Posts by Roland6

But which flops? Fosbury flops? Of which many will probably be necessary to get the funding out of the government.

Re: It'll be like the Crick Institute won't it.

Not sufficiently over budget. I suspect it will be sold as being great value for money, but will overrun and cost over £5bn (https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/04/national_cyber_force_hq_samlesbury/?td=keepreading )

A computer this important and expensive will need to be protected as if it were a military/national security asset, so will need to be housed a dozen or floors underground. Etc.

However, in typical government fudge, it will be operated by Microsoft (uk) as part of G-cloud.

Re: ESN services vs network

My brother liked his pager, it often got signal when his mobile didn’t. So when out, it enabled him to knock on a likely door flash his NHS card and be permitted to use the landline phone.

Re: hopeless

> What other net did you have in mind?

Well, I had largely forgotten the research project I had a small interaction with in the 1980s, until this recent ElReg article

https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/07/us_air_force_awards_755m/

I think a MANET is probably a better upgrade to Tetra than commercial 4G…

Re: Functionality creep.

You went a lot further than I did, I saw the potential, but as it was a very minor part of my work never encountered it sufficiently to warrant getting to grips with it. Another place where Visio with added “fizz” would be of benefit is in rack cabinet configuration and maintenance.

Re: "Outlook for Mac app free to use"

Additionally with App Store controlled apps, there are limitations on reinstall, which seem to be increasingly used.

Just had this frustration with an app I installed during lockdown on one iPad, decided I needed it on another (same user account) and discovered it was now region locked and thus inaccessible to me. I suppose it could have been worse and had the now region locked app quietly removed from my device…

Re: Functionality creep.

I think the demise of the user guide and reference manuals has done much to hide functionality. With Visio it always irritated me that stencil libraries always tended to undocumented, so Cisco et al thanks for the stencils but beyond basic “PowerPoint”presentation usage little real value.

Re: Clone of Android

And so the wheel goes full cycle.

I seem to remember apple arguing that android was a ripoff clone of iOS…

Re: But...

> If you implement something and it works in Chrome thanks to some bugs, but doesn't display correctly on something without the same set of bugs, whose fault is it

The browsers…

Had this problem a couple of years back with Foxit PDF reader, it didn’t correctly render a page that Adobe did. Foxit provided an easy to access feedback menu option that allowed me to report it and in a subsequent update was fixed.

Fundamentally the problem comes down to the maintenance of a common test suite, accessible to all developers, which basically means a market commitment to openness and fair competition.

Re: firing or layoff?

The terms are only generous once you know the qualifying criteria.

Would not be surprised if we see an interesting, but not wholly unexpected demographic to the 5%…

Re: Shared work spaces work if...

I don’t get the logic of not hot-desking the lot.

Okay divide it into areas, so that teams have a base, and have a simple reservation system. But beyond that the requirement is to facilitate team interaction i.e. do some task that is more easily done face-to-face, like brainstorming, finessing proposals/presentations etc.

From memory, the office probably got more noisy - because the focus was on interaction, however, this was mitigated by having a quiet floor of individual hotdesks and project rooms. The laugh is that many of the big consultancy companies probably had this all worked out 20+ years back…

Re: Several problems...

Google’s management wanted expensive real estate…

I see there is still no start date on the construction of Google’s £1bn (2013 money) London HQ at St.Pancras that was due to be completed by 2016.

Aside. Looking at the price of office space at St.Pancras, I can see why people are getting worried; that’s a lot of money going out each month… Working from home, with no change to employee salaries, the company is still quids in.

You missed Westland Helicopters…

Re: Chasing pies in the sky

> punitive taxes

Nice sound it’s that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

But be my guest if you want to take a pay cut and emigrate to India or China…

The Tories don’t really care two hoots about who owns industry in Britain, the conservatives are only really interested in property, construction and financial services.

Re: it's normally a Powershell job.

It would be nice if someone provided a screen recorder that translated mouse clicks into relevant group policy rules and/or powershell script, thereby having to trawl though every group policy setting…

Re: Secure boot is only part of the solution

Well, when the physical PC BIOS ROM was replaced by something that could be in situ software updated (with no motherboard jumpers to be installed/removed), it was said this was a security risk…

Re: Kaspersky?

I recently read a PC magazines 2023 review of Windows security suites, Kaspersky wasn’t listed, but was included as footnote - they had tested it and it would have topped the table however they couldn’t be seen to promote Russian software….

Re: Technology strategy

I seem to remember the having and maintaining of R&D and regional investment strategies that lasted longer than The party in power at Westminster was seen as a good thing. It does look like a new generation is having to relearn the lessons of the 1970s & 1980s…

Re: Musk's great promises falling flat

Did Tesla announce a C5 ?

Re: Okay, okay, we get it...

> It appears that a majority of people in Europe want the war over even if it means Ukraine being smaller than it started.

I suggest many believe Putin is honest and don’t want to see the evidence, namely there isn’t an international treaty he hasn’t reneged on.

Also, many probably do not want to think of Europe being at war, as that disrupts a comfortable lifestyle…

Re: Maybe they're expressing an opinion BECAUSE they are an intelligence organization

conspiracy theory

{

Well given the track record of the CIA and the known disinformation strategies adopted over the origin of student…

It isn’t beyond the possible that CoViD19 (prototype) was the product of a lab, only a US one… and Wuhan was a long way away and have many attributes that make it a test ground which would help to hide the true origin. Hence the FBI are, pointing the finger at others to direct attention away from what they are actually doing…

}

As others have pointed out it really doesn’t matter, it is only a matter of time before the next pandemic….

Re: The dangers of certainty

Don’t remember Vitamin D being “useless”, but do remember it being rated as boosting the immune system so enable the body to better combat CoViD but it wouldn’t stop you contracting CoViD, hence it was not a substitute for a ‘vaccine’ or treatment.

As for the “ungodly profits”, there was a really good article in the Guardian which set up to do an exposé of this profiteering but instead showed just how many of the companies involved in vaccine production had finally made a profit after years of loses.

Re: this again?

I remember there was a (small) piece of UK scientific research published which supported this; they analysed tissue samples taken months before CoViD19 was identified, using the tests for CoViD19 which had then been developed. Their conclusion was that cases of CoViD19 had occurred in the UK more than 4 months before Wuhan.

> It just seemed awfully suspicious to me how easily it evades evolving vaccines...

So are you suggesting that after circa 50 years and still no effective Vaccine or treatment, AIDS originated in a lab?

It’s a hypothesis, a theory requires evidence..