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From the News:

Intel releases fix for latest chip security flaws

from Computer Weekly
Intel has released firmware and software updates to mitigate newly discovered security flaws in all the company’s processors produced since 2015. This is the third major security vulnerability in Intel processors to be discovered this year, after Meltdown and Spectre in January. The chipmaker developed the security update after researchers reported a new attack, dubbed Foreshadow, which uses techniques similar…
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Predicting Failure

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Just this week, we’ve been told that the world is about to burn up because of man-made global warming – as exemplified by this glorious summer, and (yet again) that Brexit will be an unmitigated disaster for the UK economy. There is a long and inglorious list of predictions which turned out to be nonsense. From Thomas Watson’s perspective that […]
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Digital Diversity

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CIO Connect ran the final workshop before the summer break a couple of weeks ago on the topic of diversity. We invited our largely male membership to bring a female colleague with them. Although this was slightly awkwardly done – it’s hard to word such an invitation effectively – we had, probably for the first time, an audience roughly split […]
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Not Normal

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As the late, great Douglas Adams said “The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.” Whenever the world seems a […]
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Summer Time

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.. and the living is easy, as the great song by George Gershwin, perhaps best known as performed by Ella Fitzgerald, says. But as I write it is summer time, and the weather pretty much has been hot and sunny with a few short breaks since the beginning of May, but the living isn’t easy. On the political side, we […]
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Mac Musings

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I wrote the bulk of this blog on the train. Nothing unusual about that I spend a lot of time on trains these days. But I wrote this on my MacBook Pro, and that is unusual. I like my MacBook – it has a great screen, sufficient power for the sorts of things I do on the move and a […]
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Run for the hills

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“Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.” Samuel Johnson was wrong, tragically so. Traveling to a recent CIO Connect workshop I was struck by how much I dislike London. It’s noisy, dirty, dusty, full, rude, smelly. There are too many people in too small […]
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Alphabetic Serendipity

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I have rediscovered bookshops, and with them, books. Perhaps bookshops have been reinvented since I last indulged, Bookshop 3.0, you might say. I’m up to Kindle 6.6 on my iPad after all. 2.0 brought coffee shops some time ago and 1.0 always featured knowledgeable staff, who knew about the books as well as the shop, especially in the independent bookshops. […]
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I’m back

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It has been a while since I last blogged, though through the wonders of foresight not quite so long since you read my last blog. A lot has happened over the past few weeks, most notably for me my Mother died. Those of you who read this blog regularly know she had dementia, so in many ways it was a […]
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Privacy and Control

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It will come as no surprise to the people who read this blog regularly that I have been exercised by the Facebook / Cambridge Analytica story still doing the rounds on the mainstream news programmes. My preference for privacy has led to me leading a near Google-free existence , preferring to use DuckDuckGo or IXQuick as my primary search engines […]
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Ask and you may get

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I am frequently surprised by how accommodating people and businesses are. Contrary to popular opinion of “computer says no” I think we are in an era of more flexibility than many people recognise. Whether buying a major item or smaller, whether taking on a service or subscription you can often find a deal. In part the challenge comes from finding […]
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Rules not Recipes

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Throughout the Spring many people look at their lifestyle and make resolutions to fix some of the things they are most concerned about. This includes the amount of alcohol they drink and leads to ‘dry January’ or the amount they eat – especially following on from over indulgence over the holiday period. The newspapers and magazines pick up on this […]