Posts by Ku... 67 publicly visible posts • joined 12 May 2010
Its well worth a trip up there. I have been a guest of BT Corporate Hospitality and eaten in the restaurant, which was very nice as well. The revolving floor is only disconcerting if you look inwards to the "core" which is not moving. Then you can feel a bit sea sick. Looking outwards is excellent fun. Ihave to add that the revolving mechanism broke down part way through and had to be restarted though...
This is an interesting one and one which often requires a revisit.
The problem being that second user equipment carries a burden of responsibility on the supplier for electrical safety, warranty, etc. You also have to consider the time and labour taken up in doing all the data protection deletion, reformat, reload, etc. Also any upgrades to the old PCs required to bring them up to spec. to run even Ubuntu and Open Office.
A couple of times I have been through the numbers when we were encouraged to donate old PCs to local good causes, but to donate them in any kind of decent working condition and to meet our DPA and now WEEE requirements required such a lot of costable labour it would have been cheaper for us just to buy new PCs and give them away. We'd have got a better tax break doing that too!
When you are talking about the level of support I understand is being provided through the scheme then having a common platform, good working HW etc. is the cheapest part of the programme and is essential to any of the rest of it working without tying up the support staff in counter productive hardware issues.
If running old hardware with open source OS and apps was really the big money saver then all businesses would be doing it, and if it doesn't work in business then why would it work in the public sector?
I don't know who qualifies for these PCs so I'm not going to make judgements on it. I'll bet you can find good and bad which ever point it is you want to make.
Not sure if Titus Technophobe's comment is supposed to be a joke or not, but I'll make the point that to save money most of the publications previosuly enjoying huge print runs to sit on shelves in schools, PRUs, YOS centres and other local authority venues are now all only available online either as web services or as a PDF tacked onto a static page. Without internet access kids now don't have access to this material. Sixth form college applications are supposed to all be done online now to save admin and paperwork. Colleges are not printing prospecti as these are all now online.
"Doing homework" now consists of completing electronic portfolios, the last government made quite a big thing about this. All of which requires access to the sites they are hosted on.
Now so long as sufficient ICT resource is available within the school, or failing that within local libraries, then young students have plenty of oportunity to reach the information, applications and course work that they need. However much axe-weilding has taken place in library budgets already and there are closure programmes and problems with access in these venues. Add to that cuts in Education and the BSF programme ending which was providing upgraded ICT access for these schools and you have to wonder if th need will be met in all cases.
Remember also that for the disabled it is often not possible to use public access PCs in these locations anyway due to the lack of specific adaptive technology for those users. Funding for special access for the disabled has been under fire for some time also.
If you just cut administrators without cutting the admin work they do/did then what happens is clinical staff end up becoming administrators...
Serious, strategic overhaul is whats required not window-dressing cuts to "backoffice" without thinking through the over all effect on operations...
A typical mobile phone user is not using a data tarrif, is not sending data. Most users use their mobile for talking and texting which is why most packages are all about one or the other or both. Those of us using data a lot or even only a bit are still a minority of the mobile phone users.
by-the-minute talk time is still the meat & two veg of most mobile operators.
It will change, slowly.
If speed cameras result in a 21% reduction of KSI then that is still well worth having.
I suspect that the current govt. move against speed cameras is more that they don't want to pay for them than that they don't believe they work.
I notice that despite claims by many motoring groups that speed cameras are revenue generators the camera system operates at a net loss, according to recent govt. figures...
Lots of options to do this without getting mess on your own estate, depends what the users NEED, seems to be a lot of "one size fits all" solutions out there and the cases I hear where its all gone wrong are where someone didn't take into account HOW and WHERE users work so much as what they need access to.
The point is that the FBI did NOT ask burstNET to take down the site, they did that themselves for breach of ToC. Read the CNET article linked to by The Reg. The FBI did not ask for the site to be shut down. Seems people would rather go off on paranoia fuelled rants about the forth riech and lack of freedom of speech than actually read the article in full...
Yes, if I ran a hosting company and someone was hosting blogs about killing innocent citizens and publishing hit lists I would shut it down.
If you run a business hosting 70,000 blogs how come you don't back it up?
I use a disc recorder extensively in "normal" definition. I record stuff, then I watch it, then I delete it. You don't need a massive HDD to do that. Stuff I want to keep I buy on the appropriate disc format. I have the facility to record from HDD to DVD now, but seldom, if ever use it. Its useful to have the facility, and I will buy a device with this functionality if it meets other more important criteria first.
A decent, ad-free EPG is more important!
So road charging means as a motorist I'll pay 60-65% less road tax and fuel duty. Unless the government proposes to stop having an NHS, Welfare State and a military service they will just have to raise that money through other taxation, perhaps 25% VAT, higher income tax, etc.
If you want to pay less tax your government has to spend less.
If you spend less, you get less.
What does the government currently do which it should stop doing? And this will have to be big, significant changes...
Its a central database.
It is accessible from many places.
I have no idea what this "shielded" business means because all staff having access to that child have access to the record. So Baby P would have been "shielded" whatever that means but all staff having contact with that child would have access to the record.
I love the hysteria about these things. One hand you don't want agencies to have the facilities to work together, but on the other hand I assume you don't want the 50+ children a year who are on the at risk register already but who still manage to die at the hands of a family member?
The reason they wanted all kids on there, regardless of whether they were already working with social services, police, etc. or not is because they don't trust individual agencies to add the at risk children properly. So the police may add a record for Jim Smith, the social services add one for Jimmy Smith, NHS see a battered child called James Smith and nobody links the records...
Its far more fashionable to call the whole thing a conspiracy when it is in fact simply data sprawl caused by the (admittedly dificult) job of tracking millions of people who are too young to have National Insurance numbers or other unique identifiers.
You can use this as an arguement for a national identities register, but we've been there already.
Consultants were concerned that there was a security risk if PCs which were used to access Contact Point were then dumped or sold on eBay with a portion of the data still on the hard disk...
Yes, this is why all companies, public authorities and, well, private citizens should ensure proper disposal procedures for thier redundant PC kit.
We use 7 pass data wipe and drill all disks which won't wipe.
In any case, councils and other public bodies are required to be bound by WEEE regs to ensure safe recycling of the old kit too.
If those bodies using CP are following basic, legally mandated process and basic good practice, this is a non-issue.
If they are not compliant with WEEE and DPA in the first place then this is a bigger issue and should be dealt with - by prosecution if necessary.
With public sector staff all getting bashed continually in the media right now. I work in the public sector and certainly there is bad practice and other issues to deal with but certainly no worse than I saw when I worked for several good sized and multinational private sector businesses.
The problem is disecconomy of scale in organisations rather than public/private sector.
I'm sure you can point out plenty of examples of bad working practice in the NHS, local authority or whatever, but you could (if you wanted) find plenty examples of good practice, and I can certainly recall many equal bad examples from previous employers in the private sector.
Suggesting its all tea breaks and sloppy attitudes is wrong and insulting to those of us who are flexible, innovative and trying to deliver your public services effectively and efficiently.
Apple are pretty sharp at marketting.
I can video call from my desk. I seldom do. About the only application where I use video calling is when speakign to relatives overseas and there is more than one of us at either end its more of an "inclusive" thing to webcam, speakers, Skype video call than it is to sit there with a handset pressed to your head and say "yeah, mum says hi"
Mobile based video calling still seems to have a bunch of limitations which make it less useful and I am not encouraged to use it.
If parents read to their children then children will take to reading and litterature. My three year old has access to all the modern distractions of moving images you'd find in a "tech" person's house. Yet she loves the 45 year old hand-me-down Ladybird "well loved tales" books that pass to every kid in our family and many others old and new. She also loves a trip to the library to chose books.
Bring your own kids up right and don't worry about the barbarians. Don't blame the technology if you are a weakass parent.
" a hideous mess, and a dangerous accumulation of power" - I don't see how that is. I have been involved with the project. There is a lot of scaremongering about any national database and this one in particular. Next time there is a Baby P in the headlines and the papers are all crying out "why don't public services work together in a coordinated way" we can point to the fact that the database designed to facilitate this was scapped to save costs.
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