* Posts by Roj Blake

1652 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Aug 2013

Sunak's defunct SaaS scheme spent seven percent of budget designed to help 100,000 SMEs

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Re: One for the how not to text books

Were Infosys on the approved vendors list, by any chance?

UK finance minister promises NHS £3.4B IT investment to unlock £35B savings

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Re: Past history

I used to drive through his constituency on the way to work.

Needless to say, some of his posters during election campaigns were defaced in an all-too-predictable manner.

City of London ditches Oracle for SAP in search of ERP enlightenment

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Not Like Other Local Authorities

I'm not sure how relevant comparisons to other local authorities are, as the CoL is very different from the others. For a start, hardly anyone actually lives there!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London_Corporation

Vietnam to collect biometrics - even DNA - for new ID cards

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Re: Coming to a govt building near you

There are enough Blairites influencing Labour policy to make me fully expect this to happen in the UK in the next couple of years.

Someone had to say it: Scientists propose AI apocalypse kill switches

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Re: No kill switches in AIs in island volcanoes

Why would a white cat be stroking Blofeld?

OSIRIS-REx probe sucked up more asteroid crumbs than hoped

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Re: So basically..

According to Ireland's Supreme Court, Subway bread isn't actually bread

European Court of Human Rights declares backdoored encryption is illegal

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Re: Puzzling indeed.

France has, on multiple occasions, offered to let the UK build a migrant processing centre in France. Such a facility would provide a safe and legal route for claiming asylum in the the UK and as such would destroy the business of the people traffickers overnight.

The UK has always declined the offer.

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Re: Well good thing the UK had Brexit

In 2022, France received 115,078 applications for asylum, compared to 89,146 for the UK.

Southern Water cyberattack expected to hit hundreds of thousands of customers

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Re: As a Southern Water customer*, When they said "Sorry we leaked your shit"...

Now we've left the dastardly EU, we no longer have to worry about their nanny state directives and are finally free to swim in properly polluted seas.

British sewage for British beaches!

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Re: As a Southern Water customer*, When they said "Sorry we leaked your shit"...

It was 1989 so yes, during Thatcher's time as PM.

Upstart retrofits an Nvidia GH200 server into a €47,500 workstation

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They won't need many nutters to make a tidy profit though.

And luckily for them, there are a lot of nutters out there.

Tesla's Cybertruck may not be so stainless after all

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Re: Something I have yet to grok...

It's for making cash for Elon.

Quarter of polled Americans say they use AI to make them hotter in online dating

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Re: Can someone explain?

You say that by definition most people are average, but most people have an above average number of legs.

Venus has a quasi-moon and it's just been named 'Zoozve' for a sweet reason

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Wallace

After one of the great lunar explorers.

Search chatbots? Pah, this startup's trying on Yahoo's old outfit of web directories

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Re: Dogpile?

There was also an app called Copernic that collated results from multiple search engines.

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Information Retrieval

Wasn't Information Retrieval Michael Palin's department in Brazil?

Angry mob trashes and sets fire to Waymo self-driving car

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Re: Vaguely reminiscent of the opening of a film ?

Arnie vs Johnnycab in Total Recall.

The spyware business is booming despite government crackdowns

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Re: "can only be sold to governments and used to fight terrorism"

If a firefighter fights fires and a crimefighter fights crime, what do freedom fighters fight?

AWS staffer shows off the workplace that used to be a prison

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Breakfast

Does the staff canteen serve porridge for breakfast?

Cory Doctorow has a plan to wipe away the enshittification of tech

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Re: It's everywhere

Water privatisation has led to literal enshittification.

Mozilla slams Microsoft for using dark patterns to drive Windows users toward Edge

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Re: Unfortunately .....

Also, the report mysteriously doesn't show up when they search for it on Bing.

Fujitsu finance chief says sorry for IT giant's role in Post Office Horizon scandal

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Are you Paula Vennells?

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Re: Unfitting corporate punishment

It balances about as well as a Horizon nightly summary.

Elon Musk's brain-computer interface outfit Neuralink tests its tech on a human

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Re: The silicon chip inside her head, gets switched to overload

Tell me why

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I notice he's not put it in his own brain.

Funny that.

Hubble telescope spots tiniest water-rich world in orbit

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Might Still Have Ice?

If the planet is locked in such a way that one side is alway facing its star (like with Mercury), then might there be ice or liquid water on the dark side?

We put salt in our tea so you don't have to

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Re: Some will insist that milk must be added after the tea

If you're making tea in a mug, then the milk has to go in after the water, to ensure the correct temperature for brewing.

For the teapot method though, putting milk into the cup before the tea helps prevent your best porcelain getting stained.

Apple's on-device gen AI for the iPhone should surprise no-one. The way it does it might

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Re: on-device gen AI for the iPhone

Once it's there, they can sue other companies for having rounded AI on their phones.

UK water giant admits attackers broke into system as gang holds it to ransom

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From the River to the Sea

Is Southern Water's sewage release policy.

OSIRIS-REx's stuck asteroid sample canister finally cracked open by NASA

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Re: Thanks again, guys

On the other hand, the hatch would have popped off without any help at all had the cannister been made by Boeing.

Microsoft 365's add-on avalanche is putting the squeeze on customers

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Re: this particular scenario is called "lying"

Alexander Johnson might disagree with you there.

ICO fines spam slinging financial services biz

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Debt Relief

Maybe they could ask someone for help with their debts, or consolidate everything into one handy monthly payment?

But they'll probably just declare bankruptcy and set up under a new name.

At last: The BBC Micro you always wanted, in Mastodon form

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Re: Never understood why anyone found it interesting

Why it was interesting can be summed up in one word.

Elite.

Post Office boss unable to say when biz knew Horizon could be remotely altered

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Re: s/unable/unwilling/

Pardons will be unacceptable to the victims, as in law it would mean that they still stole the money and they wouldn't get any compensation.

UK public sector could save £20B by swerving mega-projects and more, claims chief auditor

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Re: Erm

Tax avoidance is legal, yes. However, very often it's achieved through exploiting loopholes in the system. Tax revenue can be increased by closing those loopholes.

Infosys co-founder doubles down on call for 70-hour work weeks

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Re: Slavery

I think you need to check the historical context of "work sets one free"

Hint: the work wasn't being done by Italians or Spaniards.

Broadcom ditches VMware Cloud Service Providers

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Re: Is late stage capitilism simply borked or are tech billionaires arseholes?

Yes.

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Re: The End

The late*, lamented Memset used to offer an OpenStack cloud amongst their products, and they were tiny compared to the big players. They also used Xen rather than VMWare for their more traditional VPSs.

*The name's still out there, but they're now just yet another Iomart brand.

Adios, dead zones: Starlink relays SMS in space for unmodified phones on Earth

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T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert

With a name like that, no wonder there are still loonies talking about the radiation hazards of mobile phones.

Silicon Valley weirdo's quest to dodge death – yours for $333 a month

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Headmaster

Re: X (née Twitter) ?

It's definitely nee.

HP customers claim firmware update rendered third-party ink verboten

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There's a reason...

...why the company's name is HP Inc.

Former Post Office boss returns CBE to sender over computer system scandal

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If you're going to have a go at Sir Ed Davey, please take the effort to at least get his name right.

And I'm pretty certain that Starmer didn't personally authorise every prosecution carried out by the CPS when he was in charge.

HPE said to be moving in on $13B deal for Juniper Networks

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A Bargain

$13B seems like a bargain to me, when compared to what some other tech companies have been sold for in recent years.

Avoiding AI-capable PCs will be impossible by 2027

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Or worse still: this

Watermarks on AI art a futile game of digital hide-and-seek

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Another Thing Not in Common

There's one other thing that AI therapists don't have in common with ones - confidentiality.

Swarms of laser-flown bots visiting a planet light years away – and more NASA-funded projects revealed

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Re: How do they slow down?

Obviously, you build another enormous laser at the other end and use that.

Expert sounds alarm bells over upcoming NHS data platform

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Re: Horizon 2.0

Not to worry - they'll be employing a new VP with specialist knowledge of the UK system in 2025, who will be able to assuage your concerns. You'll know he's really good at his job, as they'll be paying him £2M a year despite working only three days a month.

His name?

Mr R. Sunak.

Is it time for 6G already? Traffic analysis says yep

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Re: Wasted

Confirming that using a Three unlimited SIM for home broadband works out pretty nicely.

Sorry for swallowing all the local bandwidth.

Zuckerberg hunkers down in Hawaii to wait out apocalypse

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Re: What these type of people dont realise.......

Unless he can enforce loyalty by knowing the dirty secrets of everyone on the payroll. If only he had access to an enormous database of social media accounts...

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Why build a bunker?

Why build a bunker when everyone knows the correct thing to do when "The Event" happens is to go to the Winchester, have a nice cold pint, and wait for it all to blow over.