Posts by Headley_Grange

I am be just as hostile to having my records shared and I would be incandescent if they trained AI on it. I don't trust them. Cos it could fuck up my insurance. Cos I could get scammed. Etc. I think your post just emphasied much more succintly what I think too. But it's such a fucking waste.

One of the biggest issues in the NHS is that most doctors have no idea how well their diagnoses and treatments work - GPs in particular. There's no relationship any more. I see a different doctor every time I go to the GP and we get a strict 10 minutes so there's no "apart from the rash, anything else I should know about" sort of chat. The GP treats and prescribes and usually he/she doesn't see me again and that's it. They don't know if I was cured or if I ended up in hospital even worse or just dropped down dead. Just uploading patient records and correlating treatment with what little is known about outcomes could pay major dividends - both in patient recovery and the cost of treatment and drugs. It could be literally life saving. It'll never happen because people, including me (I opted out of the data sharing**), now have such a deep distrust of the tech companies and, even more distrust of any combination of tech company and government. All that potential, all that science, all that potential benefit, lives saved,...etc., all of it chucked away because a few very very very very rich people want to get even richer by trampling all over my privacy and selling my data to anyone who's willing to pay for it.

**I'm not naive enough to believe that anyone took any notice and I think that the opt-out is worthless now in light of the deal with Palantir.

Re: The government creates the rules, we just play by them

Yeah, right, cos if I didn't have to pay $150 to get my taxes sorted out I'd jiust chuck it in the bin, would I?

The problem here isn't the need for Excel, it's the fact that the crap managers who need the people-skills assistants haven't got the bottle to deal with the Excel hold outs. Sack the managers, replace them with their assistants who, with their people skills, can get the Excel hold-outs to lead the LO roll out because their specialist application knowledge and expertise puts them in the best position to help the rest of the staff transition.

That's not how I see it. I bought a new Mac last year with Sonoma. Hopefully the Mac will last many years and I'd be happy to keep Sonma exactly as it is today forever + free security updates.

I consider that I paid for the OS to work when I splashed £2k for the Mac and the OS and I expect Apple to fix whatever it got wrong, just as VW fixed the doors of my car for free last year when it found a design problem with them. Any other updates - I don't care. A few extra emojis? Folders in Reminders? Don't give a toss. If those require wealthy coders working for nothing then set them free or put their updates in the store for a few quid cos I don't want them..

It's in Apple's interest to get me on the newest build to reduce their support costs - they're not giving me free upgrades for my benrfit. The change from Sonoma to whatever comes next and letting me have it for "free" is part of a marketing strategy to support September's show, not a demonstration of Apple's altruism towards its existing customers.

The root cause isn't the manufacturers, it's consumers. People walked into the shop and bought the cheapest printer on the shelf that did what they wanted. They didn't care about running costs they cared about ticket price. The manufacturers responded by lowering costs until they were losing money and so made it up on the ink. Now they run the subscription model because the tech has made it possible and, more importantly, consumers are used to paying a subscription for bloody everything now.

Re: Can't help but think...

"..machines doing manual work are fucking useless unless you want to spend way more than it costs to employ people like me."

When those management, legal, commercial, supply chain, HR, accounts, developers, coders, testers and accounts staff are all gone and their wages are gone and their offices and buildings and car parks are gone the company will have a much lower cost base and then might have enough money sloshing around to AI your job away too. And that's before you start considering that if a majority of the workforce becomes unemployed there might not be enough money in the economy to buy the stuff you make. Maybe the government will give all those unemployed managers a guaranteed income and you'll be the only one left working.

Re: Slow down there... They ain't starving

It's not just that they put profits above all, it's also that the markets expect them to make ever increasing profits.

My local takes cash, the beer comes straight out of the barrels on racks behind the bar and I'd be happy to take the landlord's IOUs for change if power to the tills went down and I can drink and find my way to the bog in the dark. I've just checked my wallet and there's at least a week's beer money in there. That's about the extent of my resilience planning, but it'll do to be going on with.

Re- the moving icons: I can't remember where - maybe Gadgeteer - but about ten-ish years ago there was an article about buying a new phone and making the difficult choice between Android and Apple. She chose Android specifically because she could put the icons where she wanted. I'm not making any assumptions about Apple listening to users, but I bet there are a lot more people worried about pretty things than about background performance and management.

For me, as a user well ensconced in the Apple garden, the main problem with their products is the "it just works" thing and the fact that even Apple believe it. When I first got a Mac (2009?) I'd spent ages unsuccessfully trying to get a MS PC with Acronis to do daily backups. It was a right royal pain. When I bought a Mac and Time Capsule it was a couple of clicks and it just worked - and has done ever since. I tried recovering a couple of files and it just worked. I was sold - an instant fanboi (I've grown up a bit since then). However, the problems come when things just don't work because the apps have no allowance for things ever going wrong. iCloud Files is a pain on Mac and iPhone. Sometimes it stops synching, or gets to 99% and stops, or files just don't appear on the phone. In a normal world there'd be a big "Just fucking synch everything now, no matter what you think the synch-state is" button - but there isn't in the Apple world because they assume it always just works. You head down rabbit holes of Terminal commands, stopping background apps, logging in and out of cloud accounts, creating dummy files, etc. none of which are any good when you're heading out to a meeting and needing a file on your phone or ipad; I just email stuff to myself now. I can't imagine what it must be like for Admins who have to look after a bunch of iDevices when they just stop working.

Re: Shirley Knot

Hummmmm.

Dunno. I haven't got a Google or Youtube account so the algorithm is based on whatever it stores in its cookie and, I guess, whatever nefarious stuff Youtube does cross-site. I allow the youtube.com cookie - if I don't then it's groundhog day every time I launch the website - and the youtube nocookie that's needed to watch some of the vids on the Guardian website. I read most of the free national UK dailies online and a couple of locals, but use NoScript to lock them down tight and, Gruan aside, never watch vids on them, so maybe Youtube only knows I read the Guardian and, together with my recent video watching, assumes I'm a left-leaning watchmaker who likes SciFi, Suntour, Japanese wood saws, LEDs and is currently making a surface plate and a longbow.

Re: What's the Catch?

I think you're right on all counts. MS had the luck to be in the right places at the right times to become a de-facto standard and people stick with what they know. When I quit to go freelancing 15 years ago I thought nothing of transitioning to a Mac (I'd never owned one before) but I bought Office for Mac, Outlook for Mac and Parallels and Win 7 so I could run MS project - all that £MS investment without any research into alternatives, or even trying the native Mac ones. MS was the go-to solution - albeit in happier days before Windows desktop ads, subs and ties to MS accounts. Now I run LibreOffice which I find a bit buggy but OK and I've not found any limitations in features or performance compared to MS. I've even got an alternative for MS Project somewhere, but I've forgotten the passwords to those dark, damp, underground cellars where waterfall scheduling is done so it doesn't get much use these days.

Re: Made you Click

It pushes too many buttons. Crime and punishment, controversial techinical and legislative solutions and Openreach tossed in as our favourite panotmime villain, all based on a premise as thin as an ISP's promise. The only thing missing was that Kate's poor photoshopping was down to losing her broadband because of vandalism of the local cabinet by an eco mob.

Re: Perspective (OT as well)

My mate used to take a box of used fanfold home every so often - his wife was a primary school teacher and used it for art. The boss saw him carting a box out one day and went mad when he found out the reason. He was worried that it contained confidential stuff, so my mate let him look through it. Neither of them had a clue what was on it - just the usual meaningless rows of numbers with lots of asterisks I bet. The school contintued to get its art supplies.

Re: Stop using certain products then

"the risk vector in the overwhelming majority of breaches tends to reside in their products"

I'd like to see some data on that. I'm not saying you're wrong, but if we're opening a book my money on the highest risk vector would be people doing stupid things - password123, never changing admin account name and being phished by clicking on an attachment.

"Many of these scams work because greedy or stupid punters are willing to ignore the "if it looks too good to be true" rule in the hope of making a quick buck."

No they don't. The main money is made when someone calls you from you bank's phone number and tells you that someone's got access to your accounts and you've got very little time to send your money to a special secure account set up by the bank before you lose it all. They tell you to hang up and call the bank's number on the back of your bank card to prove it's not a scam call, but they don't hang up so if the scammer makes the right noises they person being scammed believes they are through to the bank when in reality you're still on the line to the original scammer. The Telcos facilitate this - they allow spoofing of numbers and they have a phone system that doesn't let one side of the call hang up (in the UK). If the Telcos were made responsible for all losses (including consequential) then they'd close these two holes so fucking fast it would make your eyes bleed.