darkpaw

Reasons why I'm not going to use this app:

- The development of the app was given to a specific company. It was not sent out to tender. Now, you can argue that we don't have a lot of time and we needed it developed quickly, BUT...
- The reported budget for the app was £250 MILLION... (Not sure on the veracity of that figure, but it's been widely reported. It may just be part of the deal between UK.gov and Palantir/Faculty.)
- It is being developed by both Palantir (run by the right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel) and Faculty...
- Faculty is an AI startup run by someone called Marc Warner...
- Marc Warner's brother is Ben Warner...
- Ben Warner was recruited to Downing Street by Dominic Cummings (if you don't who DC is, he's basically an unelected advisor to our inimitable dickwad, Boris Johnson)...
- Ben Warner was instrumental in the Vote Leave campaign.

Further:
- Dr Ian Levy is Technical Director of the National Cyber Security Centre. He put out a blog post pretty much saying, "Everything is fine. We won't grab your data, no-sireeeee, and we absolutely won't expand the remit of this app, until we absolutely feel the need to do exactly that". Within hours, NHSX said they'll expand the remit of the app where necessary. So-called "mission creep".
- The app ONLY works for NHS England, so spending any time with someone from, say, Wales or Scotland, won't work because they won't be using the NHS England app; they'll be using the NHS Wales or NHS Scotland app.
- The app will NOT work with the Apple/Google solution which means if you go abroad, neither your device nor anyone else's will match, so will record zero interactions.

So, no. I won't be downloading this app.

The Apple/Google solution would've been exactly what we needed, and it works across borders. Apple even provided the source code necessary to create a functioning app. Sadly, our government thinks it's the dog bollox when it comes to everything, so they've gone off on their own.

You wonder why the UK currently has the highest number of Covid-19 deaths in Europe? Because our government is pathetic. Our MPs are idiots. Our Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, said he wanted to test 100,000 people a day by the end of April. 30th April comes along and lo and behold we hit 122,000 tests! Oh, sorry, no, we hit 76,000 tests. The other 46,000 tests were actually just mailed out and hadn't actually been used. They did this to save his political career. In the days following the 30th April we tested 66,000 people then 56,000 people.

The UK is an f-ing joke.

frank777 said:

Does it make any sense to spend time recoding this 30-year-old software? No.

I can't believe the whole thing is 30 years old. They'll have been updating it to maintain compatibility with new version of OS X/macOS, and also to make use of various new features. It can only be a small portion of the software that they're having trouble with, and if so, what trouble are they having? Are they relying on third-party libraries that aren't compiled for 64-bit? There will likely be replacements. I don't think this was a good move on their part.

I think Apple is back as the world's most valuable company again. AAPL = 918.8bn, MSFT = 910.9bn, AMZN = 888bn.

What a coincidence: I posted a comment a couple of days ago saying I don't like William Gallagher's writing style, then I suggest a way of adding blank spaces into the Terminal. That comment got deleted without mention, and now suddenly my Terminal tip shows up in one of William Gallagher's posts...

RAM capacity
Since we are on the topic of RAM, the maximum capacity for RAM has been increased to allow up to the 32GB rather than 16GB.

Only on the 15-inch MacBook Pro. The maximum for the 13-inch is 16GB.

They also use DDR4 instead of LPDDR3. DDR4 faster, but it is no longer "low power", so it will eat up a bit more battery life.

Again, only the 15-inch MacBook Pro has gained DDR4 RAM. The 13-inch is still on LPDDR3.