Posts by Roland6

Re: Spot on!

Lets further debunk these claims...

"avoidance of capex (and potential debt/difficulty to get loans)"

If you don't take out and repay any loans, you won't build up a credit rating and so will find it hard to get loans...

The only reason (other than tax) to avoid capex, is to avoid having to pay out a lump sum and maintain it as an asset.

It should also be noted what happened in the late 1980's as companies rushed to convert assets such as property into opex, whilst they did liberate monies that could be invested or (more usually) returned to investors, they also significantly increased their opex, with a massive downward pressure on prices these companies found that they could not compete on price with (mostly) foreign companies... the companies that retained their property assets (ie. continued to own their factories) could leverage this asset to keep their opex low and thus continue to be price competitive...

Third-sector organisations that rely on grants tend to find it is more renumerative to purchase stuff outright as grant giving organisations tend to prefer to fund capex.

"avoidance of maintenance cost"

The only thing avoided is explicit maintenance costs - your subscription to say Microsoft 365 includes maintenance.

"avoidance of obsolescence"

I laughed at this one, a client has their 15+ year old fork lift's via a service contract, the service company has no interest in replacing the fork lifts with more modern ones...

Which really gets to the bottom of the xyx-as-a-service lie. Once customers are hitched to the service there is little real need and incentive to innovate at the pace we have seen in the IT industry these past 40 years. So in fact there is the potential to miss/avoid the 3~5 year refresh and 10~15 years down the road, discover the world has moved on but your xyz-as-a-service provider hasn't. Additionally, we have the converse, a business has to suffer the service providers upgrades delivered at the service providers convenience not the user organisation.

"elasticity/flexibility up and down and in terms of contract terms"

The benefits only really accrue if you have very dynamic or loads with uncertain scaling requirement - something that was common 10+ years back when businesses first opened web stores.

"immediacy of services (for cloud services at least) with no lead times"

The real value of cloud/xaas is lead time/time-to-market reduction (of the IT infrastructure) and the size of investment needed to trial something.

"outsource of infrastructure expertise"

Many business, particularly small businesses that don't run an IT organisation beyond a single person have already done this, so it isn't something special to xyz-as-a-service.

Re: Anyone who expects Google not to track at this point

Re: black box

>They need to be compulsory for all vehicles.

There are moves to make dashcams compulsory in new cars - many manufacturers are starting to fit as standard, not exactly onerous given the cameras already being fitted for the driver assist functions.

Re: Not for much longer

>Interestingly it might not be possible for the EU to sue over the internal market bill, because its a bill not an act.

However, for the Internal Market Bill to have any real value, it needs to be on the status books before the end of the year; so a game of cat-and-mouse is probably being played: will the bill be an Act before the case gets a court date and will that date be before the end of the year...

Re: "a URL manipulation attempt"

>Alternate payment methods ?

Cash...

Interesting to see that El BBC references El Reg but also indicate that this might be another Magecart

hack.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-54465359

Re: Why use the word racist.

Not yet been perfected?

I wonder if the problem is actually at a lower level ie. I suspect ExamSoft are using a third-party facial recognition engine, as it seems the UK Home Office are experiencing similar problems:

UK passport photo checker shows bias against dark-skinned women

Aside: What I like about this specific article is that at the bottom they give clear details of the method used to create their test data set.

Re: Great opportunity

>I think that Jobs are popular with a lot more people than just politicians.

But the politicians like to total all jobs 'created' across the life of a project to sway people - thus you can expect politicians to go on about say 200+ jobs being created. However, if you knew beforehand that the £1Bn investment would only result in 6 actual jobs after the opening ceremony, many would question the value of the investment.

Re: £18m?

It's probably the figure their preferred partner came up with, just that they have to go through the public procurement process to be able to award the contract...

From the requirements list, it seems that a consultancy with an enterprise architecture capability is needed.

Re: Lots of Patents

That's Birmingham, England not Birmingham, Alabama - mostly likely named after Birmingham, England....

Re: Complain to charity commission

However, to throw off the charitable trust status would seem to indicate that they once were a charity, which raises the question whether this process was correctly conducted, if not it can be rendered null and void...

The absence of any nod towards the "massive jump" from 2G to 3G in the report, really says it all.

Reading the report it is clear the authors believe 5G to be synonymous with "Digital infrastructure" a and "Digital networks and services" ie. it is a replacement/upgrade of both 4G and existing (fixed) broadband. So are making all sorts of claims for 5G, that for anyone who has been involved in mobile the design of IT know can (and will) largely be met by existing technologies; just that the existing technologies -- like 5G need to be provide nationwide coverage...

It would seem the authors have taken the OECD statement "the extent of 5G gains depends on ‘the speed at which 5G will be rolled-out, and how quickly it will be taken up by businesses and consumers’ " and simply started running.

Re: FFS!

>The problem is that GPs appear to have been told to break the law at scale by making unauthorised disclosure of PII.

You have not presented any evidence of this only wild speculation.

The only evidence you have presented is that you have received emails from the NHS at an address you supplied to your GP. Yes there is reason to question your GP about how this has come about - perhaps the NHS provides a bulk email facility to which GPs can provide a mailing list, tick a box, click okay and you get an email from the NHS in your inbox...

Re: Scandal, but not this

> realtime usage monitoring apps. No one uses them.

Not quite correct. People tend to use them initially to get an idea of what energy they are using, but once this is done there is no real need to look at them again unless an exception happens. I remember this usage pattern being reported on with the monitors supplied with new smart meters.

Re: MS is between a rock and a hard place with desktop windows

The 286 was the min. cpu for Windows 3.1; Windows 3.0 supposedly could run on 8086/8088.

Personally, I never used it on anything less than a 386 with 4MB of RAM for Word, Excel, Powerpoint; now I use W10 and use some massively more performant CPU and 4+GB of RAM for Word, Excel, Powerpoint...

Re: "we will never be able to avoid outages entirely"

>Where do you draw the line though?

<digression>

Suspect having a failover cloud on Mars is going a bit far, but it might come in handy when that asteroid hits...

</digression>

Re: ROTFL!

>I've previously been a console gamer, and I was shocked at how much fiddling around with old versions of drivers and third party hacks it takes to get a lot of PC games running in a usable state under Windows.

That's because a console only has one specific chipset architecture, making it very simple for games developers. With the PC, games developers are free to specify their own graphics card and other preferences...

It's the reason why my son is only allowed a console, until such time as he can build and maintain his own PC's.

Re: Nice

>Easy micro farming on a Pi.

I wonder if Xen clustering will seemlessly work out-of-the-box on a Pi cluster...

Re: Unfortunately....

It's a grey area because... its the music industry, which has its own idea on copyright. And from various cases over years thinks that if you are inspired to do something as a result of listening to a song and actually say they you were inspired by said copyrighted song, they are entitled to royalties...

See the same thing with Disney's actions against kindergarten kids drawings of Winni-the-Pooh etc.

Re: Spendy

>I remember being poured a cup from a jug almost as soon as I sat down, and having it topped up on a regular basis.

I always asked for a fresh coffee, not one from the jug that had been kept warm for an unknown number of hours... Having an English accent probably helped me get away with it. :)

Re: effective and simple to use

"This particular item looks as though the control is to produce a throttling of trade, what is the point of preventing trucks entering Kent "

According to the Brexiteer interviewed in the Express, this is supposed to put pressure on the EU to "force a deal", without giving any reason as to how having a border in Kent would put pressure on the EU (and not the UK). Laugh is that the no-deal Brexiteer's won't like whatever is in the deal and will vote it down regardless just to keep face.

Re: What about?

They do, however, you seem to need either a phone purchased directly from EE or a reseller as an EE network locked phone ie. contains EE firmware.

Aside: Not tried a non-EE phone to test this constraint.

Re: Nothing new really

Not really, the big driver was cost reduction. With the PC, there was surplus processing time on the machines CPU, thus the "I/O Channel Controller" could be redesigned to use the main CPU rather than its own dedicated CPU - making NIC's affordable to the many. This thinking also lead to dumb modem cards and cheap printers that relied on intelligent drivers; all tied to the Windows OS...

Re: Just unfit for the purpose

Yes, I suspect in the current era, the problem lies in the tools...

I use Word/Libre etc. to produce a formatted document, which allows me to link elements together, the problems seem to arise when these documents are converted to some other format ie. PDF and HTML, where this linkage information seems to get lost.

Given the purpose of PDF is to preserve the look of a printed page across devices and printers, it is generally okay that PDF loses some of the metadata of the original document. It only becomes a problem when you wish to use the PDF as if it were a document format like ODF and Doc, ie. something PDF/Postscript wasn't intended to be used for .

However, webpage creators don't really have the same excuses; particularly when there is an expectation that the user will want to print the displayed webpage. It p*sses me off that web page producers don't understand the principle that I want not only to be able to display a webpage nicely on my screen, but also at times I want it to 'display' nicely on a series of A4 sized 'screens'. Strangely MS manage this quite well in Word giving the user multiple views of the same content. Interestingly, there are some websites that do understand that people want to print stuff and the print option reformats the content for printing (to printer or PDF).

Re: This years excuse

Of course there will be. There'll also be a term stating the rate. Changing the agreed rate unilaterally is where the breach is.

Only if they try to change the rate without giving notice that they are terminating the current contract.

As sysconfig noted "Yes it's shit, but it's not illegal." provided they do things in the right sequence... It's what the legal profession call a "technicality".

Re: Not surprising for Aus

You made this key point first!

No where in the article or in comments prior to this is the quality and reliability of Home-Office comms raised.

Re: "Europe (UK included) exist under the protection of the US military"

>It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see Russia as serious threat.

Trouble is, NATO is still largely of the cold war mind set ie. a Russian attack is something that can be repellec with nuc's and conventional military forces, not a long-term guerilla war: a Polonium laced cup of tea here, a quick spray of Novichok perfume there, a carefully orchestrated Facebook/Twitter campaign...

It looks like when there is something for NATO to attack the battle will already have been lost; to the Chinese.

Re: Economics 101

>Don't forget the electricity cost isn't $0

I had thought of that, however, given the organisation: Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, I suspect they get fully funded to run the supercomputer 24x7 - or someone is p*ss poor at writing funding bids....