Posts by Richard Jones 1

Re: 'Redmond's not-at-all creepy service'

"a sneaking suspicion that this is a handy way to collect AI training data is surely not mere conspiracy theory?"

You can see it that way, another way is to find out the sort of user who collects 'friends' but cannot be bothered to interact with them human to human.

As such it is an ideal way to train a system intended to man help-desks to provide responses to those poor saps who want someone to talk to when their 'Super Whizzo' has failed for the umptenth time.

Try not to forget that it is an opt in system, also has anyone opted into Cortana in their normal life anyway?

Re: Great!

Agreed, I looked at 'Groove' for the first time today, I still cannot see its point, everyone I know who wants some form of music device has one and it is not this 'thing'. So after stifling a few yawns I wondered (and not for the first time) how the %^&*() to recovers its wasted disk space.

Re: Take results with a pinch of salt

Do nothing 'cause it is hard, is not an option.

I suggest that the first steps are that either (a) facility by facility review is needed to decide what needs to be internet or even intranet connected or (b) some overall relevant guide line is needed to define the achievable objective across a wider, e.g multi facility area, examples. insurance company/ health standards body, OEMs, etc or several working in concert. This process must be health system and political influence independent.

By the way, 'nice to have connections' need not apply!

Authorisation processes need some critical examination to find out whether it really does need years of expensive prevarication to secure life saving/threatening equipment.

Re: How on earth ....

I understand that the checks are increasingly automated. Data on money flows is compared, the ins and the outs and if there is something out of kilter the name gets into the hat. If you make an allowed claim, e.g. personal allowance, perhaps tax free ISA income or as a business you claim legally allowed business expenses you will look OK. However, make some unallowable claim or do something that just does not stack up and you will be in trouble. I know a few who have been caught out over their business accounts not being right. So at the very least get a good accountant to control your excesses if you lack the skills to DIY correctly, that goes for private as well as business accounts.

Re: Bald men fighting over a comb

I live about 25 miles from the centre of London and half a mile from a motorway running straight into London. The only sheep are those bused in to mow a water meadow at the correct time of the year.

Pretty Please EE can I have some in house service like I used to have in the days of One-2-One?

Voice and data would be nice. Since the stupid medical lot insist on calling the mobile and not the land line they were told to use, (as EE service here is crap), I guess I need some mobile service.

@ J. Smith

In the unlikely event that you have paid employment do you claim personal allowance when considering your tax bill? Do you claim child allowances? Do you have an ISA or similar tax free savings vehicles? I trust not, since those are all tax loopholes that exercise those practising numpty-nomics

Re: Why?

For me it is the reliable phone line or effectively no communications. We live in a house which has very unreliable mobile service.

I am not now with BT as such any more and never had their broadband. Yesterday my wife fielded one call about 'our 'BT BB yesterday and I had one today. The idiot was so shocked to hear that my (non) BT was in fine health, I almost felt sorry for them.

Once around Christmas I was doing something with BT and also had a bank statement on my desk. A scammer claimed that a payment had been missed, when I had several proofs to rebut his claim I just wish the scum could get an 'honest' fraud.

Re: S3 bucket default is *private* to that account

@ AC, it may or may not make routine stuff like security easier, that is not really the point you addressed in your post. The fact that something is made easier is of no use if you do not bother to get even the easy configuration done. I see you assume that the worst case applies until you have checked and double checked that all possible steps have been taken to secure the shop. So one brownie point for you and all of those who follow that example.

However, if Joe Thickastwoplanks Or Bertie Cheapscate does not bother to look let alone check they have not messed up; then the ease or difficulty of getting it right does not matter. The fact that AWS was said to send out reminders of misconfiguration suggests that the Joes and Berties might need to invest in some staff who can read and do some basic checking as well.

Re: Trading security for convenience

Do not use a mobile to pay for drive through meals, or bridge or other tolls in the UK as use of a hand held, including a wrist device while driving is illegal.

So choices are:

1) Pull out card from wallet and pay in ten seconds or less.

2) Fumble about with an inside pocket, dig phone out of pocket (after 5 hand operations not so easy). Fumble about in front of growing queue to try to unlock the $%^&*()" phone, give up and either use cash or a card anyway.

Perhaps that is one reason I do not put any financial stuff on the phone (there are other reasons).

Re: A new creators update?

Only my oldest and slowest portables have been offered 1703, which I find slightly strange. It appeared to benefit the circa 2008 laptop so I was OK with that. I wonder if the desktops will ever get anything.

Re: Yeah, right

Moto promised an upgrade to Nougat for my g4 play when I bought i earlier this year, however the service preventer (EE) is failing to make it available. I did wonder about slipping a SIM from the one service provider with an upgrade availability to see if it would deliver the package. The phone was bought as SIM free and has previously worked with that service so it might be worth a punt.

Re: When to record

While I agree with the idea of streaming to the cloud, my own experience of mobile access shows that mobile and access are two words on opposite sides. My own 'mobile' can certainly move about so it meets the mobile bit, however keeping the thing on line is not so easy so fails the 'access' test. In fact most of my house appears to be a not spot whenever an important call is likely to come in, funny thing damned PPI and the like calls and texts are immune to stoppage. Some local storage capacity is therefore essential otherwise gaps will happen and disputes about the gaps will result. That is before the other side resort to jamming equipment. However, any local storage must be hardened so that it can be uploaded without changes ASAP should service be restored.

Re: Legislation, Boycotts and Real Change

While I do not doubt your sincerity your errors should not go unmarked. Tax evasion is already a criminal matter and with few exceptions that do get prosecuted it is relatively rare. Tax avoidance is a totally different matter. A simple tax on turn over might appeal. Think about that for a moment, the retail food trade runs on margins of about 5% and has massive turn over. So lets tax them at say 22% and wonder why there are no food shops any more. It would simply not be worth opening the shop if you lost 17% on every deal. Where there is some leeway to make realistic changes is on such matters as transfer tax, which have already been started. OK so lets move in on to such as investment allowances, buy a new machine and improve production, great. You get an investment allowance to set some of the coasts against tax. So what should now happen is that the business makes more money and is thus in a position to pay more tax and quite likely pay more staff. I guess tax allowances for investment could be abolished and the business could then run on its cranky old devices with the odd breakdown here and there, lower turn over and thus lower taxes, what a great idea, with luck they will also go bust and put a few more out of work, Great is that what you want?

Perhaps we do need some changes taken after a considered approach and not a knee jerk.

I bet most people are only too pleased to claim their personal allowances against tax, perhaps we should stop that bit of what you call tax evasion, rather than rule following, perfectly legal tax avoidance. I have personally not bothered to chase interests rates as the time spent against the taxable return generated was just not worthwhile. Would you class this as tax evasion as well?

Re: You might have also looked up "Social Darwinism"

John Smith 19, sadly doctors did not act alone in taking some of the reprehensible actions you condone. They were mandated by a society who's religious zeal transcended any actual religious consideration, i.e. the bit about forgiveness as a starting point. In short society conditions and allows conditioning and has to take action when it becomes clear that society's own failing are leading to bad outcomes. In my book that might have happened in this case.

But then I once worked in a different society where it was found that females, who had previously been excluded from the labour force by societal norms only a few years earlier were actually far better coders than their male brothers.

@ Brenda McViking

How true your comments were. I have been retired for some years but an associated company had even worse rules than yours. One 'command centre' had a critical capacity issue with the power feed to the site. The manager needed more seats so took the wise route of buying LED displays on petty cash for just over £100 a time rather than £2,000 per throw from the 'supplier of choice' As a circa £100 item they were not capitalised and were classed as expendable so did not justify a supplier's maintenance agreement. He also saved the cost of a new power supply, (£50,000 plus) and its follow on higher bills. Mind you their procurement cycle time for new kits was up to 12 months. This did not sit well with a just in time style desire to buy kit to service new contracts.The different business in which I worked had a customer first service ethic, so we ended up servicing both ends of the deal with equipment. (The same brilliant unit had even managed to sign off on empty racks 'as ready for service', so their super systems really worked well. The customer suffered a two week's delay while we, not the sister bunch organised the missing equipment to arrive, oops.)

Re: Must watch tv ?

@ I ain't Spartacus, some useful ideas, noted.

Thank you.

Re: The problem isn't ideologies spreading on the Internet

Claptrap, austerity as you call it is a consequence of overspending until you have no money left and borrowing has been seen for the folly it is. My grandchildren will still be paying off Blair's PFI contracts for most of their lifetime. The problem is no one can be bothered to learn from history so endlessly repeat its mistakes. I went abroad to work many years ago because the socialist government of the time were hell bent on wreaking the joint by funding failure while taxing anything still working until it was starved of funds to carry on.

Even in this modern world young can get jobs if they discard the web fed clap trap they were fed. I have coached several to forget the false hoods they were told by antisocial media, they obtained jobs within weeks after months of web folklore inspired failure.

Many things can be a force for good or evil. Some of the internet is good, some OK and some is frankly rubbish. Antisocial networking, is a great way to make money for a few and perhaps they should pay back something the harm they permit by encouraging bullying and other 'dark arts'.

When they filter out a celebrated anti war image from > 40 years ago, yet allow torture videos from terror groups even you should be able to understand that their balance is doubtful.

While YouTube has some helpful, interesting stuff, educational, or entertaining stuff, quite what is the value of something instructing the feeble minded to go and kill <insert your personal object of hate here> or commit suicide? Please explain their value?

Re: Oh no

Well at the moment, there is no front door, no back door, no walls and no windows, oh and no roof either; are you so sure you like that situation?

Oh ah is that a government spook I see looking through your missing everything or just some local tramp?

At least he can see you have nothing to hide.so no real need to even bother looking.

Re: Experts all giving advice how how to stay secure

I went to mine as well, except that their system is less than 12 months old and was fine. The local NHS trust is saying the same about their systems.

The old system that the GP used, (mandated by the relevant authority) was a real bag of nails, it had longer outages than working periods and the support package appears to have been provided by a corpse on Prozac. The Lead GP threatened to wall up the next support person who failed to fix it after a two day and counting outage . So far so good with the new one.

Re: The lull before the next storm rolls in

The last thing I read about Munich and Linux was a statement that it was a disaster and that they had to change course bad to something with main stream support. I guess the IT managers and the beer halls have a few missed appointments after all. Or has it all changed again?

Re: From North of the Border

Update, software does not run on the ground or in the air, it requires hardware, thus upping the cost considerably. Then it needs installing or profiling. Then it needs testing and deploying. You might even need to train staff to use it correctly. Then there are all of those lovely custom crafted funnies that all the staff know and love like CTI scanners and MRI machines, etc. Etc.

So as a reasonable estimate the costs of deployment are probably out by a factor of 10 at a minimum.

None of this is a reason to not act, but knee jerks are for jerks.

Re: Pass

Originally I could see no reason for the tat, ow I can see only reasons not to buy the tat.

Re: I realise it's simplistic but....

Perhaps they were all stuck in their seats needing to go to the loo and, well nature took its course? Then the lights went off due to the 'damp problem'?

Re: Trivial fix

I agree with everything you said and upvoted your thoughtful post. However, I also feel that sending out what appear to be death threats and a notification of an intent to take what he desired to be deadly action, is really not the brightest action. Following through with something clearly designed to activate a potentially harmful condition was dumber than being purely stupid. Stabbing someone or even shooting them is also not always fatal, but has anyone seen that being used as a defence?