* Posts by NeilPost

1881 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Jan 2014

UK minister tells telcos to share telegraph poles if they can't lay cable underground

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Re: They do.

Or round here where CityFibre have been causing havoc with dangerous/illegal wildcat mobile roadworks, burying their fibre within a millimetre of the minimum allowed depth.

I look forward to it regularly being dug up by Warwickshire County Council Highways (and sub-contractors) along with Openreach, Cadent Gas, Severn Trent, Vermin Media as the usual miscreants.

Attacks on UK fiber networks mount: Operators beg govt to step in

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Re: Pouring in petrol, and setting the whole lot alight

Could well be retribution attacks for the chaos caused around town by dangerous illegal wildcat ‘mobile roadworks’ (if there is such a thing) - Vodafone owned CityFibre has been particularly impactful in my town - replication of service already provided by Virgin Media Cable and BT 21CN fibre rollout in town.

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

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Re: Cynical? Me?

It might be a necessary, if unpopular thing.

The only way to make the UK work - and I mean merely not shit, aspiring to be good - is increased spending on core things. Esp the complete broken local Government situation.

Not like the fucking Tories haven’t massively jacked up taxes to the highest label since 1948.

https://amp.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/mar/07/uk-taxes-have-reached-1948-levels-but-the-contrast-between-the-budgets-is-stark

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Re: Cynical? Me?

The biggest threat to survival is the bonkers NHS Trust and Integrated Health Boards ‘choice’ system. You basically have multiple functions duplicated many times across England, with each having a CEO, FD, People Team, Procurements, Estates, IT Teams all doing stuff ‘locally’ and part using national backbone systems.

The ROI isjust nuts. More like £24bn to save £2bn.

Copilot pane as annoying as Clippy may pop up in Windows 11

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Re: Not sure it will be that intrusive

Are you the single Edge user out there?

Thankfully in Euro-land we can delete it.

AI to fix UK Civil Service's bureaucratic bungling, deputy PM bets

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Re: Time wasting form filling ..

I’d be happy to just be able to send a fucking e-mail to my GP or HMRC. It seems beyond them.

My local hospital is happy to correspond by e-mail for stuff.

Plans to heat districts with datacenters may prove too hot to handle

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Re: Locally it can work

It always was nuts. Build some greenhouses next to them on colder climates and grow tomatoes etc.

AWS Tomatoes for Amazon Fresh.

City council megaproject to spend millions for manual work Oracle system was meant to do

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Yes. School crossing will need an enhanced DBS check for a start. Think of the children.

Binmen just need to be able to move a Wheelie bin, press a button and make arbitrary decisions on whether to put a waste prohibition notice on one.

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20% local tax increase - rubbish.

In England, councils with social care duties can raise council tax by up to 4.99%, without triggering a referendum. Others can increase it by up to 2.99%.

40k servers, 400k CPUs and 40 PB of storage later... welcome to Google Cloud

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Re: The Fonz

Jumping the Shark more like.

Legal campaigners challenge UK.gov decision to redact NHS-Palantir contract

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I’d be happy just to be able to send a fucking e-mail to my GP.

Reported $60M Reddit deal signed to train AI models with user data

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Re: Really!?

Perhaps it’s training the Exclusion Data set to wash the raw LLM results through before reporting.

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

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Re: Frying pan

Yes. Former Peterborough Software (now after some company churn NEC Software Services) was a market segment leader for much of the 70-90’s in Payroll and HR.

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Re: Isn't it odd

You would have thought that would be a slam dunk for a Government IT Oversight function … but all they want to do is endless fucking Procurement Frameworks these days.

Rest in peace CCTA. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Computer_and_Telecommunications_Agency

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Re: Isn't it odd

They has to deliver a Custom ‘Yam-Yam’ language pack. They were hoping to on-sell to Sandwell, Walsall and Wolverhampton Councils.

Virgin Media to stand up rival network operator to BT Openreach

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Re: no mention of speed

Funnily though .. only France is on the front page for internet speed … and its average is only 89 mbit/s. Spain ranks far below the UK and Andorra - well you could almost cover the country with a Gigabit Ethernet switch to cover that landmass - so not really representative for comparison … and the headline grabbing speeds mentioned about are not that widely available - certainly not national.

https://www.speedtest.net/global-index#mobile

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Re: More BS from Vermin

Well plus zzz

“UK telco Virgin Media is opening up its fixed line broadband networks to other internet service providers (ISPs) for the first time, setting up a rival national infrastructure provider to BT's Openreach in the proces”

and “16 million Customers”

National network rival my ass.

Vermin only serve profitable locations, have very poor geographical network reach outside of large suburban and have no PSO.

Microsoft says it'll throw €3.2B at AI ops in Germany

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Re: wurst

Hopefully AI Powered Bing will get the ‘Shall we invade Poland’ question right and not a racist positive summarisation of the benefits of Bkitzkrieg..

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Re: Lesson 1

Develop, but not employ. Plus how many jobs will AI destroy.

CoPilot is just lipstick on a pig trying to automate the incoherent shit that is M365/Office/Teams.

Ford pulls the plug on EV strategy as losses pile up

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Re: killing top selling models in favour sub evs

That’s why the best selling vehicle in the UK is now the Ford Puma 1.0L EcoBoost MHeV cross-over.

Faraday plots a 64-core Arm chip with Intel inside

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Not news

Not really news considering Intel was the lead ARM chip supplier before flogging StrongArm/XScale to Marvel for a pittance … in 2006 in the biggest act of IT corporate stupidity I can think until HP and Autonomy.

Two of India's most prominent startup tech giants are in deep trouble

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So does BrexIT and shIT.

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On the other hand ‘old finance’ seem happy to be pushing interest rates ever up, against the direction of current level or downward travel and institutionally fucking customers over.

Consumption driving interest rates to choke off demand, was never going to do anything other than impoverish the masses, increase government debt at the expense of lining banker and commodity trader/speculator war profiteering during the recent producer led inflation spike. All artificial.

Return to Office mandates boost company profits? Nope

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Re: Just reduced my office time

Noisy impersonal Open Plan offices with acres of glass, necessitating blinds, necessitating artificial light, with ‘smart’ climate control that makes it both too hot and too cold (no-one is ever happy)…..

…. sick building syndrome.

Amazon extends the life of its servers to six years, expects $900m benefit in 90 days

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Re: “ the change will contribute $900 million to net income in Q1 of 2024 alone”

Depreciation of Tangible Assets.

The I in EBITDA is being stretched over 6 years now instead of 5 (was 4).

Microsoft's vision for the future of work is you trusting Redmond to get AI right

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But Siri - like Alexa - is dumb as shit.

Amazon’s AI generated shopping review summaries of late don’t hint there is much improvement coming.l any time soon.

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Crypto is back with Feb Approval “ETF’s”… for another round of fleecing fuckwits. You don’t even need to buy the stocks/commodities to play with them - LOl. What could go wrong. .

https://www.npr.org/2024/01/10/1222641640/bitcoin-etf-sec-crypto-blackrock-fidelity-ark-investing

Virgin Media comes top of the flops for customer complaints

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Re: Virgin Media comes top of the flops for customer complaints

Quote from article “ "As Ofcom acknowledges, the rise is largely due to its investigation announcement in July, which subsequently generated a higher number of complaints than would ordinarily be expected. However, it should be noted that overall complaints about Virgin Media products still represent a very small proportion of our customer base.‘

… no Ofcom, it’s because they are shite… and so are you.

UK merger of Vodafone and Three in competition watchdog's crosshairs

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Re: Vodafone … to create the scale to compete against incumbent BT …

Indeed the largest global with their former global reach around the world and massive stake in Verizon.

Much pissed up the wall, or gutted from the business in special dividends.

Intel warns of Q1 nosedive... and its shares follow suit

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Re: Still beating the Gelsinger horse

Shoe in for a job at Broadcom then.

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Re: Microsoft to the rescue

Windows RT again ?

… and the closely related Window’s Phone is long dead and buried.

As NSA buys up Americans' browser records, Uncle Sam is asked to simply knock it off

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Re: Barking at the wrong tree

Yet the GOP and NSA nutters continue with asinine debate about what the Second Amendment means whilst this unlawful rapeand pillage of data continues largely unabated and above the law:

Huawei prepares to split from Android on consumer devices with HarmonyOS Next

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Re: It’s Linux

What apart from Samsung and Tizen?!

Or BlackBerrySecureOS (formerly BlackBerry OS10 and QNX)

Or LG and WebOS.

They are ten a penny. Android is still trouncing them …ask Samsung. You. An’t bet bigger the man that…. as a multiple sector top manufacturer.. and literally the supply chain.

Google building datacenter campus on the outskirts of London

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Re: Why London?

Somewhere Cheaper - like say Moray West - close to the Wind Farm?

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

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Re: No sympathy

From a home PoV, it’s still relatively affordable.

6 User Family - inc 1Tb One Drive per user and full fat local apps (PC or Mac) and Mobile if you want - is still only £67 for a full year retail key on Amazon.

If you don’t like that, single user full software copies of Office 21 for £10-20 an Amazon and other download key led retailers.

BT to spell out contract price hikes in pounds and pence

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Re: Where the fuck did UK journalists go to school ?

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/604270a5d3bf7f1d0fdfd44e/Super_deduction_factsheet.pdf

‘Plant and machinery’ has a very wide interpretation, and the super deduction was 130% recently 2021-2021 and was replaced on expiry by ‘full expensing”.

“For expenditure incurred from 1 April 2021 until the end of March 2023, companies can claim 130% capital allowances on qualifying plant and machinery investments. Under the super-deduction, for every pound a company invests, their taxes”

https://swoopfunding.com/uk/government-support/full-expensing/

Tesla owners in deep freeze discover the cold, hard truth about EVs

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Re: Norway

Looking at BBC weather it’s -18C overnight there on Friday.

Eben Upton on Sinclair, Acorn, and the Raspberry Pi

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Re: The tube

The

"We talk a lot about the BBC Micro, because it's a machine that I had – it's a machine a lot of people had – but if you think about the actual impact, probably the Sinclair products are the ones that had more impact. They had more impact because they sold more units. And they sold more units because they cost less."

Is a bit off in my view. Most people learned to program the BBC at school. Plus it ultimately led to the Archimedes and ARM CPU… and obvs the Taspberry Pi.

The lasting legacy of ZX 81/Spectrum is a bit kore limited- Rare, GTA?

The lasting legacy of Commodore … I’m struggling to see what C64 and Amiga brought.

Big Cloud deploys thousands of GPUs for AI – yet most appear under-utilized

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Re: Not sure how you can directly link revenue to utilisation

Meanwhile… Siri, Alexa and Google continue to be dumb as shit.

How governments become addicted to suppliers like Fujitsu

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Re: Sir Humphrey Appleby

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Computer_and_Telecommunications_Agency

Swap Sir Humphrey for Michael Hestletine.

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CCTA

You could do with something to manage this and promote government tech savvy in Computers, software, communications, emergency and military services comms and provide hosting.

A Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency for want of a better name ……

… oh dear torn apart by Government interference - read the history.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Computer_and_Telecommunications_Agency

Boffins demo self-eating rocket engine in Scotland

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Re: Interesting but....????

Commonly payload is atop of the rocket… so it feels inherently a bit iffy, without some structure around the self-eating rocket. Akin to the tool you use for sealant/caulk/no more nail cartridges.

It seems like a great idea until you consider the top loading is at the opposite end to the pushing bit.

Maybe for strap-on boosters only.

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One for SpaceX then.

Uncle Sam wants to make it clear that America's elections are very, very safe

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Re: Well, to a certain point

Though you must agree they are asshats.

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Re: "From whom, exactly, we wonder"

Like with most hysteria, the furriner’s are getting blamed… and the real threat is provocateurs internally- gerrymandering and obfuscating process. Postal voting or drop-off elimination for example.

As in the UK the recent photo/id voting nonsense did more to disenfranchise voters that any perception of voter fraud fixed - there was none, and historically none.

Welcome to 2024: Volkswagen really is putting ChatGPT into cars as a gabby copilot

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Re: Can it reach out, though?

A CarPlay or Android Auto App would at least be far be better than fucking about losing your infotainment back to the car’s built in stuff and trying to get your CarPlay/Android auto back on screen whilst driving.

Expert sounds alarm bells over upcoming NHS data platform

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Re: Fujutsu?

They were a core partner in the catestrophic failed NHS NPfIT in the 2000’s. Well worth a read for anyone involved in this - doing or oversight.

Mobileye shares crash after warning of automotive customers' chip glut

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Who wants self driving?

Who wants self-driving other than bean-counters looking to get rid of professional drivers ??

Retail customers want built in integrated dashcam, USB ports in the right places, the ability to switch off lane assist permanently, truly Wireless Car-Play, CarPlayAndroid Auto and apps that is less dumb - Amazon Music looking at you here - , better gas mileage, less clumsy infotainment systems, auto update (and satnav data uploads) of car tech via an end of day connection to your home broadband etc

… and definitely no subscriptions for stuff thou have bought outright. Fuck BMW here.

UK officials caught napping ahead of 2G and 3G doomsday

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Re: Going to be awkward

They are obviously doing it Agile.

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Re: Going to be awkward

BoJo promised FTTP to 100% of the country by 2025 don’t worry. It’s going really well. Just like Brexit.

https://www.theregister.com/2019/07/17/boris_johnsons_promise_of_fullfibre_by_2025_is_pie_in_the_sky/