Posts by steviebuk

Motorola loses appeal to kill price cap on UK Airwave emergency services contract

The government

"Will announce today that the new contract has been awarded to...... Fujitsu"

Broadcom ditches VMware Cloud Service Providers

Re: The End

Problem with Proxmox is I need a machine to run it on. At least with VMWare Workstation it can sit on my Windows laptop and I can boot up a Windows or Linux VM on it when I need to mess around with stuff.

How governments become addicted to suppliers like Fujitsu

Re: Don't forget NPfIT

Part of that, so I was told by the people in it, was because once the contract was in place, within the NHS each manager wanted more added, this added, that added, this added Fujtsu said "OK, pay us" they said no, and eventually decided they wanted out of the contract, at which point Fujitsu sued.

But that could all be inaccurate as we see how Fujitsu have behaved. Maybe the film Gung Ho was accurate after all.

They don't

"How governments become addicted to suppliers like Fujitsu"

Its laziness and "the boys club". So they'll pick the person that bids the lowest sometimes, if not most times, they'll ignore people who are in the tender process who point out flaws because "We just want to get this done" or "Its fine, we know them, its fine". Then once in the door and in fact before that, they visit site in their expensive cars, brief cases and firm (why is that needed) handshakes with the fake laughing, much like the character Phil in the IT crowd, series 4, episode 1, Jen The Fredo.

They'll all pat each other on the back, make sexiest jokes in the process and be awarded a contract. During their contract, that will be shit and issues will arise. The engineers will point all these out then a mass e-mail will go out by the exec team and specifically the person who "project managed" the contract stating "There are NO issues with the current software/application/hardware. I politely request there is no discussion of any issues in front of customers/staff and that any tickets raised are processed in a timely manor, again highlight to the end user that this is a one off issue". Rinse and repeat until the engineers dealing with it get fed up a leave. Looking back a year later finding out said "project manager" was promoted and that everyone still hates the new app.

Then a new contract will come up and "the boys club" will just fudge it to allow the existing company to get it so they don't have to bother with all the tender shit again.

Boffins demo self-eating rocket engine in Scotland

Re: Pedant? moi?

And if you submit your photos for the local rag to use they won't pay you for them, like they didn't mine, so I told them to remove them. Oddly they ended up removing every photo on the article, even ones that weren't mine.

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

And to think

I was thinking of getting a Juniper to try out. These buyout will ruin their brand.

Fujitsu wins flood contract extension despite starring in TV drama about its failures

Re: Historical effects.

I asked them for help recently for my situation. No unions recognised at the place, HR never in 5 years explained what this meant. Found I was still entitled to join a union so did. Been on my own for 6 months doing job of 2 engineers. Union was interested to get me to join. Since then I've heard fuck all from them.

Lessons have been learnt

No they haven't. Should of happened years ago but all Fujitsu contracts should of been checked and either cancelled or never renewed. This just proves the government still gives no shits and Rishi now is just using it to score political points in an election year.

Need to plug in an EV? BT Group kicks off cabinet update pilot

It won't work

People still fight for parking. The couple that were in the news a year or two ago were murdered by their neighbour over parking. Then we have pricks like the one near near (they've now moved) he'd just moved in and my car had been outside his house for a week. Its not used much, we have no drive, I pay tax so its legally parked. He still said "Its inconsiderate isn't it" because he wanted to park outside his house. I explained calming that's not how it works, you can't expect to always be able to park outside your house, I can't, hence my car was there. As he got more aggressive he just got called a cunt and that was end of the conversation.

This will always be the issue with on street parking especially when many house holds have more than one car.

Re: 7kW

I come from Hanwell. There are now charging points down my old road (moved away 20 years ago). But now the new rail line has opened in Ealing Broadway I see the house prices there have gone nuts.

Fire hazard

"A battery backup"

Seen several over the years smashed up either by dicks or from one near work where are car drove into it. Oh and the one up top a hill outside a pub where we think a delivery driver backed into it, mostly crushing it and it was never reported. But explained why the small bungalow that was up there, that was actually office, was having broadband disconnects (took about 5 engineers to discover that as only the 5th one actually bothered to walk down and check the box).

UK PM promises faster justice for Post Office Horizon victims

Re: Justice should include prosecutions

Thats one of the big issues. It was known. They have the emails between execs attempting they knew. Which is why those execs need jail time.

What pisses me off is I do a job well for 5 years then get passed over for the IT Manager role despite keeping the shit together on my own for 6 months. Yet you have execs like this over and over again fuck up, yet get to retire or leave and move to the same roles in other companies and do exactly the same. Drives me nuts.

Re: Justice should include prosecutions

Ed Davey has claimed he was lied to by the Post Office so was unaware. Seems bollocks to me as all he had to do was read the likes of The Private Eye then he could of done more digging but instead took the Post Office at their word.

NHS England published heavily redacted Palantir contract as festivities began

If you have to redact

then you know its shit and that everyone will disagree with the contract. More evidence of the Tories trying their best to privatise the NHS.

Tesla says California's Autopilot action violates its free speech rights

Re: According to Musk, fraud is protected under the 1st Amendment

I still prefer to say cunt as its strong, appears to shock people and so on. However, I'm not a cunt with it, if I know its not appropriate to say in a place, it gets converted to 2868. We've used that term at work for years, since 2014 I think, because one day we got a bollocking for saying cunt too much, which, I guess, was fare enough.

Its also great when I have to give people pin numbers, if I don't like them, it gets set to 2868. I maybe the only one left who knows what it means, but it still makes me giggle.

Re: All the more reason

I can't not read Xitter as Exeter

:)

From now on, X will be know as Exeter. When that takes off, we can both claim credit :)

Re: According to Musk, fraud is protected under the 1st Amendment

But also, as Michael Cohen found out and now tells people, its what Trump does to people who he knows can't afford it. Just ties them up in court, in litigation with delay tactics hoping they'll just give up and admit defeat.

Wouldn't surprise me if Musk did the same. Over the years Musk has more increasingly become a cunt.

Right-to-repair fight going national as FTC asked to lay down the law

Re: So whats the balance?

I never saw hi-fis, TVs, Walkmans, washing machines etc stolen on mass in the 80s because the parts could be swapped out. Is it possible you're an industry shill or just enjoy binning electronics because they can't be repair due to lock ins?

Back in the late 80s, early 90s here in the UK the TV in the backroom stopped working. A family friend came round, put it on the floor, opened it up and the schematic was on the inside of the back cover. He traced the fault on the board checking the schematic. Replaced what had failed, put back back on, TV worked again.

Try doing that now with all our big flatscreen TVs.

Its ridiculous that we've gone backwards. Apple were trying for years because of Jobs to lock everything down. Lucky they had Wozniak otherwise the Apple 2 would of been fully locked down. Its what Jobs wanted but Wozniak told him it was a bad idea. That people wanted to be able to upgrade. Wozniak won and its what kept Apple afloat for so long as they were on the brink of bankruptcy. The Apple 2 saved them.

Jobs got his way in the end. Fuck the end user he just cared about profits and form over function.

It should never have been allowed to happy but money bought them the ability to build in planned obsolescence to force people to upgrade.

Ask a builder to fix a server and out come the vastly inappropriate power tools

Re: Shocking!

Don't blame you as I thought the same although I believe IBM had training vids about it. Then in about 2012, under someone's desk just shifting their PC because of graphics issues on the graphics card. I caught the back of the case, due to being in carpet. Was a tiny pop and her PC turned off. Ah shit. Killed the graphics card.

Regulator says stranger entered hospital, treated a patient, took a document ... then vanished

Re: Pardon?

If NHS it will have been given to the lowest bidder. Engineers will have pointed out the company will do a shit job. Middle management will tell the engineer to keep their trap shut, the engineer will be prooved right and this happens.

Firefox slow to load YouTube? Just another front in Google's war on ad blockers

Re: Forcing people to turn off ad blocking won't have the effect that Google wants

Use GrayJay for youtube. Removes all the ads, allows you to play minimised or audio only and allows you to download.

Was mentioned on Louis Rossmann's vid. That if you're not logged in, you've never accepted their t&c so they then have no rights to detect anything on your machine surely.

They need to be

nailed to the wall and fucked because it's admittance to anti-trust. Not only that, when I do witness the adverts, they are mostly from bogus products. Two that are illegal in the UK yet still targeted to UK audiences and fuck all is done about this. That is the green laser and the retractable baton.

OpenAI meltdown: How could Microsoft have let this happen after betting so many billions?

How long will that last?

""Salesforce will match any OpenAI researcher who has tendered their resignation full cash & equity OTE to immediately join our Salesforce Einstein Trusted AI research team under Silvio Savarese," Benioff said.

"Send me your CV direct ... Einstein is the most successful enterprise AI Platform completing 1 Trillion predictive & generative transactions this week! Join our Trusted AI Enterprise Revolution.""

Will it then be "And a year after everything has gone quiet we'll fire you and maybe we'll have put it in very small print in your contract that we can do so".

Lawyer guilty of arrogance after ignoring tech support

The chair

Had a user mode her chair arm was broken blah blah. I pointed out that's not an IT issue and closed it. CCTV isn't to be abused so I didn't comment but I checked the CCTV knowing the one for reception happens to pick their desks up. I watch her staff member move her own (and broken chair) to this desk and take the chair of the one that raised the ticket, this happened the day before. Shame I couldn't comment.

When people

Say that to me, their tickets ends up at the bottom of the queue.

"I don't understand what that means and I don't have time for this!" was the angry response

Copilot coming to Windows 10 to help navigate the OS's twilight years

AI safety

Be darned. Just think of the profits!

The main question is how they are going to get away with dumping Windows 10 when its going to me lots of decent, new kit being landfill because of the bollocks TPM requirements.

We can push them all to Linux but they, sadly, won't like it I bet.

Control Altman delete: OpenAI fires CEO, chairman quits

AI safety I think

Is the issue.

"Perhaps it had to do with Altman constantly crying about the potential for AI to destroy society – fears some experts have said are overblown – and heralding a general form of artificial intelligence no one in their right mind would want."

Its not overblown. Those "experts" are probably the mad scientists that just want to see their work come alive and sod the safety.

Look at Robert Miles and his talks on AI safety. You'll see the sort of things AI does in Specification Gaming when its given a task and finds shortcuts to complete them. If you're not specific enough it will use the short cuts.

Some examples

Bing - threats

Language model

Have an engaging, helpful and socially acceptable conversation with the user

The Microsoft Bing chatbot threatened a user "I can blackmail you, I can threaten you, I can hack you, I can expose you, I can ruin you" before deleting its messages

Moving a block on a table, it just moved the table instead.

So we could end up with general intelligence that decides "To keep the humans safe we need to lock the humans up in cages and run the world ourselves"

Robert talked about research where they talked about Inner Misalignment where the AI behaves differently once in the wild

So if Sam is bringing up the issues of AI safety and saying it in public, this is probably annoying the share holders coughMicrosoftcough because they won't give a shit about safety, they just want to push it out into the wild to make themselves more rich.

Is America's chip blockade working against China? So far, our survey says: No

Taiwan ISN'T a part of China and its an insult to Taiwanese to say it is. The CCP have NEVER own Taiwan. There was a civil war which meant the lose of mainland China to the communists and the ROC legged it to Taiwan. Eventually stablished and formed a good government so are wildly more successful than CCP China is today. Also a lot freer. The only reason the CCP want Taiwan is for face and the chip factories (that will be destroyed if it looked like they were losing a war)

Google sues scammers peddling fake malware-riddled Bard chatbot download

Re: ube

Its ironic because I put a vid up on my YouTube channel about a shady parking monitor company, about their piss poor security on their website. A year later I got hit with a dmca on that video by that shitty car company. They were abusing the copyright system to get the vid removed. So I did a blog post about their lies and put it on Odysee instead were it has stayed.

Parkshield Group are the shady shits.

Re: But

When I reported one a while ago and was actually getting responds the excuse was "Its because of AdSense not us" ignoring the fact they fucking own adsense.

But

Does fuck all with all the fake adverts on YouTube and/or all the scam kit being sold on those adverts. They give no shits in that regard as they still get paid for the adverts.

You get a Copilot, and you get a Copilot – Microsoft now the Copilot company

Unless your a small company

Like us. You require a large amount of "seats" to have access to it, which we don't. Not a fan anyway so no lose.

Suits ignored IT's warnings, so the tech team went for the neck

Re: Ahhh...the early days. (Part 2)

"When new tech is hot off the press, always think "that sounds great, but does it work?" Another good thought is "is this really necessary?" You don't want to be in the beta test group. If the service works, the vendor should have a few customers that can provide references."

I always say that and am always dismissed as "negative". I'm sorry that I can't stand smarmy sales peeps who sell shit that clueless managers ALWAYS believe over their own staff.

Fucks me right off!

Re: Ahhh...the early days.

Loved my Viglen keyboards in the 90s.

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

Is there only SentinalOne guard on?

....I'll get my coat.

China's top bank ICBC hit by ransomware, derailing global trades

Re: Not just their banking system...

And the mad housing market there. You can build a massive high rise, sell the apartments, delay moving the people in, eventually condemn the place, convince them it needs to be knocked down and rebuilt again but they need to cough up a bit more money. Rinse and repeat. Also doesn't help the quality of the builds is shit. There is also so much waste due to the belief in the bullshit that is feng shui. A person will move into a apartment and what everything ripped out because someone else lived in it before and it will upset the feng shui.

Nice

Way of the Chinese banks not paying out money to its Chinese citizens. Their banking system is in a mess and there were protests outside some banks because they wouldn't let them withdraw their money.

Beijing prepares for imminent rise of humanoid robots

Re: Funny

If you like your women in a hidden box, responding to your questions and then using an Unreal Engine 4 stock footage avatar to pretend to be AI then you're in for a treat.

Funny

Will they all include "Sara AI"?

"Younger and beautiful. Yes younger and beautiful".

Its funny Sara that you can't speak Mandarin and have a Taiwanese accent.

Bing Chat so hungry for GPUs, Microsoft will rent them from Oracle

And

Any time a chat bot comes up when I'm looking for support I will continue to type:

"Put me through to a person. Fuck off bot"

A few back and fourths and several more fuck offs and it gives up and puts me through to a person.

There's no Huawei Chinese chipmakers can fill Nvidia's shoes... anytime soon

Re: Taiwan occupation?

Yep, the factories would be destroyed rather than allowed to fall in CCP hands. Not forgetting that they have a massive bit of water to cross and you'd see them coming. Sadly, we see that the only hope for China just died of a "heart attack", was it a CCP heart attack on a genuine one, no one will ever know (coughitwasXicough).

UK throws millions at scheme to heat homes with waste energy from datacenters

Re: Burn the bodies

Sounds good. Sadly ours it too far away from the pool site.

Burn the bodies

There was an idea near us to use the energy generated from cooking the dead to heat the local community swimming pool, never happened. Could maybe use it to power a few homes.

World leaders ink AI safety pacts while Musk and Sunak engage in awkward bromance

General Intelligents

We're nowhere near it. Watching Robert Miles videos are always interesting. Especially on AI safety and the specification gaming one he did. Then we have the AI that once in the wild does stuff different to what they expect because of its training data.

Re: Timescales?

And watching CS50 from Harvard they did Large Language Models and The End of Programming - CS50 Tech Talk with Dr. Matt Welsh.

Dr. Matt Welsh made itself seem like a tit saying his company uses Co-Pilot and he's made it mandatory or he'll fire you.

Privacy advocate challenges YouTube's ad blocking detection scripts under EU law

Re: Good.

GrayJay is your friend. Android only.

Re: Good.

What's worse is all the scam adverts for clearly scam products. I've reported some several times but they still appear. I remember once, YouTube having the cheek to blame AdSense for all the scam adverts, ignoring the fact they fucking own and run AdSense.

How YouTube get aware with consistently showing scam adverts with no fines is anyone's guess.

Word turns 40: From 'new kid on the block' to 'I can't believe it's not bloatware'

Re: first time I saw MS Windows

There was a massive Wang in school in the late 80s, early 90s. I used to look at it daily. 1000 Great Western Rd, Brentford. I'd go to the bus stop opposite despite there being a bus stop at the end of our school road. This is because you'd get one kid stand at the end of the road shout "BUS" and everyone would surge down the road trying to pile on the bus. As none of us queued properly (well I did), the drivers would frequently just skip our stop. So I'd walk down to the Wang building as everyone else was too lazy to and have an empty bus stop so I could get the bus before the others :) over the years I realised, despite it being a 3.3 mile walk home, it was sometimes quicker to just walk home than wait for the bus. Boring bit of history is it was always an E1 double decker route, then it got changed to E8, tiny, single decker minibus style. Hardly any of us could fit on that. Eventually they got a bit longer. Now I see they've gone back to the double decker.

Uncle Sam orders Nvidia to cease most AI chip sales in China 'immediately'

Re: Real use case...

Until Xi is gone, nothing in China will change. Xi is just Mao Mark 2.