Posts by idiotzoo

Sainsbury's eyes up shoplifters with live facial recognition

Aside from the problems of misidentification that have already occurred in some places, this is the bit I don’t believe: “ Records of shoppers' faces will be immediately deleted if the software does not recognize their mug.”

'Once in a lifetime' IT outage at city council hit datacenter, but no files lost

Re: Did they try turning it off and on again?

I once built exactly this and if VMs didn’t come up in the right order nothing would work. It was incredibly stupid but it happens.

Ford CEO admits he drives a Chinese electric vehicle and doesn't want to give it up

Re: Suck, squeeze, bang, blow

My parents and in-laws are old. They do less than 5000 miles a year in their cars. It genuinely makes more sense to keep the ice going in this case. However if you’re not really that old you’re missing a trick.

Re: They did

One of my neighbours is running a Vauxhall Ampera which is the UK badged version of the Volt I believe. He’s over the moon with it. Realistic battery range, petrol generator onboard for long runs. However once you’ve run a battery EV a hybrid loses most of its charm.

Re: :)

As someone who’s driven electric for almost 5 years I find comments like “ Battery technology is still not there” genuinely funny.

EV sales hit speed bump as drivers unplug from the electric dream

Exactly this… I’ve driven an EV since 2020, for all journeys except hiring a can for moving house.

Hydrogen is a non-starter unless we can find a new way to store and transport it. For all the noise made by those who would champion its use, it simply isn’t happening. There’s a good reason for that.

We didn’t choose, the technology did. Toyota pushed their hydrogen fuel cell tech really hard and it wasn’t viable in the real world, either financially or technologically.

Australian techie jailed for accessing museum's accounting system and buying himself stuff

I’d be doubtful there’s anyone who’s been online for any length of time that doesn’t come up on I’ve been pwned

Juniper sued over HPE buyout after allegedly ginning up execs' wallets

Re: isnt this normal for HP ?

This may well happen but it isn’t what this story says at all. This is an action kicked off by some Juniper shareholders.

New cars bought in the UK must be zero emission by 2035 – it's the law

Re: Think of the Grid!

Really? I hear this said by people who don’t back it up with anything other than an ad-hoc reckon. Quite apart from anything else it’s likely batteries made from really abundant materials will become more widely used. There’s already a small city car available in China that uses a sodium-ion battery

Openreach hits halfway mark in quest to hook up 25M premises with fiber broadband

They barely know what they’re doing

Recently moved half a mile down the road from a house with openreach fttp. New house doesn’t have fibre available, even though much of the town does, eventually got a response from Openreach they have “no plans to install fibre at the moment” however on the day we moved in we were greeted by some fellas digging through the streetlight cabling while they installed fibre for openreach…

UK's Co-operative Group to centralise IT teams across various divisions, warns redundancies 'inevitable'

Re: Boo

Yep they do the same with the shops, no consideration of other existing local businesses, butcher, newsagent, etc, they just open their shop with their template and to hell with local need. They could, and should, be a lot better than they are.

Mind the airgap: Why nothing focuses the mind like a bit of tech antiquing

Yep... I do a lot of photo and video editing. This is where you notice the difference. Otherwise the laptop I literally acquired out of a skip continues to serve all my needs.

Ancient OS on SSD for the speed!

Had cause to build XP on an aging Dell laptop, probably a similar vintage to this iBook. Got hold of an ata SSD for it and it was glorious. No service packs, no unnecessary guff, no security of course. This thing was fully air gapped but it was an absolute joy to use. Booted to functional desktop faster than anything else I’ve owned. This approach is an anathema to our modern hyper-connected world, but my word it’s fast.

Mobile networks are killing Wi-Fi for speed around the world

Oh Rly???

The mobile carrier industry would dearly love to get the claws into your corporate network, replacing your oh so slow WiFi with their high performance 5G+superfast but to do this they need access to your building to offer their managed service.

Part of this strategy is to constantly talk down WiFi performance when, in reality, this report isn’t talking about WiFi at all but consumer dsl.

The network I manage offers users realistic, reliable speeds that can be beaten by 4G offerings in some cases. On the rare occasions there’s been an issue with our network and all the users jumped onto the mobile carriers their network collapses under the load.

Certainly in my experience the mobile networks are a long way from having the capacity to handle all the users.... which is why what they really want to do is replace your APs with their managed service offering which will largely be based on..... WiFi.