Posts by lsces 155 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jan 2015
Since the tools are simply crap why shouldn't we blame them for giving crap information? None of them have any intelligence at all and until THE TOOLS start asking WHY then any content they produce needs to be taken with a pinch of salt, and YES - sod privacy - potentially dangerous threads SHOULD be automatically flagged and the tools producer should be liable for not following up on that!
It is a pity that there is no archive of the lives of domain names. When they were live if they no longer exist, who 'hijacked them' and when and so on. Old domains that are now hosts to fraud and crap with no easy way of ascertaining when that change took place and in my own case being unable to restore a domain that is now randomly forwarding to an unrelated third party :( Old links still work, but not to the content that they refer to, and so some means of flagging that fact would be useful especially given the amount of fraudulent sites that are active today?
One of my CNC machines still has it running a copy of Mach3 and throwing the milling head around reliably and safely. No internet connection needed, one just plugs a stick in with the Gcode, much the same as the newer CNC printer and laser cutter. I can well imaging that the ticket machine will have a number of pieces of hardware controlled directly from it's parallel port ...
Certainly none of the crap I am being served up by the current string of Advanced Idiots shows any signs of things 'moving forward'. Until I can actually tell the idiot that the information is crap and more important until it also has a memory of MY context over time then all we have is yet another example of failure to address the real problem?
That much of the trash served up is biased by what I consider 'American prejudice' add to the problems. I can see a very good case for NHS 111 automation, but it needs to start from a BRITISH based training set with BRITISH guidelines. That my phones health apps keep pushing the American guide lines and is unable to admit that it can't cope with my own heart condition means that even the crap context that it does have is broken and the advice is pointless!
As with all earlier 'search engines' ... one has to know just what TO ASK to get the right answers. ALL of my current interaction with the 'AI chatbots' have failed to show any intelligence in addressing the real question and in a number of cases actually took a lot of time addressing the wrong target. A normal 'search' gave me the answer a lo quicker and when correcting the 'AI tool' it always seems to apologise for not actually giving the correct answer in the first place! As with search engines of the past, we have to relearn how to get the right answer which often means we need to actually know that answer before wording the question? Even more so with Advanced Idiot tools ;)
"While it is possible to extract useful data from a basic SQL dump" ... having started on dBase I tend to forget that many 'modern' databases are probably the whole reason Horizon is a piece of crap? But I never had any problem pulling data into Firebird from often strange formats and making it usable. My point perhaps is that better planning in the first place so make the raw data accessible what ever the original source? I've got 30+ year old archives that are still perfectly accessible today ...
The question perhaps is just what information was actually needed? If a system like say Horizon was built properly in the first case, then any competent accountant could have verified just what amounts of money had been paid and to whom? And all of that data would have been backed up annually as part of the annual accounts? It should not need to be able to run old software to access the raw data at all and certainly a migration SHOULD have included access to the previous years raw data?
But don't tell the boss that ...
All of my email traffic is archived and backed up locally and that includes a number of long running support lists. I have been asked on a number of occasions either why do I keep 25+ year old traffic or why don't I just leave it on the server, but I don't have to worry about either the volume of stored messages or 'exceeding my quota', and I can go back through the history of a development at leisure. If that history was duplicated across many other users then it would remain available and THAT is what cloud computing should be about? Independent duplication not tied to one particular monopoly and protected from this sort of harassment.
That many key elements of the development scene have been hijacked by corporate greed just makes a transparent shared network even more essential. No reliance on the likes of github's central strangle hold, or any of the other single supplier systems?
"Obsolete code remaining in production is user/operator/admin error; not a shortcoming of the language."
Guilty as charged ;)
Up until last week my websites were all still running on PHP7.3 with Nginx and Firebird3. It's taken 6 months of work, but I switched to a new machine last week which has PHP8.4.10 and the code is running without any deprecated or warning messages, although I did have to hack both adoDB and Smart5 to achieve that. bitweaver started life in PHP3 and so lots of things needed to be rewritten, adding namespace has a mare of a problem and the simple fact that EVERYTHING has now to be defined is painful when templates and the like are designed to quietly default to false when a feature is not being activated. Adding !empty() everywhere just added to the work. Do I think PHP has 'progressed', no, the PHP7.3 code was clean, stable and secure so there was really no need to do all the work. NOW I need to make sure all the code is properly recorded on github :( Then perhaps I can think about making phpgedview run on PHP8.4 ...
The fact that we HAVE to have graphics even when the machine is only configured for text console is irritating. I've just set up a new server which has a GT710 graphics card as the processor does not have a graphics port. The AMD Ryzen5 5600 was sitting on the shelf simple because I had not twigged that it would not provide graphics on the motherboard that was bought with it, but at least the listings do now flag things better. One gets used to things like 'graphics' built into the motherboard ;) Having to manage graphics settings from the command line to get the text screen to display has been fun. But since it's normally only used in an emergency it's not a problem ... ssh into the servers is the normal access port and does not need some high power graphics card on the desktop machine?
I stand by the statement that when initially dealing with IBM, there was not even a license agreement in place for 86-DOS. The purchase followed later after a single licence had been sold to IBM.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/86-DOS and that Douglas Adams's quote perhaps sums it up ... https://www.azquotes.com/quote/357838
With regards processors, the IEEE article is a good summary. I was USING the TMS9900 at that time and had a development system driven by it. Yes it was quirky, but so was the PC at that time. I had a memory that AMD was producing a third option at that time, but I may be getting that mixed up with the AMD 29000 which appeared later? That today there is not a single x86 based device in mobile devices also speaks for itself? That said I've just pulled a new machine together with an AMD Ryzen processor, with Linux driving it because the price was right :) The windows machine is going nowhere as Microsoft will not update it to W11 'because the hardware is not good enough'.
Where would we be today if IBM had done a better job 45 years ago?
The main problem has always been that each trust had it's own private systems and did not talk to any others doing the same thing. Not just the NHS but across all public services. Today we are seeing the good trusts now being forced to an American straight jacket which is preventing them from their own progress plans ... which SHOULD have included rolling out the good stuff to all trusts. Open source gets a bad press at times but it's key element is sharing knowledge, and if all the existing IT departments got their acts together and started to share then we would not need some proprietary third party system, and perhaps ALL of this information could be managed on totally UK based services.
Licence free database systems with no limits on number of users and the like and open standards as to just what information packets are used along with proper security on just what level of information is permitted in a package, duplicated across multiple sites without the straight jacket of some proprietary third party 'cloud supplier' ... the whole point of the cloud originally was that anybody could connect with anybody not be restricted to other machines on the same mega monopoly supplier.
"Another thing you can do, if any of those domains are yours, is simply add an A record to the DNS for it to one of them, that presumably has SSL certs. Then you can connect to https://servername.yourdomain.com:port (that's how I get around this)"
Which is exactly how things are set up at the moment, but having written the original post HAS answered the question posed and I will slip an IP certificate in the mix since it's not going to cost anything. Without LetsEncrypt I would be spending a lot of money on alternatives ...
I have a fix IP address ... with a dozen domains hosted on it ... and if I put in the ip address direct I already get redirected to the default website ... OK the initial connect is insecure but it redirects to sites already in my LetsEncrypt folio of certificates. Does having a certificate for the ip address give me anything else other than stopping Firefox moaning if I add the https:// ? Without the domain name one can only get at the raw devices ...
And I'm finally back in control of most of the desktop ...
An update Monday resulted in my not being able to browse to sites other than opensuse. Several hours later I found a hidden KDEWallet window that was waiting for me to give a password so that the wifi could be connected ... not that I actually needed it! ... the real problem was down to a wrong DNS setting which came about because LAST week I lost 3 days when the BT Business Hub decided it did not want to work at all and I had to hack things to get the local network talking. Anyway, Tuesday I had X11 running as it had been, but the 'global size' setting was not playing ball and after some time I gave in and switched to wayland just to see if it would play ball, which it sort of did. But just as many problems that do not compensate for the alleged advantages. Yesterday was spent trying to get something stable in wayland and not succeeding.
This morning a post appeared on one of the threads I was using which brought out a light bulb moment. "Log in as root to set the font on Myrlyn ... it runs as root" ... gave it a try, and of cause everything was fine on BOTH X11 and wayland ... So despite the fact that I am the only person using this machine I created a new user and we are back in business. YES something has been upset the the latest updates to tumbleweed in relation to X11, but many of the problems with wayland that had prevented me using it previously vanished. Just how many files do need removing to restore a 'clean' state in either system?
It's taken a few hours to get the key apps moved from one user to another. Another layer of aggro which has been helped by the fact I've been through a LOT of this over the past months and have an assortment of notes on how to 'hand adjust' many of the layout bits hidden away in many different config files which needed moving to the new profile.
OH for a "window.zoomLevel": which one sets at the SYSTEM level?
Do I like wayland any better? No I can't see any reason that X11 could not simply have been restored to how it worked across multiple displays many years ago ...
Quote from Douglas Adams from 2001?
"The idea that Bill Gates (one of the founders of Microsoft) has appeared like a knight in shining armour to lead all customers out of a mire of technological chaos neatly ignores the fact that it was he, by peddling second rate technology, led them into it in the first place..."
Had this on my wall for years ...
There's a button "Provide Coverage Feedback" under the little map. ... YES but it does NOT allow you to flag that while there is an indication we can get signal, the reality is not the same! The potted answers are no use to anybody?
According to the previous maps and this one, I am in an area with good indoor coverage on Vodafone, and I am paying for 'unlimited broadband'! In reality the mobile signal has trouble getting above 1Mb download when it's working and drops out completely at times. SO I had to pay for fibre to get any decent broadband connection, on BT Business to get a static IP address, which has the option of a 'backup' to the mobile as well. Monday that went down, and after 2.5 hours we had finally established that the router needed replacing ... which took 48 hours to arrive in the end. In the meantime I still had the Vodafone 'backup' since the BT one via mobile is not a lot of use if it's the router that is duff. No use obviously for local websites but over the two days the mobile signal was down as much as up.
Can I get a refund on the unused mobile broadband and just pay for what I ACTUALLY use, which was less than 1Gb over the two days ... I'm supposed to have 5G, but even 4G is simply not being provided reliably, but they will not even reduce the airtime contract to the level being provided by them.
"Simple : use a Linux kernel."
Linux still has a few situations where it drops into 'maintenance mode' when it fails to boot back up. Particularly when a mounted drive has failed. So BOTH are in need of a little more work to allow them to work around problems that can be worked around.
But I'll not be sending the W10 machine to the recycling site any time soon, so any improvements to W11 are useless to me, but the drive to kill off X11 on Linux is just as annoying as telling me that my computer can't run W11. PLEASE can we have something that simply works as it has since W3.1 days ...
I keep being told that I 'need to switch to wayland', but if it is pulling stunts like stopping key applications from working as they have for a LONG time then it time to stick two fingers up as the people telling me I'M in the wrong.
And yes where DO we upvote such a well produced article!
"These days any actual documentation is buried 10 pages down in a SharePoint search and is five years out of date."
I'm still learning how key elements of the android apps I'm using to monitor my health problems actually work. 'Searching' never actually gets me anywhere, and the latest 'upgrade' to just crashes when you try and search at all!
And why can't different functions in an app use the same steps to achieve the same thing. PERHAPS writing a guide to standardise HOW things work could be a better starting point ... even before a manual?
OK prompted by the warning about X11 perhaps not working after an upgrade, although SUSE Tumbleweed has not offered it yet, I logged in using 'wayland' rather than 'X11' and all the windows sizes were as I expected all over the place. The MAIN problem though is Firefox which reverts to a miniscule font for the windows framework AROUND the web pages which appear much larger than I had when logged in on X11. Thunderbird I can adjust things to be usable, but as with many applications, pop-up windows such as search return to the almost unusable font size. SO I'm back on X11 in order to post this comment!
That some key applications I use do not even rescale with the 'global' function adds to the fun when using a desktop spread across two 4k resolution monitors, and while the perhaps nice feature on wayland that scales each monitor individually would have been useful when I had different resolution monitors, it still does not fix things. I do remember in 'the good old days' being able to manually set up my X11 configuration when I had a 4 screen setup, but 'improvements' to X11 which plague us today by always 'reconfiguring' things when a monitor is simply switched off makes things even worse.
Just where does one go today to fix the increasing problems that 'improvements' are forcing on us?
"I get poor results from search but good results from asking AI complicated things." Answers less contaminated with adverts perhaps, but equally biased and inaccurate on the sort of stuff I am trying to deal with. Personally I think that the training sets are simply crap, and trying to deal with anything that HAS changed since the last date in the training set is simply pointless? Even stuff that IS well documented prior to the cut off date is often misquoted or simply missing from a response.
What is essential going forward is a system that actually acknowledges then it is told it is wrong and updates with current data on a rolling basis. Not something the current 'models' have any chance of doing, but the only way any of these systems will actually be useful going forward? Even trying to provide context that contains accurate information does not help obtain a more accurate answer.
I have several 'apps' on my phone linked to different bits of the NHS but the main monitoring apps are basically American and ignore things like '5 a day' and push American agendas. What is needed today is a move to a SHARED standard of working that is fed by UK suppliers with UK standards. Such things as proper UK nutrition database fed by each manufacturer and distributor in the UK and not defaulting to American material. Things like the NHS 111 service needs to be improved with UK based training and targeting UK services better. AI results I keep getting directed to have a very obvious American bias and the obvious complaint about much of that advice is that none of these systems have the intelligence to say "I can't answer that" preferring to invent something "creative" instead.
Ring fence UK data in a UK based system that is not contaminated by material that originates in other areas of the world. While, yes there are many other cultures present in the UK, the basic platform should provide a BRITISH set of rules and default to British standards! Not trying to make some overseas solution pretend that it does follow those rules?
Open source gets a bad press, but it should be viewed not as a 'free' option, but as a method of working where resources are shared and standards are defined by consensus rather than the biggest cheque book. Rather than 'looking for the best supplier', getting current UK based IT systems to cooperate around an open source standard of data management and require the commercial elements to feed that distributed database with current material such as the nutrition material does not require any one party to have propriety control of anything. Along with making it web based via browsers rather than all these 'apps' that don't seem to be able to talk to one another anyway.
Security of medical data is important, but that should not prevent the cross transfer of that data between even different departments in a hospital because they are using different 'providers'. THAT is a problem I'm seeing today having to register with yet another APP to get physio help and appointments NOT appearing on the 'NHS App' from cardiology. THAT is the real problem here and a 'cloud' solution that avoids the 'non-cloud' solutions of the big providers who are NOT cloud based but ring fencing that data in their own hardware in unknown locations around the rest of the world?
It would be very nice if android got the same treatment as windows did over browsers and gave the option to switch off default programs completely. I use openstreetmap and have google maps disabled, yet I still get 'redirected' at time to google maps and while a do have a gmail account, the client is never used. Firefox is working perfectly for me across desktop, tablet and phone and I think the next target should be for thunderbird to be as transparent, treating messages in the same way as emails. Uninstall 'rather' than 'disable' should be the standard requirement on these base functions where there are very good alternatives?
I worked for a while at Macro Marketing back in the 80's and they ran the entire sales floor on a PDP11/70. 100 dumb terminals. I had my own VAX with just one graphic terminal on it for custom silicon design which probably spent more time running rogue than design software.
The PDP11/70 was eventually replaced by a pair of Amhdal towers (I think), but the software was never as good as the original suite.
The recent outage at Heathrow brought back an interesting incident where the emergency generator was religiously tested each week and fell over and back without batting an eyelid, until that is a real event occurred. The generator kicked in ran for a few minutes and then spluttered to a halt ... you need the fuel feed switched to 'main' and not 'reserve' ...
Having driven around Heathrow many times while living and working in that area 50 years ago, I find it no surprise that all of the power comes from north of the airport. There is nothing south that could supply the power and I can remember that discussion when planning other projects in that area. 50 years on we should have solved that problem? Probably, but given they have now been given the go ahead for a large increase in the load - also to the north of the airport - it will be fun find THAT power ...
"will it then "learn" from its previous hallucinations?"
That personal data is being served up as fact even ignoring the 'disclaimer' just shows that NONE of these systems are safe to use for any purpose. The 'models' that are being used live NEED to be able to learn when they are told something is wrong. Until that time any output is simply a best guess based on the crap that has been input so far?
Spent yesterday trying to get a section of my own websites working again using a combination of Mistral and raw search. That Mistral simply rewords the same wrong information just highlights another recent story about faulty output. Until I had a combination of facts so I knew just what questions to ask I was unable to fix the configuration so not sure that using Mistral is ACTUALLY improving productivity. Most of the questions were correcting it's mistakes trying to get at a correct answer and I suspect I would have solved the problem quicker had I just skipped straight back to raw searches of CURRENT information.
"reducing it's effectiveness as an alternative processor that China can use."
Since they have a large local market, are they worried if their version evolves in a different way to the rest of the world? I am sure other external users would not find it a problem either?
The sole windows desktop machine here has W10 but with classic shell after it was forced onto me by Microsoft, but the XP CNC boxes are still as stable as ever, and not going anywhere ... except perhaps to linux is the hardware finally gives up the ghost. NONE of these would ever take W11 anyway. Windows 7 could not be 'restored' to the machine despite all attempts at the time ...
Being tied into a contract with Vodafone for unlimited 5G broadband and in an area where Vodafone advertise 5G I have yet to even see a reliable 4G connection and when that is working it's pig slow! I'm having to pay for fibre as well and can't get out of the useless mobile one for another 17 months! Worcestershire County Council are currently investigating the large number of complaints about all mobile providers around here.
And how many perfectly functional computers will be running Linux once M$ kill off W10 without allowing those machines to install W11? My token Windows machine will just stay with the last working version of W10 ... and LibreOffice is all it's ever had Office wise anyway which I presume WILL still take updates. My main desktop has been Linux from before LibreOffice appeared :)
"Er... not exactly, but studying the closing para, yes, I see where you got that impression. I will ask the editors if they could maybe insert a couple of words to clarify the closing paragraph."
The summary is the sort of thing I am seeing in my playing with the current generation of Advanced Idiots. It is the subtleties such as this which then get fed back into the 'training models' and distort history? I think I AM right with the title of this post, my mistake was with the "when Sun stuck it's oar in?" forgetting that by then it was Oracle who was 'in control', or rather not hence LibreOffice ... Sun only sewed a seed in that development.
And if the machine that is running Windows 10 can't be upgraded to 11 then I'm not going to change it. Heck my CNC machines still run Windows XP via a real parallel port and they work fine for that job. I'll just take the W10 machine of the internet and all the problems are solved :) The main desktop machine has been Linux for years.
It would be useful if one could delete google ( and Samsung ) apps when you have suitable alternatives installed. It's like Microsoft's insistence on using edge rather than the default browser, Android does much the same thing and the history of some actions is lost as it is not on my central Firefox archive, which today works almost seamlessly across all devices. I would prefer that I was always taken to Openstreetmap for my map information but can't stop Google maps still being accessed.
My medical applications are an utter mess and the NHS needs to standardise on one non-proprietary base to make all of them work seamlessly.
