Posts by tip pc

After staring over the precipice once before, Kent County Council considers £500m in outsourcing again

Re: Why?

While I fully agree, the aim of the game changes once things are outsourced, meaning that local small players can’t be in scope. In addition when disciplines/towers are split across vendors additional costs/profits can be had in the delicate negotiations.

Lastly, the outsourcers need to improve their profits/costs year over year per customer. Once customer loses its expertise it’s in no shape to challenge the increase’s especially when it can be demonstrated that more activity is taking place.

Those to blame are those advising the organisation outsourcing, they typically are the big consultancies often not charging much as they get their fees from the outsourcing businesses.

I've got a broken combine harvester – but the manufacturer won't give me the software key

Re: Only half the story of half the story

Our last Samsung bubble wash had a free 5 years parts and labour plus 10 year warranty on the inverter.

At year 8 I replaced one of the pumps with a replacement from Amazon.

Year 10 it started leaking, I couldn’t be bothered to work out what seal was shot so replaced it with the newer WiFi model, again with a free 5 year parts and labour & 10 year inverter warranty.

I think 10 years is long enough for a machine like that, the bubble pump looked like it needed replacing anyway and as I understand things, using the machine cleaning chemicals you can buy isn’t good for these machines (weakens the rubber and seals) and another reason why I didn’t bother to investigate where it was leaking from.

I won’t get another Samsung condenser dryer though, that got repaired at least once a year covered under the included 5 year parts and labour warranty.

In each case I could have bought a cheaper less feature full machine but adding on a warranty would have taken the cost over that of the Samsung.

SSD belonging to Euro-cloud Scaleway was stolen from back of a truck, then turned up on YouTube

Had a pallet of Cisco switches disappear before.

They where new with no config so no security issue especially as they never reappeared. ~£50k vanished.

Luckily they where not needed for a while and we had other new kit we repurposed so didn’t suffer too much delay on a refresh project.

Ably blog claims company doesn't need Kubernetes to scale, surge in traffic takes down entire website

ACI & SDN

It’s not just server containerisation that is subject to the latest fads. So many “Software Defined Networking” vendors all promising sliced bread, all doing it differently. You then need some kind of orchestration tool to interconnect the differing systems.

How many are running different sdn’s for VMware, data centre, wan and lan?

SDN for VMware makes sense, doesn’t really make sense for the other environments or would be better to use 1 for all (2 if you need ACI)

Is it broken yet? Is it? Is it? Ooh that means I can buy a sparkly, new but otherwise hard-to-justify replacement!

My Plasma’s still working

I got a 37” 720p plasma in 2007, I got a 50” 1080p model in 2012 and had been hankering for a 4k oled but vowed to wait till a plasma died, I bit the bullet in 2020 and got that oled but the other 2 plasmas are refusing to die.

The 37” is in the bedroom (fnar)

The 50” in the dining room

The 55” oled in the lounge

I have a Samsung r series 720p lcd from 2006 that’s also still going strong.

The funny thing is that the 2012 plasma came with a pen that swmbo showed our 3 year old how to use, she was mighty miffed when I explained the pen wouldn’t work on the oled, luckily she never tried.

Exsparko-destructus! What happens when wand waving meets extremely poor wiring

Bodge it and quickly

Facilities had a moan once because the crew I’d organised to run Ethernet through a campus building had pinched / snagged a power cable in a metal surface trunking. I asked why there was metal surface trunking in the first place. Weeks of blaming with them insisting they wanted to run the Ethernet with me countering, it was agreed the electric wiring wasn’t safe and the metal trunking would be replaced with new electrical wiring and Ethernet re termination.

Everyone was just lucky the metal trunking was earthed.

On inspection there had been evidence of arching in lots of places and after plastic was installed the stories came out how that building was plagued by electric circuit trips for years previously.

In the '80s, satellite comms showed promise – soon it'll be a viable means to punt internet services at anyone anywhere

Re: Can't wait...

depends on the techy they hire.

i once worked with a UK born and bread global support engineer on a unix based product. He had absolutely no clue what he was talking about yet confidently spoke to advanced user customers in global giants about sorting stuff on our product. After a few days of him getting it wrong me or someone else would sort it.

lots of people have lots of "certificates" but are no better for it.

Troll jailed for 5 years after swatting of Twitter handle owner ends in death

Sentence should have been far longer

5 years wasn’t enough for the sustained continued campaign against multiple people.

Hundreds of irate UK Parliamentary staffers sue IPSA over 2017 salary spreadsheet publication snafu

“ If the existence of an injunction is secret, how do we know what not to say about whom?L

Those subject to the super injunction will know the details of what they can’t report so everyone else is in the dark.

Peers question experts over UK police use of AI, facial recognition tech

My dog has a microchip. Doesn’t stop him being a bad boy!!

Watchdog slaps down Three's claims to be building the UK's 'fastest 5G network' – again

Re: Dear Goverment.

Yes the same ASA that lets Virgin advertise its copper broadband as fibre.

Euro space boffins hatch comms satellite hijack plan to save Earth from extinction

Re: Forget telecom sats

Why is would you want to send the leaders of the world religions ( they command billions of people in addition to billions of units of currency) at these space rocks?

Who would pray for us once they’ve gone?

Booming balance sheets for India's big four outsourcers after horrible quarter at home

Outsourcing profits too

These outsourcers don’t miss a trick. Record profits and growth but at who’s expense.

Where on Gartner's Hype Cycle is Gartner's Hype Cycle?

Self serving Hype Cycles

Maybe the Hype Cycles are just a reflection of the wacky conversations they have with their customers who think or are heavily investing in these "Activity Streams"

Teen turned away from roller rink after AI wrongly identifies her as banned troublemaker

I agree but sometimes you need your type of “use case” in use somewhere so you can sell it to others.

Magic quadrants need real life use cases, regardless of how artificial those use cases start out.

Re: Using it wrongly

The computer says no

for the Americans watch here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0n_Ty_72Qds

NASA fixes Hubble Space Telescope using backup power supply unit, payload computer

Outsource?

NASA engineers seem to be able eek out performance and reliability from systems do old they would normally be decommissioned.

Isn’t it time they outsourced this exceptional capability to the lowest bidder?

That’s normally how it works.

IPv6 still 5–10 years away from mainstream use, but K8s networking and multi-cloud are now real

Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

I agree the other changes where stupid.

Deliberately trying to eliminate nat was an own goal.

People didn’t need to use it if they didn’t want or need to.

Just extending the ipv4 address range isn’t as easy as it sounds though.

Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

"Why can't we have an IPv4.1 or something that does the more numbers thing, but leaves everything else the same?"

Like NAT?

As I explained in another comment, when you are processing billions of packets and want efficiency you want an addressing system that'll make best use of the processor, addresses in powers of 2 work best on processors that run on powers of 2 that's why 6 bytes is not a realistic addressing proposition, 8 bytes works but why not just go 16 now and be done with it.

The lack of backwards interoperability was a mistake.

My view was they wanted to combine the MAC & IP in an attempt to make things easier and collapse the L2 & L3 camps. They never really envisaged the way ipv4 is working today.

Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

for efficiency reasons you want the addresses to be in powers of 2

if you have 4 bytes = 32 bits to process

8 bit computer takes 4 cycles

16 bits = 2

32 bits = 1

64 bits = 1

if you have 6 bytes = 48 bits to process

8 bits = 6 cycles

16 bits = 3

32 bits = 2

64 bits = 1

on a 32 bit system you may as well have gone for an 8 byte / 64 bit address as it'll take the same amount of time to process, a 64 bit system could process 2 32 bit addresses or 1 64 bit in the same time as 1 48 bit address.

when you must process lots of packets in a short time using cheap cpu's you don't want to be wasting effort.

Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

“ IPv6 has lost the war. It will never see serious use.”

I largely concur but ipv6 is being used seriously by some, iirc some mobile carriers are ipv6 native.

It’s difficult when only some sites and users are ipv6 and some mechanism is needed to choose between the 2.

I’m on VM and Apples iCloud private relay will show me as having an ipv4 & ipv6 address (private relays job is to obfuscate my real ip), clicking google search links often fail unless I search from ipv4.google.com.

Security wise it’s probably a good idea to use ipv6 internally with ipv4 only internet connections. It’s an additional layer miscreants need to hop through!

Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

For the first time ever I find myself agreeing with most of that.

Maybe I’m ready for management after all?

SDN is just companies flogging stuff that sits in the way and does vxlan.

Private 5G & 5G will be a game changer

ipv6 has little benefit for most people

Intent based networking is a noble effort but Zero trust is the way forward.

I personally feel private wan circuits are more secure than wan over internet but zero trust is there for that.

How many Brits have deleted life-saving track and trace app from their phones? No idea, junior minister tells MPs

Motivation

"The motivation for scrubbing the inconvenient bit of code is clear: people needing to work."

I'm sure some are motivated by needing to work, others are motivated to go on holiday or other events where being pinged would be a real dampener.

if you deactivate the exposure notifications it deletes the logs, you could just delete the logs everyday if you wanted, or just bin the app.

As far as I can remember the NHS cv19 has no clue who you are so its more for awareness.

If you are contacted by track and trace then you must isolate.

As Europe hopes to double its share of global chip production, Intel comes along with $20bn, plans for fabs

Re: Cost assertions don't make sense

“ I had to spend a week at Intel's facility in Haifa. Israel. The working conditions there were unbelievable -- it was the free food (breakfast and lunch -- nice stuff as well, none of your prepackaged junk), the relatively short working hours compared to what I was used to. Then there was the free car -- all employees above a certain grade were eligible for a free vehicle (below this they just got a subsidy).”

Back here In the UK the last Labour government tightened the rules around “perks from work”

Companies can provide free food, cars, healthcare and other perks but the employee must pay benefit in kind taxes which makes it not so attractive to the recipient.

“ We're schooled in the long obsolete notion that Asians work for peanuts (or rice or whatever). They don't.”

Outsourced technicians working from Asia often earn 8 times less than their onshore predecessors.

Check Glass door for what roles are paid in different parts of this globe.

Fab Tastic news for the EU & UK

Once the EU pony up the 8bn subsidy we in the uk can benefit from no increase in prices as the EU will have offset the disparity of producing in the EU vs Asia.

Intel may struggle to ship product out of the EU if there is a future shortage though. Also the intel offices could be raided and evidence seized of wrong doing if the EU decide intel are not cooperating with EU diktat.

Wake me up when TSMC decide to build a plant in the continent of Europe.

OK, you're paying data charges in the EU, but you can still roam free in, er, Iceland

Re: What exactly did we get from the EU for £40bn divorce settlement?

I’m glad we can split hairs on this without resorting to childish name calling :)

https://fullfact.org/europe/no-deal-divorce-bill-payment/

“ It’s not clearly set out that the UK would be obliged to pay anything if we left with no deal, but the EU could take the case to the International Court of Justice on the grounds of the UK’s repeated commitments to pay”

The full fact article is of an age, but is along the lines of my thinking.

My view is that the UK is paying out of a duty of doing the right thing rather than any particular law.

It’s fair to pay something, not sure £40bn for something we won’t have access to is fair.

Re: What exactly did we get from the EU for £40bn divorce settlement?

“ Farage got 39% of the vote as an MEP for the region. It's good, but hardly a sweeping endorsement of the man”

While I agree abd haven’t looked at the stats, that left 61% on the table for other parties.

The fact that someone with as much negative publicity as him got returned as an MEP for 20 years says something that can’t be ignored.

The other parties clearly didn’t try hard enough, or the narrative espoused by the popular parties snd echoed in the media wasn’t resonating with voters, which is what we saw in Brexit.

Thankfully some narratives never make much impact at the ballot box, things like Brexit did especially when it was a focused question.

The Lib Dem’s promised a referendum and got what they asked for.

https://fullfact.org/europe/lib-dems-first-call-eu-referendum/

Jo Swinson asking for a referendum there is a commons video too somewhere.

https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2008-02-26/debates/08022642000002/TreatyOfLisbon(No7)?highlight=%22in%20or%20out%20of%20europe%22#contribution-08022658000044

Re: What exactly did we get from the EU for £40bn divorce settlement?

He was an MEP for ~20 years. His EP constituency kept returning him when asked.

That’s a lot of votes he got, likely against strong opposition.

Re: What exactly did we get from the EU for £40bn divorce settlement?

“ Erm that doesnt make sense. That £40bn is the figure racked up by being in the EU. By leaving the EU we stopped the bill at £40bn owed to the EU which would be considerably higher had we remained (and been forced into the covid recovery fund too, again GBP bailing out the Euro).”

As I understand it, the UK could not have to pay if it forwent the “deal”. The deal went hand in hand with the settlement.

I understand the settlement is to do with paying the UK’s share of EU investments while we where a member but we lose all rights to those investments we continue to contribute to, the deal should have provided some access or equivalence for that continued payment, there is a zero tariff arrangement that excluded the city of London but it doesn’t permit lorry drivers to take their lunch abroad or goods to travel within the UK without the EU getting upset.

Doesn’t look like we get great value from our £40bn.

What exactly did we get from the EU for £40bn divorce settlement?

Our friends in the EU have come up with a figure of £40bn that we owe them for that last minute deal British campaigners forced us into.

what exactly have we got for that £40bn? that's a lot of phone calls etc.

Richard Branson uses two planes to make 170km round trip

Green?

Congratulations to the bearded one for his epic achievement.

How many virtu signalling green boasting celebs will be celebrating this achievement and have signed up for their own turn?

Jetting around the globe to tell us not to and then paying to directly pollute the upper atmosphere.

Beijing further tightens its grip on local web giants with 'Network Security Review Measures'

Numbers

China claims it has 989 million internet users, yet 1 internet property claimed 1.2k million monthly users. I assume that’s 1.2k million unique users.

Are those extra 211 million unique users from outside China?

That would be an interesting finding on it’s own.

Massive 3D catzilla gets crowds purring in busy Shinjuku district of Tokyo

Super Realistic, is each panel 4k or the whole lot 4k?

That image looks super 3d realistic (yes I know its captured on a phone). The last frame shows the blackness of the panels and you can see the curve of the screen.

Was the video taken at just the right spot to make it look 3D?

Focus on the camera, mobile devs: 48MP shooters about to become the sweet spot

Re: Why the obsession with MP?

what's a 2mp camera with an amazing lens like compared to a 48mp camera with a decent lens?

what stew cost of a decent lens?

Where's the boss? Ah right, thorough deep-dive audit. On the boardroom table. Gotcha

Audits can be expensive

Very expensive.

I'd be IT manager on a final salary earning as much as a senior banker with a new company car every 2 years if I where Derek.

Xiaomi my heart is still beating: Reg hack takes Chinese giant's new fitness band for a spin

Re: It’s not good then

"For example, if your literacy leaves something to be desired, the use of a spelling and grammar checker can help you to improve the quality of your written communication."

I'm fully sure you comprehended exactly what I wrote despite the typos.

My phone has a tendency to change words for me, they look fine as I type the last letter then I press space and it decides to alter the word.

so long as you get to be the AC grammar twit that's all good :)

Re: It’s not good then

yes there is a price delta but at least it works and does what is needed.

It’s not good then

Supporters in the comments seem to use it for counting steps and seems adequate for that, anything it’s useless.

If your cycling, get a mid range Garmin cycle computer with wheel & peddle sensors and a hear rate strap.

The big screen mounted to the bike will be easy to read, customise and provide instant feedback using the built in dynamics apps like seeing if your ahead or behind previous attempts or how much longer a hill is etc.

Using the right tool for the job is essential, buying a toy for something other than walking was a waste of money.

IBM insiders say CEO Arvind Krishna downplayed impact of email troubles, asked for a week to sort things out

Re: The gorilla lost weight

"What?

Just name them FFS, what's holding you back?"

there are hints of Polaroid & Kodak in there.

not sure what the printer ref is though, Xerox or Canon?

“ I literally cannot believe that IBM was running off Notes on someone else's kit. It's bad enough they were using Notes (although understandable since it's their crappy product), but why on earth was it cloudified at all?”

Notes does much more than just email.

It’s a bit like sales force. It’s a database that runs a load of business logic. Some of that logic happens to be an email client. Other bits of logic will be mundane things like registering for mandatory training, accessing the network with your MacBook, requesting access to another site, etc etc etc, almost endless possibilities.

No one really works that way anymore but plenty of businesses still running notes hidden in their dc’s for some use case no one remembers what for.

After 15 years and $500m, the US Navy decides it doesn't need shipboard railguns after all

Re: It’s not 15 years

If you compare the impact velocity and mass of a current kinetic projectile vs that of a rail gun projectile You will have your answer.

Florida Man sues Facebook, Twitter, YouTube for account ban

Surprised it took this long

In the land of the lawyers I’m surprised it took the Orange One this long to get around to lodging his sue balls.

Even if he didn’t want to sue I'm sure the army of lawyers relishing the gravy train would have been talking up a deal.

All involved are douche bags.

Mega-distie SYNNEX attacked and Microsoft cloud accounts it tends tampered

Mega-distie SYNNEX

never heard of them.

also why ALL the bold text at the bottom of the article under the heading "SYNNEX distances itself from Kaseya"?

I was expecting the statement from "Mega-distie SYNNEX" but was just conjecture.

Not for children: Audacity fans drop the f-bomb after privacy agreement changes

Is there a fork yet?

Is there a Fork yet that doesn't contain the post sale stuff?

whats it called?

is there a link to it?

Calling all fanbois: If you can't wait to glimpse iOS 15, Apple is running a public beta now

iOS 15 safari tab bar sucks

iOS 15 safari tab bar sucks

Was fine as it was but now makes it hard to see what other tabs are open.

IT manager who swindled Essex hospital trust out of £800k gets 5 years in prison

"How can anyone think they're going to get away with doing that on a long-term basis? Obviously the victims are bound to catch on eventually, and then the proof is right there where even police can find it."

I suspect many people have done far worse and got away with it for far longer.

Daniel Morgan springs to mind, and there are plenty of others who have been swindled and the perps got away with it.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-57484219

Record-breaking Kuwaiti heatwave triggers inadvisable TikTok expletive outburst

Why are they getting all the heat?

12c last night here in Blighty a high of 18c during the day, last year it was stifling with temps in the early 30s.

The North America is also buckling under heatwaves too yet here we are freezing our butts off.

Yes I reach for the warm jacket when heading out.

UK's competition watchdog preps to shoulder post-Brexit workload from European Commission

Re: Oh, right.

They can’t make law but did agree the EU–UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement that the EU Parliament didn’t agree to till 28th April 2021

Re: We're going to hit you with a massive fine.....

“ The UK isn't competent enough to have attracted (or retained) any of the big international tech players. ”

Yes no big tech players left in the uk..

https://www.themanufacturer.com/articles/uk-motorsport-pole-position-global-automotive-innovation/

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-57640001

Many other examples of uk excellence but I can’t be bothered to google for you.

Watch the moment China's Zhurong rover lands on Mars, hear it truckin' for the first time

Re: Second view?

i was wondering exactly the same.

its like watching a something from the 70's or 80's with a second action shot.

you can see the rover heading back towards the lander so yes it dropped the camera then reversed away.

The stereo cameras look like Johnny 5 though.