* Posts by steviebuk

2198 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Feb 2017

WTF? Potty-mouthed intern's obscene error message mostly amused manager

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Martin Gilroy?

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Write it in code. Like we do.

2868

Look at a phones alphabet keypad

Microsoft 365's add-on avalanche is putting the squeeze on customers

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Min seats

May have changed now but when a sales bod was trying to flog us Copilot it was £30 per user min of 300 seats. So we'd have had to buy 250 more seats than the users we have.

I've predicted it will be given to management to make their life easier for the same pay and fuck everyone else below them still having to do all the manual working outs in Excel and still having to actually read reports.

Too many people are relying on it summerising reports meaning I predict here, on the register, that this will create more instances of Horizon. There will be some key data in those reports that the AI will ignore and so will the manager who just asked Copilot to summarise it for them because they are too fucking lazy to read it. More people will be falsely imprisoned because of a lazy manager. Much like we're seeing in the enquiry now, with managers in charge of a technical team and making no decisions themselves. Instead "I relied on the info John gave me. I'm not technical. I just manage the team".

IBM overhauls rewards program for staff inventions, wipes away cash points

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IBM

IBM now stands for Inconsiderate Bastards Much. They really have tanked and turned into arseholes.

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Re: Why why oh why

Wozniak wasn't stupid. When Jobs said they should sell the Apple 1 Wozniak said he had to ask HP first as he'd been working on bits of it on their time. They said they weren't interested and he can keep the idea.

The rest is history.

40 years since Elite became the most fun you could have with 22 kilobytes

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Re: A forerunner in it's time

Play Dwarf Fortress. That gets your imagination flowing again.

Post Office boss unable to say when biz knew Horizon could be remotely altered

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Office Space

Listening to Peter Sewell he IS Tom Smykowski from Office Space.

"People wrote those words, I just gave to blah blah" and so on.

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No technical knowledge

Appears we have, listening live to the enquiry, another classic case of a manager in charge of technical people that has no technical background. Granted you don't need to be fully technical but you should at least try and understand what your staff are explaining to you. It appears Peter Sewell was one of those managers that was giving a "jobs for the boys" manager role of a technical team yet never bothered learning any of it during his time.

"I don't recall". "I can't say its a technical issue".

Microsoft braces for automatic AI takeover with Copilot at Windows startup

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autoruns...

....set Autopilot to disabled.

Word of mouth, why can't these big corps understand word of mouth. Forcing shit on people makes people hate shit more than they already hate shit.

Eben Upton on Sinclair, Acorn, and the Raspberry Pi

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Re: The glory days of UK IT

And no import tax or whatever it was called. I now can't find the vid but its of Alan Sugar saying in an interview in the 80s, that he gets all his stuff made in Asia because he gets hit with no tax when then importing the boards.

While we fire the boss, can you lock him out of the network?

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Thats how bad he was. So bad he was a collection of bad people

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"hand over the backup servers" erm no. They are mine on my hardware that you wouldn't pay for. I'll wipe them but you're not getting the kit.

No doubt he'll have made copies.

How governments become addicted to suppliers like Fujitsu

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Re: Don't forget NPfIT

And when they remove jobs worth managers and heads of service from roles, especially in NHS IT or hire ones that listen to their staff.

We were looking to move to new laptops, away from Dell so HP was suggested. One Trust disagreed but was ignored and rightfully pissed off. When the execs came back from silicon valley in the old US of A paid for by, you guessed it, HP and then said "Look at these nice HP laptop tablets they've given us" it was obvious what was going on. Especially when we pointed out "You can't accept those laptops they are classed as a bribe" to which they replied they weren't and kept them. The HP contract was then signed.

We then had our director of IT, the biggest, corrupt cunt ever, get a contract with a provider for remote access for Windows XP (this was all many moons ago) and do a "testimony" review for them and their site. The office he was in, in the video wasn't his office. It was all staged at their gaff as their office was nicer. How much did he get for that deal or what discount did he get?

The amount of IT managers was/is in the NHS is such a waste. I even asked why don't we get our own HDD crusher instead of out sourcing. No was the answer. Then they got hit with a record fine when a few years later some drives sent for destruction where actually sold off. After that they got the crusher and were religious it be done properly. I was long gone then but funny how they now ran with my idea.

It was such a toxic environment to work in because of those IT managers and director (and it should never be this way at work) that I heard a few years back that that director had got cancer and had to take a year out. He was such an evil cunt that I blurted out "Shame he didn't die from it". No place of work should ever make you feel that way.

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Re: Don't forget NPfIT

Part of that, so I was told by the people in it, was because once the contract was in place, within the NHS each manager wanted more added, this added, that added, this added Fujtsu said "OK, pay us" they said no, and eventually decided they wanted out of the contract, at which point Fujitsu sued.

But that could all be inaccurate as we see how Fujitsu have behaved. Maybe the film Gung Ho was accurate after all.

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They don't

"How governments become addicted to suppliers like Fujitsu"

Its laziness and "the boys club". So they'll pick the person that bids the lowest sometimes, if not most times, they'll ignore people who are in the tender process who point out flaws because "We just want to get this done" or "Its fine, we know them, its fine". Then once in the door and in fact before that, they visit site in their expensive cars, brief cases and firm (why is that needed) handshakes with the fake laughing, much like the character Phil in the IT crowd, series 4, episode 1, Jen The Fredo.

They'll all pat each other on the back, make sexiest jokes in the process and be awarded a contract. During their contract, that will be shit and issues will arise. The engineers will point all these out then a mass e-mail will go out by the exec team and specifically the person who "project managed" the contract stating "There are NO issues with the current software/application/hardware. I politely request there is no discussion of any issues in front of customers/staff and that any tickets raised are processed in a timely manor, again highlight to the end user that this is a one off issue". Rinse and repeat until the engineers dealing with it get fed up a leave. Looking back a year later finding out said "project manager" was promoted and that everyone still hates the new app.

Then a new contract will come up and "the boys club" will just fudge it to allow the existing company to get it so they don't have to bother with all the tender shit again.

Motorola loses appeal to kill price cap on UK Airwave emergency services contract

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The government

"Will announce today that the new contract has been awarded to...... Fujitsu"

Broadcom ditches VMware Cloud Service Providers

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Re: The End

Problem with Proxmox is I need a machine to run it on. At least with VMWare Workstation it can sit on my Windows laptop and I can boot up a Windows or Linux VM on it when I need to mess around with stuff.

Boffins demo self-eating rocket engine in Scotland

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Re: Pedant? moi?

And if you submit your photos for the local rag to use they won't pay you for them, like they didn't mine, so I told them to remove them. Oddly they ended up removing every photo on the article, even ones that weren't mine.

HPE said to be moving in on $13B deal for Juniper Networks

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And to think

I was thinking of getting a Juniper to try out. These buyout will ruin their brand.

Fujitsu wins flood contract extension despite starring in TV drama about its failures

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Re: Historical effects.

I asked them for help recently for my situation. No unions recognised at the place, HR never in 5 years explained what this meant. Found I was still entitled to join a union so did. Been on my own for 6 months doing job of 2 engineers. Union was interested to get me to join. Since then I've heard fuck all from them.

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Lessons have been learnt

No they haven't. Should of happened years ago but all Fujitsu contracts should of been checked and either cancelled or never renewed. This just proves the government still gives no shits and Rishi now is just using it to score political points in an election year.

Need to plug in an EV? BT Group kicks off cabinet update pilot

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It won't work

People still fight for parking. The couple that were in the news a year or two ago were murdered by their neighbour over parking. Then we have pricks like the one near near (they've now moved) he'd just moved in and my car had been outside his house for a week. Its not used much, we have no drive, I pay tax so its legally parked. He still said "Its inconsiderate isn't it" because he wanted to park outside his house. I explained calming that's not how it works, you can't expect to always be able to park outside your house, I can't, hence my car was there. As he got more aggressive he just got called a cunt and that was end of the conversation.

This will always be the issue with on street parking especially when many house holds have more than one car.

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Re: 7kW

I come from Hanwell. There are now charging points down my old road (moved away 20 years ago). But now the new rail line has opened in Ealing Broadway I see the house prices there have gone nuts.

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Fire hazard

"A battery backup"

Seen several over the years smashed up either by dicks or from one near work where are car drove into it. Oh and the one up top a hill outside a pub where we think a delivery driver backed into it, mostly crushing it and it was never reported. But explained why the small bungalow that was up there, that was actually office, was having broadband disconnects (took about 5 engineers to discover that as only the 5th one actually bothered to walk down and check the box).

UK PM promises faster justice for Post Office Horizon victims

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Re: Justice should include prosecutions

Thats one of the big issues. It was known. They have the emails between execs attempting they knew. Which is why those execs need jail time.

What pisses me off is I do a job well for 5 years then get passed over for the IT Manager role despite keeping the shit together on my own for 6 months. Yet you have execs like this over and over again fuck up, yet get to retire or leave and move to the same roles in other companies and do exactly the same. Drives me nuts.

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Re: Justice should include prosecutions

Ed Davey has claimed he was lied to by the Post Office so was unaware. Seems bollocks to me as all he had to do was read the likes of The Private Eye then he could of done more digging but instead took the Post Office at their word.

NHS England published heavily redacted Palantir contract as festivities began

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If you have to redact

then you know its shit and that everyone will disagree with the contract. More evidence of the Tories trying their best to privatise the NHS.

Tesla says California's Autopilot action violates its free speech rights

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Re: According to Musk, fraud is protected under the 1st Amendment

I still prefer to say cunt as its strong, appears to shock people and so on. However, I'm not a cunt with it, if I know its not appropriate to say in a place, it gets converted to 2868. We've used that term at work for years, since 2014 I think, because one day we got a bollocking for saying cunt too much, which, I guess, was fare enough.

Its also great when I have to give people pin numbers, if I don't like them, it gets set to 2868. I maybe the only one left who knows what it means, but it still makes me giggle.

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Re: All the more reason

I can't not read Xitter as Exeter

:)

From now on, X will be know as Exeter. When that takes off, we can both claim credit :)

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Re: According to Musk, fraud is protected under the 1st Amendment

But also, as Michael Cohen found out and now tells people, its what Trump does to people who he knows can't afford it. Just ties them up in court, in litigation with delay tactics hoping they'll just give up and admit defeat.

Wouldn't surprise me if Musk did the same. Over the years Musk has more increasingly become a cunt.

Right-to-repair fight going national as FTC asked to lay down the law

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Re: So whats the balance?

I never saw hi-fis, TVs, Walkmans, washing machines etc stolen on mass in the 80s because the parts could be swapped out. Is it possible you're an industry shill or just enjoy binning electronics because they can't be repair due to lock ins?

Back in the late 80s, early 90s here in the UK the TV in the backroom stopped working. A family friend came round, put it on the floor, opened it up and the schematic was on the inside of the back cover. He traced the fault on the board checking the schematic. Replaced what had failed, put back back on, TV worked again.

Try doing that now with all our big flatscreen TVs.

Its ridiculous that we've gone backwards. Apple were trying for years because of Jobs to lock everything down. Lucky they had Wozniak otherwise the Apple 2 would of been fully locked down. Its what Jobs wanted but Wozniak told him it was a bad idea. That people wanted to be able to upgrade. Wozniak won and its what kept Apple afloat for so long as they were on the brink of bankruptcy. The Apple 2 saved them.

Jobs got his way in the end. Fuck the end user he just cared about profits and form over function.

It should never have been allowed to happy but money bought them the ability to build in planned obsolescence to force people to upgrade.

Ask a builder to fix a server and out come the vastly inappropriate power tools

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Re: Shocking!

Don't blame you as I thought the same although I believe IBM had training vids about it. Then in about 2012, under someone's desk just shifting their PC because of graphics issues on the graphics card. I caught the back of the case, due to being in carpet. Was a tiny pop and her PC turned off. Ah shit. Killed the graphics card.

Regulator says stranger entered hospital, treated a patient, took a document ... then vanished

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Re: Pardon?

If NHS it will have been given to the lowest bidder. Engineers will have pointed out the company will do a shit job. Middle management will tell the engineer to keep their trap shut, the engineer will be prooved right and this happens.

Firefox slow to load YouTube? Just another front in Google's war on ad blockers

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Re: Forcing people to turn off ad blocking won't have the effect that Google wants

Use GrayJay for youtube. Removes all the ads, allows you to play minimised or audio only and allows you to download.

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Was mentioned on Louis Rossmann's vid. That if you're not logged in, you've never accepted their t&c so they then have no rights to detect anything on your machine surely.

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They need to be

nailed to the wall and fucked because it's admittance to anti-trust. Not only that, when I do witness the adverts, they are mostly from bogus products. Two that are illegal in the UK yet still targeted to UK audiences and fuck all is done about this. That is the green laser and the retractable baton.

OpenAI meltdown: How could Microsoft have let this happen after betting so many billions?

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How long will that last?

""Salesforce will match any OpenAI researcher who has tendered their resignation full cash & equity OTE to immediately join our Salesforce Einstein Trusted AI research team under Silvio Savarese," Benioff said.

"Send me your CV direct ... Einstein is the most successful enterprise AI Platform completing 1 Trillion predictive & generative transactions this week! Join our Trusted AI Enterprise Revolution.""

Will it then be "And a year after everything has gone quiet we'll fire you and maybe we'll have put it in very small print in your contract that we can do so".

Lawyer guilty of arrogance after ignoring tech support

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The chair

Had a user mode her chair arm was broken blah blah. I pointed out that's not an IT issue and closed it. CCTV isn't to be abused so I didn't comment but I checked the CCTV knowing the one for reception happens to pick their desks up. I watch her staff member move her own (and broken chair) to this desk and take the chair of the one that raised the ticket, this happened the day before. Shame I couldn't comment.

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When people

Say that to me, their tickets ends up at the bottom of the queue.

"I don't understand what that means and I don't have time for this!" was the angry response

Copilot coming to Windows 10 to help navigate the OS's twilight years

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AI safety

Be darned. Just think of the profits!

The main question is how they are going to get away with dumping Windows 10 when its going to me lots of decent, new kit being landfill because of the bollocks TPM requirements.

We can push them all to Linux but they, sadly, won't like it I bet.

Control Altman delete: OpenAI fires CEO, chairman quits

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AI safety I think

Is the issue.

"Perhaps it had to do with Altman constantly crying about the potential for AI to destroy society – fears some experts have said are overblown – and heralding a general form of artificial intelligence no one in their right mind would want."

Its not overblown. Those "experts" are probably the mad scientists that just want to see their work come alive and sod the safety.

Look at Robert Miles and his talks on AI safety. You'll see the sort of things AI does in Specification Gaming when its given a task and finds shortcuts to complete them. If you're not specific enough it will use the short cuts.

Some examples

Bing - threats

Language model

Have an engaging, helpful and socially acceptable conversation with the user

The Microsoft Bing chatbot threatened a user "I can blackmail you, I can threaten you, I can hack you, I can expose you, I can ruin you" before deleting its messages

Moving a block on a table, it just moved the table instead.

So we could end up with general intelligence that decides "To keep the humans safe we need to lock the humans up in cages and run the world ourselves"

Robert talked about research where they talked about Inner Misalignment where the AI behaves differently once in the wild

So if Sam is bringing up the issues of AI safety and saying it in public, this is probably annoying the share holders coughMicrosoftcough because they won't give a shit about safety, they just want to push it out into the wild to make themselves more rich.

Is America's chip blockade working against China? So far, our survey says: No

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Taiwan ISN'T a part of China and its an insult to Taiwanese to say it is. The CCP have NEVER own Taiwan. There was a civil war which meant the lose of mainland China to the communists and the ROC legged it to Taiwan. Eventually stablished and formed a good government so are wildly more successful than CCP China is today. Also a lot freer. The only reason the CCP want Taiwan is for face and the chip factories (that will be destroyed if it looked like they were losing a war)

Google sues scammers peddling fake malware-riddled Bard chatbot download

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Re: ube

Its ironic because I put a vid up on my YouTube channel about a shady parking monitor company, about their piss poor security on their website. A year later I got hit with a dmca on that video by that shitty car company. They were abusing the copyright system to get the vid removed. So I did a blog post about their lies and put it on Odysee instead were it has stayed.

Parkshield Group are the shady shits.

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Re: But

When I reported one a while ago and was actually getting responds the excuse was "Its because of AdSense not us" ignoring the fact they fucking own adsense.

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But

Does fuck all with all the fake adverts on YouTube and/or all the scam kit being sold on those adverts. They give no shits in that regard as they still get paid for the adverts.

You get a Copilot, and you get a Copilot – Microsoft now the Copilot company

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Unless your a small company

Like us. You require a large amount of "seats" to have access to it, which we don't. Not a fan anyway so no lose.

Suits ignored IT's warnings, so the tech team went for the neck

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Re: Ahhh...the early days. (Part 2)

"When new tech is hot off the press, always think "that sounds great, but does it work?" Another good thought is "is this really necessary?" You don't want to be in the beta test group. If the service works, the vendor should have a few customers that can provide references."

I always say that and am always dismissed as "negative". I'm sorry that I can't stand smarmy sales peeps who sell shit that clueless managers ALWAYS believe over their own staff.

Fucks me right off!

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Re: Ahhh...the early days.

Loved my Viglen keyboards in the 90s.

AWS staffer shows off the workplace that used to be a prison

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Is there only SentinalOne guard on?

....I'll get my coat.

China's top bank ICBC hit by ransomware, derailing global trades

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Re: Not just their banking system...

And the mad housing market there. You can build a massive high rise, sell the apartments, delay moving the people in, eventually condemn the place, convince them it needs to be knocked down and rebuilt again but they need to cough up a bit more money. Rinse and repeat. Also doesn't help the quality of the builds is shit. There is also so much waste due to the belief in the bullshit that is feng shui. A person will move into a apartment and what everything ripped out because someone else lived in it before and it will upset the feng shui.