have lost count of the number of one-to-one or group calls where there are issues with children or other noise in the background from one or more participants. This can be as simple as making communication difficult to bringing the call to a standstill. It is easy to say just go on mute but if you are actively participating in the meeting, then is not possible if there is continuous noise. Then add to this all the issues of sound quality that can vary from very good to appalling. There are times where so much of the higher frequencies are lost from a participant that it is very difficult to understand what is being said.

So, yes WFH or Remote Working is here to stay but everyone has to be realistic about what is achievable and the overall impact (positive or negative) on everyone. There are some companies that are being idiotic about the office component but equally there are others that are not being proactive enough on the WFH side. If the latter is no fixed it is only a matter of time before the law suits start flying due to people having issues with working in conditions that would be totally unacceptable in the office. You can see this being the next PPI or Diesel Emissions claim bonanza.

Epoch-alypse now: BBC iPlayer flaunts 2038 cutoff date, gives infrastructure game away

Re: A fix for this

Or more possibly, anything what so ever on the BBC......

US-China chip cold war? It's only helping the Middle Kingdom, silicon makers warn

Re: Sanctions

The Chinese also think long-term, not just a year or two ahead by decades. This is what is created the powerhouse that is now China and why they are so successful.

If something does not work, they go back, learn, refine & repeat until is does. All the things the "developed" countries used to do in the 19th/20th Centuries before short term money making on stock markets became so important.

The only way for the West to even start to be able to regain parity on manufacturing is to move the view ahead beyond greedy shareholders, Venture Capitalist funds and politics.

All have been completely destructive in the race for quick money.

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

Re: The town of a thousand roundabouts ...

Possibly incentives due to Honda moving out?

All these massive developments: warehousing, distribution centres and data centres has one thing in common, the planning applications all are filled with total lies on the issues of jobs,

Here in the Midlands we 1000s of acres are disappearing under distribution centres, the most recent gumpf sent out to residents is for the DB Schenker site at Hinckley.

Apparently it will create 8000 jobs locally. That is simply not possible unless it is 8000 ZHC that add nothing to the economy. Similar for the East Midlands Airport site, Magna Park at Lutterworth and the monster, speculative build a Nothhampton.

They are all built with companies setup specifically for the site to provides means of getting incentives and then folding at a loss.

Weed dispensary software company's ambitions pruned after Spotify trademark clash

Re: What a bunch of dopes

Maybe they have been sampling the merchandise.......

Anonymous employee review site Glassdoor research: Tech companies dominate the best places to work

Re: I know my last company...

That maybe the case however there is now an industry that provides services doing just that.

Look at the people who have been discredited due to some post on social media when they were a student or something.

Equally there are plenty of people out there with reams of social media content that align exactly with their views (Katy Hopkins is an excellent example). The big difference is that the latter is current active & valid whereas trawling through posts that are long forgotten from years ago is simply destructive and is usually for malicious purposes.

That these companies exist is part of the problem and equally that there are people prepared to pay for the services they offer.