Posts by HenryCrun

What's in a word

We are doomed (please may I be wrong) if every few years we have to examine every aspect of a project under the microscope because a shift in language and unintended consequences.

Have you read The Canterbury Tales in the original English, if so I do hope you're not easily offended by some of the language.

Have you looked at a map of London pre-1560, there's some street names I cannot repeat in polite society (funnily enough you can find it in Wikipedia).

Are you aware that what are considered rude 4 letter words were (mostly) pre-Norman invasion Anglo-Saxon common use words which only became considered base after 1066.

I could go on, but I won't.

There is no KotL (keeper of the list) for the English language, not even us British! There are nation variations of English around the world and regional variations within countries and special use cases elsewhere. There is an estimate of 170,000 English words in current usage and another 47,000 obsolete one. It's impossible to curate that lot just in case a meaning has changed over time, we just have to do our best.

May I suggest then if a word offends you politely say so. If you are informed that another person is offended by a word then do your level best not to offend that person. This is just common decency, the kind of politeness that was once a common expectation and did need H.R. breathing down your neck like some kind of secret police.

Honestly, I mean Belgium man[1], just be bloody well nice to each other.

[1] Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy.

What's in a name?

I wonder if this US AI startup is aware, or even cares, that there's a well established UK finance company with the same name?

Edge has been harvesting for some time

A while ago I watched Edge using Wireshark as on loading it queried my LAN and reported home upon every device connected. Considering that the default settings includes "let edge pre-load to make your life super wonderful" (or something like that) the spying is starting the minute you boot up.

Nothing changes

Over 40 years of working in and with IT has shown me that there's nothing new under the sun. The cloud is, and will always be, facilities management with your valuable data in somebody else's hardware. Now the big providers have got your data and software you are their hostage. Apart from pretty pictures of butterflies and unicorns on the GUI there is so much that we do today that we could just as easily do on a green-screen (multi-colour you AS400 folks) system. The cloud just like a fancy GUI is a fiction dreamed-up at a time when providers were feeling a financial pinch and needed a new revenue stream, and we all fell for it.

XBollox

Next it'll be Xbox platform as a service (XaaS). The continued slide into game playing and multimedia pink unicorn emojis instead of a robust secure operating system continues.

Mobile devices are not the answer either

I really hope that as well as passwords we can junk using mobile devices, particularly mobile phones, as an authentication solution because of the risk of theft or SIM cloning. Still fighting so many sites that mandate a phone number as part of their security protocol.

Will this let us dump Edge? :-)

So "AICOA prohibits tech companies from favoring their own products", will this stop Microsoft from forcing their applications over third party ones? Could this be used to force Microsoft to de-couple Egde from Windows? Will Microsoft just stick to making an operating system and let the user decide on which applications to install?

Answers to be provided the day after hell freezes over I expect.

Time for a non-Windows operating system? Not 100% ideal I know, but it may be better than nothing.

Never had these problems with ICL mainframes :-) ;-)

The break-up of the old Regional Health Authorities into the "wild west" management of the NHS has got a lot to answer for. Granted that the old model had its problems of one sort or another, but we did not have stupid issues where a GP cannot get their patient's results because the hospital is in a different commissioning group despite it being the closest hospital to the surgery.

Today we have the freedom to purchase just about any IT solution we care to, despite that it doesn't integrate with anything else or share a common coding structure. There are at least 4 medical records coding systems in use and there is no one-to-one data mapping between them. It's just good money being poured down the drain.

On-Prem Emissions Calculation

Despite all of our data telemetry that Microsoft slurps they can only estimate on-prem emissions from one of three user-selected levels. Shame really as it might have actually been useful.

Pi time?

So Microsoft want me to shell-out £1,000+ to replace my work desktop (6c/12t cpu, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD) and still need a non-dumb client. Perhaps my client device will have to be a Raspberry Pi because I cannot afford anything else having given all my money to Microsoft. But wait, I'm developing cloud stuff in Azure so as long as I can do that on the Pi I don't need the virtual PC. Well then perhaps I don't need office given that there are a number of alternatives, some of which are free. So perhaps I can do everything on a Pi, even if I were to get the top level Pi 4 it would cost less than one month subscription to Microsoft. Now how-to get shot of Azure? Well for my purposes all I need is a queue technology (e.g. RabbitMQ or similar) and change my C# to something like Node-js and then host it somewhere. Given how light the demands are on my system even at the maximum estimated demand it would probably work on a fat desktop or similar 1-U rack item. The rational for anything Microsoft gets weaker by the day. Hello open source.

Windows 11 no thank you

I have some older AMD six-core PCs that run Windows 10 but will not go to 11. Anyway looking at the news updates I think I don't want 11. So one is already dual-boot with Fedora and I think I'll drop FreeBSD on the other. M$ can go screw themselves.

If 3G goes lots of Amazon Kindles become useless

A lot of the earlier Kindles are 3G enabled. Oh goody more landfill full of working equipment.

A very good report, but sadly like ones I have seen almost every year in my 40+ years in the computing field. The other big problem is we are repeating over and over again the same mistakes from previous years. I can't wait for retirement and that thought really annoys me as I used to get such a kick out of my job.

So from what I've seen so far scattered over the web, this new W11 will not work unless you use UEFI. That's not very helpful, if true, as loads of people will be stuck converting their HDDs over and then get a nasty surprise that their video card stops working. The video card issue may be more of a problem with people searching around for any card that they can get their hands on in the current supply shortage. Likewise anyone with a perfectly good CPU kept going for lightweight work, think AMD FX-6300 for example, that do not provide TPM. I wonder how long I can keep W10 running before I finally swap over to Unix/Linux/BSD?