* Posts by sierraskies

5 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Oct 2013

AI spending spree continues as Microsoft commits $80B for 2025

sierraskies
Alert

Monopolisation concerns

Investment of this scale in AI is beyond most countries. How can the UK (or any other country than the US or China) - anything smaller than FAANG etc - compete with this level of investment (and its potential yield)? It seems like we're beyond the tipping point of potential competition. Non-FAANGs will need to focus on efficiency rather than scale?

Tesla owners in deep freeze discover the cold, hard truth about EVs

sierraskies

Re: Norway

If you had any EV chargeing available, you could ask it to precondition (warm) the battery 10 mins before setting off. Actually doesn't take much power and once the battery is in use it stays warm. It was -9 where I live yesterday and climbing into a ready warmed, de-iced Tesla (with a warm battery) at 0730 in the morning was glorious. EVs aren't ready for everyone yet but with a little knowledge and planning, they're great!

HP: That print-free-for-life deal we promised you? Well, now it's pay-per-month to continue using your printer ink

sierraskies

HPaaS

I signed up for HP'sr free-ink-for-a-year offer. The way the service works is that they monitor your printer/cartridge status remotely (the printer calls into HP).

When the HP-supplied cartridge developed a fault, the printer stopped working and because I was unable to print further, no further cartridges were sent ;-/

Then (I wasn't paying attention) the free first year expired and HP began to charge me for keeping their useless printer in my house. Zero utility. And when I cancelled (rather angrily I'll admit) they insisted that the contract I'd signed took some time to cancel and then charged me an additional month.

Never again, HP. I'm with the others on this list, bring back the LJ4 mono please - the original version and not some stripped back shite.

NHS tears out its Oracle Spine in favour of open source

sierraskies

Re: Variety is the spice of life

Agreed. I can tell you that there was no small amount of interference, sometimes for the most bizarre reasons! The trick here is to rebuild 'as-is' functionality on 'better' infrastructure, using an in-house dev-ops team as much as is possible, regression testing as you go - and take it from there. Spine as baseline for Spine2. Remember the size (overall spend) of the overall Spine contract was absolutely massive; I'm confident that the financial savings this initiative alone - never mind the qualitative improvements - will be sufficient to pay for a new hospital! That's some premium for lessons to have been learned... Let's not ignore them now. I'm hoping that this project becomes the poster boy for modern government IT.

sierraskies

I love this initiative. It was begun in 2012/2013, and last I heard it was going spectacularly well. Yes, it's built around diverse technologies but in some ways this is an indicator of the maturity of the team selecting them and building on them. BJSS is a small player perhaps, but a highly reputable one, and what is more it has been brought in for the right reason, which is to supplement a small but skilled internal agile dev/devops team. Yay