Posts by an.other_tech

England's local government shake-up promises to be a massive tech headache

Chaos ? Nah, just more money spent

This is going to be both an administrative and tech disaster.

It also feels rather than streamlining things, it'll give greater control to fewer, with less accountability.

Databases are relatively easy to build. It's the database reporting that generally bloats it.

Boss Z wants it their way. Director W theirs, Manager Y her's, and the I.T team are stressed out because everyone is saying different things, yet the people that need to use said database daily, are rarely consulted. Yet they are the ones having to waste time inputting on foul flow charts and migrated systems with clanky interfaces.

With the recent AWS outage as an example of eggs in one basket, does anyone else see a potential tech titanic heading towards a data iceberg with all these councils and local authorities being culled and forced into a new entity ?

One thing, if we as a sector came up with a best practices framework, so that users were the primary consulted parties, not the occasional users, would that help us provide a much better system, and one that might last 20 years plus, as some of the legacy systems have exceeded ?

I cite one hospital trust that had a rock solid, green screen, terminal system

The reason it was replaced, it was awful at exporting any data, but just kept working.

Anyone over 40 will likely have similar experiences, with perfectly good software being replaced for worse ones, purely because of the new reporting and analysis demands.

Servers hated Mondays until techie quit quaffing coffee in their company

A mix of server rooms

Totally agree with the article.

Over several decades of servers and desktops, in a variety of hostile and pleasant environments, it's not always the temperature o

Microsoft pulls MS365 Business Premium from nonprofits

Re: Fortunately...

For those charities that have volunteers fundraise, how incredibly wasteful and selfish do they see these execs ?

Why are they on six or seven figure salaries if they add nothing ?

Would have suggested that they switched to libre or open office years ago.

Tech renders iconic rockers Kiss genuinely immortal

Wasn't it Peter Gabriel who was the first digitised pop star ?

Much like Lucas' re editing of the original trilogy to include 'new footage' and better digital effects.

Which was very much like when Widescreen format came out on VHS (the boxey things before DVDs, which were before streaming)

So after buying Stat Wars on VHS , you could then buy the Widescreen version, and oh boy oh boy, then the extended version cane out.

Shortly thereafter DVD became mainstream,

Which was then followed by BluRay.

Let's say you also stumped up for Laserdisc.

(Yes, that is old)

You then had, of the same film title, let's count them up.

VHS : 4 (normal, widescreen, extended, remastered)

DVD : 3 (16;9 , extended, remastered)

BluRay : 1

Laserdisc : 1

In this example, that's 9 copies of a film. Potentially.

Each costing between £10-£30.

That's a lot of pocket money.

Raspberry Pi 5 revealed, and it should satisfy your need for speed

Pi on the moon

Would that make it a moon Pi ? ;)

(American snack food thing)

BMW deems drivers worthy of warmth, ends heated car seat subscription

Agreed, phone holders should be standard equipment these days !

Can my coffee cup provide navigation?

Nope, the coffee is kept hot though!

UK flights disrupted by 'technical issue' with air traffic computer system

NATS has regional centres, so surely must have data links ?

It could be akin to saying town 'A's cctv can be viewed remotely by an app

So the 'Closed' part of Closed Circuit Television becomes a bit of a farce.

Windows screensaver left broadcast techie all at sea

BSOD and inappropriate screensavers

Having seen the airport BSOD on both advertising screens, and even once a flight board, it makes me wonder why after the NT days, where it said "don't run mission critical" or something like that.

Yet here we are 20+ years later, still relying on Windows for advertising and information screens/boards.

Had the inappropriate screensavers, locked from the user plebs, so we could pretty much put what we liked. The Happy Birthdays, congratulations on your new baby, or the classic, screenshot from the drunken office party with names and departments .....

Those liberal days are long gone. Due to cost saving, the machines now sleep. Boring

Last rites for the UK's Online Safety Bill, an idea too stupid to notice it's dead

Re: Computer MOT

Of course having external 'engineers' such as Kelly communications being allowed access to Openreach street boxes is most of the outside premises faults we seem to find around here.

Yes when the street boxes are installed they are a thing of beauty. But give it a week or two, and you find so many extra wires, wires disconnected and other cr*p that you just can't fight the script system that wastes so much time.

What the independent fibre companies boxes will end up like, I shudder to think.

Bizarre backup taught techie to dumb things down for the boss

Using a practical example

I recall exactly the same type of thing.

One or two people in the same branch office decided they were super important and kept current emails in their trash, as there was a desktop icon that took them straight there.

Until.

A software update, mandatory one, that auto purged the Trash every 30 days.

So , off we go as an I T double team to see said important persons.

Asking them where they keep their important paper files.

Did they keep them in the waste paper bin ?

Oh no they reply. As a cleaner empties it daily. . absolutely right we say. So why would you think the Trash folder is any different ?

Puzzled looks.

Brains whirling away.

Penny drops. Then looks of horror on their faces.

Don't worry we say, we can try and 'recover' them.

We didnt, but we did create Important and Archived folders for them. Then left them to sort their individual emails into those folders.

That same week an internal memo went out, on paper, saying Do Not Use The Trash Folder on your desktops or email to keep anything you actually need.

It then went on to state that every time a user logged out, the Trash would be emptied.

Seemed to work, we never had thise issues again. But perhaps it was that we made those 2 new folders part of the default install....

Threads versus Twitter: Shouldn't we be happy the wheels are falling off antisocial social media?

Even more data grabbing?

So you have to have a facebook or Meta account for Threads ?

OK, but haven't Meta / Facebook already proved they can't be trusted with personal data ?

Some say the Fediverse isnt big enough to worry the big boys.

There's the problem. If they can't control it, won't they destroy it ?

How is it in anyone's collective interest to allow Threads in the Fediverse ?

Surely it is just opening the ports for corporate tentacles to creep into .

Didnt want Facebook, tried TikTok, and not a huge fan of social media, but recognise it's potential and uses.

Nobody does DR tests to survive lightning striking twice

Primary, secondary, tertiary, quantilary ?

When your backup needs another backup but your primary got fried in the first strike, you naturally move to the second and so on.

However, when the owner doesn't understand I.T and the need for any backups because he owns the building, it's a really tough uphill struggle to get anything done, let alone a backup schedule and regime.

So, the workaround?

An on site tape backup, a daily removable database backup (thats what made the money), an off site hdd that only came in on Thursdays, a random backup that was done twice monthya d went elsewhere. Plus I shoved a separate server elsewhere in the building, think it was in a loft space, inside a modified waterproof cabinet. That had a dedicated ups, various surge protectors, plus I could remote access over, a, wait for it, 56.6k modem.

Oh the heady days.....

The number’s up for 999. And 911. And 000. And 111

When a single system isn't enough

Back in 1935, tech was emerging. Before that you had church bells and signal fires to warn of emergencies.

Look at the situation today.

Tech has moved so quickly and without a thought for such needs.

Or has it ?

Anyone remember when VOIP started to be offered to domestic customers.

There were several choices, but if one recalls correctly, only a couple that offered 999 access.

One was Vonage (still going today).

That is why we chose them.

We did away with our copper phone line and had cable internet. That worked.

Until. Yes. You know whats coming.

Power cut.

(Even cordless phones knew that issue, and a lot of base stations had battery back up compartments.)

So what to do ? Pop to a neighbour and use their landline phone !

What might be the future is satellites with 999 capabilities, but also phone boxes which are linked via copper network to a battery backup exchange. But much much smaller than now.

We all know that an EM pulse knocks out tech, batteries run out, rain interrupts satellite.

So, we find, and agree, on a multi network that is resilient and redundant.

Or we just put big hand bells in cabinets.

Datacenter fire suppression system wasn't tested for years, then BOOM

Back in the late 90s

Ah Halon, so useful yet so bad for us humans.

Came across these systems at a Sony building, had a couple of server rooms. Never heard about it going off.

However, did get given a halon extinguisher for home, and luckily never had to use it, although did have several CO2 extinguishers, they were used many times.

To clear wasps, and to put out the odd accident when someone decided to leave a soldering iron on and it, cough, apparently slipped !

Then when work decided to upgrade the whole fire alarm system that had to be linked to the fire brigade.

Before the new system, a few call outs, when someone forgot to turn the isolate key.

When the new addressable system went in, it went off almost daily for several weeks due to a faulty board, so when the firemen turned up on the third day, they said we would get a fine and if it kept happening, we would be removed from automatic call outs!

So whilst the engineers were trying to sort it out, we had to isolate the auto callout link.

But, every time the system went into fire, there were several automatic things that happened, day or night.

Road barriers opened, magnetic locks released (and wouldn't you know it, every single one needed to be manually secured and reset, and large smoke vents opened around the site. Plus the sirens and external klaxons went off which of course woke the neighbours.

We were never so fit as that month !

UK PM Sunak plans to allocate just £1bn to semiconductor industry

Who gets the Billion ?

Anyone else reckon most of that money will end up in shareholders pockets, or grants that see failed startups being sold outside the country or bought by the UK taxpayer ?

Come on politicians, do the people of the UK a solid and think about the long term, invest in this country, let's actually make products here, and perhaps we can be self sufficient in food, as we once were. Not held to ransom by other countries.

Anything is possible if you all work together.

Now that Ive woken up, what a lovely dream tvat would be....

Techie called out to customer ASAP, then: Do nothing

Re: SLAs make work for idle hands...

We had a similar system introduced for out of hours doctor care.

This was just before NHS 0845 4647 around 2004/5.

There was a really simple and reliable database system, that was at the HQ, multiple bases and mobile terminals.

Worked really well , and was loved by the centre staff m

However it had poor report generation. So a new system was brought in.

Time to make a cup of tea.

So, the management decreed it was the best thing since the toast slice and wheel combined.

And it would be faster and better than it's replacement.

Ok. Great.

Yeah. For the first several weeks, we were using paper logs, faxing data all around and then had to rely on 1 landline emergency backup phone when it went belly up and somehow took out the phone system.

That was one Saturday morning, the busiest time for us, of course.

In the following weeks, many updates and tweeks were made, it became more stable, and it was all we could use.

So we made it work. Or so we thought.

One fairly hot bank holiday weekend, the server room AC failed, so everything went off or shutdown.

Even the phone system. But it was ok, that previous disaster had produced some backup mobiles. Yay !

Which then identified another problem.

Because our base terminals were all talking to the now switched off servers at HQ, no one could access the patient data, or clinical notes. So patients arrived, and the doctors were writing everything on paper, which as you can imagine doctor's writing to be, was a series of mostly wiggly lines that could only be read by Egyptologists.

So, a new backup paper system was used to log the patients at base and mobile appointments, with the corresponding case file number next to it.

Of course, when the system was back up, all those paper notes had to be inputted, so that took several days, luckily before the next weekend.

What had been learned helped, as we were hit with wide power blackouts a few months later, and we had learned enough so it wasnt a total disaster and people got seen.

Duelling techies debugged printer by testing the strength of electric shocks

When your colleague decides to avoid testing the polarity of a cable repair and claims it must be a software failure.

The tell-tale burning components were a dead giveaway to those of us that knew what we were smelling.

He was of course promoted out of the way and still contiuned to wreck havoc.

I left and have been stress free since !

Don't lock the datacenter door, said the boss. The builders need access and what could possibly go wrong?

When you give the big boss the one key to open them all, and they go right ahead and loose it.

It does make you wonder why you had to in the first place.

We laughed, only because our team wasnt responsible for said loss, nor were we the ones to change about 200 physical locks.

The absolute kick came, when the big boss's boss, came in, opened the secure safe, in the secure office, and found the golden key, complete with the big boss's house keys !

Funny thing, we had a new big boss less than 4 weeks later.

Startup raises $30 million for wireless power delivery system

Re: Pigs might fly.......

And of course we now have to measure how much RF energy our transmitters are putting out, so as not to endanger any human who might happen to be near an antenna when it's transmitting.

50w on 5.8Ghz, yeah, ok, and why did we enclose 2.4Ghz magnetrons again when we could have simply zapped our dinner in another room ?

Oh yes, death.

US Air Force reveals B-21 Raider stealth bomber that'll fly the unfriendly skies

Decoys

Cast your mind back to WW2, when decoys were used as deterrents on both sides.

So does this perhaps mean that part of the budget will be for set dressing models, and the rest goes on a superior weapon.

Maybe it's one in space, maybe it has a 'death ray' and a rather enormous satellite looking dish as part of its structure.

Or.

The money is going to the moon base project, could be project 'back garden' ;)

And no one wants to risk hitting the moon with missiles, because a) it takes so long to get there and they can deploy the defence tennis racquet.

b) the impact on tides and suchlike back on Earth

Or c) due to a software and communication error, the missiles will miss and hit the passing Vogon shop plunging the Earth into administrative hell.

Game Over

Intel offers Irish staff a three-month break from being paid

Sounds a lot like Musk's Twitter debacle

Intel, once a world leader, looks to reduce costs by 'allowing' staff to take unpaid leave....

Well, we've all seen what happens when you try and cut back on staff. They go elsewhere to find a paycheck!

Musk thought he'd be fine by treating his staff appaulingly, and the instability caused something like a 90% reduction in ad income plus Apple pulling it from their app store.

If Intel think they can do the same, maybe it's time to buy shares in AMD ?

UK bans Chinese CCTV cameras on 'sensitive' government sites

Re: PS: coaxial cameras are still a thing.

Thermal and X-ray !

Thermal really pricey and X-ray, well, you know ;)

Re: Devil's Advocate

Methinks that's perhaps why they've brought this in ?

There is more than enough public reports of backdoors to prove it happened.

For the secure sites, thats going to be a bit of a pain in the rectum for sure.

The irony is that Closed Circuit Television isn't closed anymore, we want to watch our remote sites, or desks from elsewhere. And for added security, upload any data to 'the cloud' which for some of the lower budget stuff is definitely Chinese controlled.

It used to be camera to monitor, then recorders came in, video tape, then optical disk, then magnetic disk, now solid state storage.

And along the way, Cloud storage.

When you see an extra IC on a board and it serves no logical purpose, it was that point you asked, why.

Having dived head long into CCTV for both work and fun (yes, it's true), the image quality to cost impact is unbeatable.

However, as previously pointed out by many other commenters, the security (for us, not China), doesn't exist.

All the software and apps have massive 'phone home and share the audio and video' holes, so much so that on some of the apps, you can see somewhere in China, likely Shenzhen, a nice bland factory, but you can move the camera view !

So when my 360 camera cost, and please sit down for this gem, £3.66 Inc VAT and Amazon delivery, was powered by usb and had IR and a white light option. I bought 2, just to take one apart.

It still works !

And going up to the £75 per camera bracket, was full colour night vision, using a superb fixed lens, was 5mp res, and had line crossing and if used with the right NVR, number plate recognition ! That was Hikvision.

We can't compete, on any level, so I have no idea, when pretty much all the boards and units are China made, that it makes any difference which name is on the outside.

Maybe the UK government would like to start our own CCTV and electronics factory, just so they can guarantee what goes on their sites, and not rely on sub-contracts.

Elon Musk to abused Twitter users: Your tormentors are coming back

Well, this will be another nail in the 'stopping online bullying' coffin.

Sure free speech needs to be protected, and everyone is entitled to their opinion, it now seems that you can buy more protection for those words that hurt and inflame others.

Thanks for the education social media, 20+ years ago I didn't care what my friends had for lunch, as I was sitting with them.

Now I don't sit with them, yet still know what they had, what their friends had, and for some reason, what the adjacent table had, what time and got a link to their feedback of what they thought !

My internet ads always seem to be about 24 hours behind my last random conversation.

So Tuesday will be combine harvester air conditioning day. I shall await the ads from Wednesday onwards....

What's up with WhatsApp? Messaging platform suffers outage in the UK

No issues as of 1145hrs here.

As Hurricane Ian hits, FCC rules cell carriers must help each other in disasters

This should have been done from the start.

Of course here in the UK we can access any network for a 999 call.

America is much larger, but the idea is still logical.

Radio hams have a really decent disaster system and there are lots of them working for free with the support and either free or heavily discounted equipment from the major manufacturers.

This is not generally done here in the UK. The voluntary aid societies such as Red cross and St Johns had disaster planning with every local council and government, also Raynet was involved too. But over the last 20 years things have really gone downhill and if anyone thinks relying on the UK cellular network and airwave (which relys on the same equipment) they need to look again at the real world usage of such critical comms networks.

Massive telecom outage in Japan kicks 40 million mobile users offline

POTS so reliable

Good old progress, who is waiting to see the UK have a major VOIP and internet outage due to 'equipment failure' ?

Having fibre to the premises (fttp) makes sense for providers, of course only if the backup solution (mobile phone networks) work in the event of a power failure or network failure.

There is something to be said for wired connections, not just for backup communications, for internal networking and the simple fact that it's much easier to repair a wire than a fibre optic line (for most users not those who have all the kit )

Speaking with another specialist recently, who is investing in their own power redundancy and communications backups , it's high time the UK practices for such events.

Where would we be without constante emails, notifications, takeaway deliveries, online shopping 24/7 and streaming music and videos ?

Books, candles, battery radios and actually walking round the corner to your friends. Or driving if the roads were clear.

Support the no smartphone day idea. Sunday would be nice. Now if the shops would all shut too.....;)

Arm CPU ran on electricity generated by algae for over six months

Lemons

Had a simple LCD clock that was lemon powered, many years ago as a kid. Smelt nice, plus we had a lemon tree.

When we tried potatoes, they didn't smell as good but lasted a bit longer.

Can't remember how long they lasted, but it's doubtful anywhere near a month, so it will be interesting to see the actual output figures , over time, they got !

Hospitals to use startup's AI tech to predict A&E traffic

Never enough beds

Waste of money. Every A and E I've ever heard of, worked in, visited and been in does not have the capacity to cope.

Often in the management meetings, when , at the weekends, there were no beds, and critical incidents were called to free up money for more agency staff.

This is not a solution for now, but yes, certainly in the future, after more hospitals are built and there is real capacity, not just people waiting to go home sitting in a chair for hours, or waiting for an ambulance to take them home because they can't use a taxi.

It is inhuman some of the things I've seen hospital management do to patients.

Another utter shambles from NHS bosses at the National level, not individual trusts.

Trusts, there's another story...

I'm diabetic. I'd rather risk my shared health data being stolen than a double amputation

Really empathise with his point of view, having medical issues of a multiple nature, but why would pharma companies find a cure to something that makes them money ?

It could be akin to a sweet firm saying they're inventing an ever lasting gobstopper or chewing gum that doesn't loose it's flavour or texture. (Thanks Roald Dahl)

Look at Michelin's lifetime tyres, you buy 1 set that doesn't wear out, yet where are they now ?

Perhaps, and this is a non-empathic viewpoint, humans only survive if they are able, no medicines or treatments available, so the weak are whittled away, and nature takes its course.

Of course if that were the case, then this comment wouldn't be written....