Posts by hairydog

AI is Artificial Intelligence, but 'artifice' meaning 'dishonest' not 'made' "intelligence" meaning 'espionage', not 'thinking'.

A more accurate description would be 'Automated Plgiarism'

This is the time ro switch to Zorin 17.

One of the snags with beoling told "swiich to Linux" is there are so many different sorts.

Zorin is the one I heartily recommend for a Windows refugee.

If your device connects by wifi, how will it get the rollback?

I find it hard to believe they care. There is fibre to the manhole 230 metres away from my house,

Unfortunately, the fibre does not do the final leap to the pole feeding our connection, even though poles in the opposite direction get fibre.

The pole after ours gets fibre from the other direction. Just our pole is without fibre.

How hard would it be to let us have fttp? Too hard for Openreach, it seems.

So now it's announced: android (sorry, Android) is now officially obese.

This ridiculous scenario is played out up and down the country. Councils are suckered into expensive, complex bespoke systems that probably won't work.

The reality is that Birmingham council may be bigger than the others, but their functions are the same as every other council.

Yes, Birmingham may have more dustbins, but the task of arranging to empty them is only different in scale.

What is needed is to find a LA with a working system and replicate that (with local data and scaled to suit). Not to reinvent the bespoke wheel at huge cost and risk

I keep reading about AI. It is supposed to stand for Artificial Intelligence. But that's intelligence in the 'espionage' meaning, not the 'thinking' meaning.

All AI seems to be good at is Automated Plagiarism. It steals other people's work and anonymoses it.

Without people to steal from AI will end up stealing from AI.

The issues were not technical

Having worked on two parts of npfit over several years, I could see not only that it was going badly, but why.

Basically the core "spine" and database part was terribly badly designed simply because it was based in a 'quick and dirty' demo setup that wasn't designed for scaling to production, but 'the authority' insisted in using that.

They also insisted on regular version releases so close together that there were two separate development streams leapfrogging each other. An utter and complete waste of resources.

The implimentation of the system at endpoints was mostly a matter of integrating it with one of a handful of existing systems.

The sensible approach would have been for a given contractor to integrate all instances of one system no matter what the location.

Instead it was done regionally, so each contractor had to cope with all the systems as well as accommodating varied (and contradictory) requirements for each trust - and sometimes for each hospital!

It could have been excellent. It should have worked, but it was crippled by inappropriate administrative restrictions.

Since then, technology has moved on, but political incompetence is still the same problem

Splendid!

I like Windows 10. It seems to be fairly dependable and fast, tolerably secure.

I'm sure there are people who love the idea of tabs in notepad, but I've used notepad++ for many years.

Most of the major features announced for Win10 seem to be about things like live tiles, which I disabled in the first five minutes after installation.

If MS wants to leave Windows 10 features unaltered and just have security updates, that seems perfect. Thank you, Microsoft

Income from online or other sources that is over £1000 is taxable, not taxed.

If you have no other income, tax is not due unless your income (after allowing for expenses) is over £12,500.

However, it does have to be declared on a tax return.

How many readers of the Reg actually buy their phones in China?

This article would be more informative if the same research was also done on what is snooping on the same models of phones bought in the EU or the UK.

Weasel Words

Yes, the fibre passes my house. What a pity it isn't possible to be connected to that fibre. Seems that the fibre feed goes to poles in either direction, but not to the pole feeding the houses where I live. So it passes, like an express train. I'm not allowed to be a passenger.

Yes, they have rolled out 5G, though not to here.

Where I can get 5G on EE, it seems to be exactly the same speed as 4G in the same place. Where's the advantge?

Leaving aside the dangers from the rotors, the carbon cost, and the sheer silliness of this, it's pretty obvious that it will only be able to use "normal" roads that have no pedestrians and no other traffic.

Anyone who has cycled along as a vehicle has passed by closely knows the power of the slipstream. Roads are twisty, hilly, and pass shelted sections then sections where wind is funneled in. Vehicles' grip on the surface is an assumption inherent in the design of roads.

Basically, this is a big passenger-carrying drone, and drones are not happy travelling along the ground. It won't work. It will have to fly up higher.

It would be even more effective if they stopped doing the things that cause the problem. Re-siting hives, huge areas of monoculture, lack of biodiversity, toxic sprays on crops, robbing the honey and replacing it with HFCS.

How do they get away with it?

If a member of the public was to knowingly and provably tell deliberate lies in a court case, they would be prosecuted for perjury.

Why has the Post Office not been subject to the same sanction?

Due to an unspecified IT cockup a year or two ago, NS&I prevented me accessing my account for nearly four months.

I wonder how well a new system will work, given the track record of government IT outsourcing.

Of course, the Huawei App Gallery is only needed because of the ludicrous Google Play ban.

Hello... can you hear me?

In my experience, the one huge advantage of Huawei phones - and the reason I've bought them in the past - is now considered so unimportant that reviews don't even mention the subject: its ability to connect to the mobile network.

I used to find that Huawei phones worked in places where other phones couldn't get a signal.

Reviews, such as the one I'm commenting on, don't even mention the ability of a mobile phone to do its primary task.

Insteas we get loads about the user interface, which I almost always replace anyway.

Why not just cut the power to the thing?

Or replace it with a £55 toilet from Screwfix?

I didn't know that anyone used paint, ever. Why would they, when paint.net is free and vastly better?

The point is that Zen are in the right here. They cannot do anything to resolve issues within the Openreach section. They can only lean on Openreach. Which they have done, without success.

BT (owners of Openreach) is a private company that exists to make a profit, not to provide a service. This was a political decision to set up.

The best way to lean on OR/BT probably is to contact your MP. But he chose to ignore that advice - perhaps his MP is as useless as mine!

It makes no difference which ISP you go to: they all depend on Openreach engineers fixing the same fault in the same pair of wires.

The difference with Zen is that they don't bullshit you. The people you speak to are knowledgeable, not reading a script. And if your connection is good, your service will be good too. But it is always going to depend on the weakest link in the chain, and that's clearly in the Openreach sector in this case.

Merceded

It's not just IT kit. A Mercedes car has loads of parts that can't be replaced without "coding in" the new bits. And the coding equipment isn't available.

To make matters worse, components aren't available. My car needs a new DVD drive head for the navigation system.

It'd probably cost a few quid, but you can't buy one. You can only buy the whole unit, which has to be coded in on the 'Star' system. The £3 head would cost well over £2000 to fix.

I would like to know who appointed Nominet to be in charge of the UK domain registration. If it was some sort of official body, perhaps they should be pressed to reconsider.

If no-one specifically appointed them, is it now time for Ofcom to look into whether this vital national resource should remain in the hands of such a corrupt, self-serving organisation?

How do you go about being the boss of such an organisation?

Did he simply appoint himself, or was he invited?

If so, by whom?

Why?

I live in a rural village. Our FTTC broadband was fed from a cabinet a kilometre away, getting slower and slower as take-up grew.

Then a new fibre cabinet appeared in the centre of the village, about 180 metres from my house. Great: that'll give far better speeds.

But no. Seems that Openreach will only connect you to the new cabinet if you don't already have a wire (active or not) connected to the old cabinet.

An hour spend checking estimated speeds on the checker identified two buildings that can benefit from this, because they've never had a BT phone line. One of these buildings is derelict. The other has not taken up the service available.

Even if you are willing to pay for a new line, Openreach will not put in a new line if there's an old one they can reuse.

So that's a few thousand pounds of public money "spaffed up the wall". It's not even as if Dido Harding was in charge!

So the community money that went into this cabinet is wasted.

Not sure what I think about this.

Yes, it seems insensitive timing, but if hospitals say they are busier than ever, presumably their need for software licences will also have peaked beyond normal (aka paid for) limits.

Can the software suppliers rely on hospitals doing retrospective audits after the crisis has passed, paying for the extra licences for the peak use? I suspect not.

Will the software companies be in trouble without the extra revenue? I doubt it.

Is it a risk I'd be willing to take? No!

So HP started by deciding to breach the contract that the printers were originally sold under. That was never going to end well.

Now they've backtracked, they've shot themselves in the foot a second time: nobody will switch to a paid-for tariff because they wouldn't be able to move back.

I guess their marketing department has been taken over by a competitor.

And for some of the others commenters here, no it does not print advertisments. and yes, fifteen pages a month is very useful.

Cleaning the heads isn't going to to change:the heads are part of the cartridge, changed for free when the ink runs down.

I've been using one of these printers for a few years. It is mostly used when I'm away in my motorhome, or for when I want a quick one-page document printed.

Ivee never needed toa print as many as fifteen pages in one month: the problem is remembering to print something at least once a month to keep it clear. If it have a big print run I use the big laser printer.

Perhaps there should be an extra tax on people who insist on pointless commuting?

Superfast swindle

A collaboration including taxpayers' money has provided the village I live in with a shiny new FTTC cabinet, bringing superfast speeds to new phone lines in the village.

The trouble is that almost every house in the village already has a phone line, connected to a cabinet well over a kilometre away in one direction or another.

It isn't possible to get connected to the new cabinet.

Even if you pay for a new installation, Openreach will re-use the existing line rather than run a cable to the new cabinet.

I wasted half an hour looking, and found just one single address where the BT speed estimate was the 60mb/sec the new cabinet gives, rather than the 20mb/sec (or less) the existing cabinets are estimated to give. That address has no phone line at present.

The way BT is doing it, we'll never get good speeds. I live in a village with so-so broadband speeds.

One of the community partnerships has paid Openreach to put a new FTTC cabinet in the middle of the village. But almost nobody can use it.

Anyone who has a line already is connected to a cabinet almost a mile away in either direction (depending which end of the village you live.

Even if you order a new line, they'll almost certainly just use a spare pair in the existing cables. I have found just one address in the village that is predicted speeds that reflect a nearby cabinet: that address has never had a phone line.

As long as penny-pinching is more important to BT than delivering a good service, giving public money to BT is throwing it away.

I have a previous version of this laptop, and after a couple of years of use, I would say that it is nothing less than wonderful. Way cooler-looking than a Surface or a Mac, but also better in performance and usability.

The fingerprint reader is superb. Always works first time.

The battery life is stunning.

It charges really fast using USBC. The second USBC port also does Thunderbolt, I understand, though I've never used it for that.

The screen is amazing: It is 3000x2000 though I generally run it scaled.

It happily drives three other monitors at the same time, as well as ethernet and power in, all using one USBC plug (though the included adapter doesn't have ethernet).

I don't have much to say about its actual performance, because I don't play games. For business and multimedia, it is always way ahead of the load. I've never had to wait for it to do anything.

Yes, the webcam is a silly setup, but at least it is easy to switch off.

There is only one thing I dislike about this laptop: it has no page up, page down, home or end keys on the otherwise superb keyboard. I can live without them, but after two years, I still mourn their omission.

Top posting the standard? I don't think so. It's just a sign that you're corresponding with a numpty.

Microsoft's rubbish email clients started this with the reply cursor at the top, but it's not a great choice of email client for so many reasons.

Pardon?

I watched this stupid video, not to see what a light aircraft looks like when flying, but to see if it is quieter sounding than a non-electic plane.

I guess it isn't quieter, or why else would they have put the moronic "drug dealer chimes" attempt at music over the soundtrack?

Yes, of course, police HR is completely unlike any other sort of HR. It's the shape of the helmets, you see.

And every other aspect of the system has to be custom-coded to allow for geographic differences.

Once you are made aware of the need to have everything specially customised for your unique requirements, it's clear that you will need to pay for the best and understand that the work will take time. Lots of time

Oh, and do you realise that you need a special word processor to be able to write a good shopping list?

Fingerprints

If you want an example of how ridiculous an idea can get accepted, look at fingerprint retention.

If your prints are recorded by the police but you were not guilty of the crime being investigated, the EU forced the UK to bring in a system that deletes the record after a time. How long that time is depends on how serious the offence was.

So we have a situation where if you didn't commit a minor crime, your prints are deleted faster than if you didn't commit a more serious crime.

This makes perfect sense only to anyone who doesn't understand the meaning of the word "didn't", but it seems to have been generally accepted.

So what will be accepted for misuse of this data at a later date?