Posts by ATrickett

Techie lured out of retirement to support software only he remembered

Re: 1st class flights

I can see them doing that, but his point was he had to go to China to do the work - that was where it had to be done, so it was an expense anyway. He worked for a very large French based multinational, and they sent people all over the world all the time on fancy flights and put them up in fancy hotels and not that I would say it, paid bribes everywhere and claimed those as expenses too...

The French tax authorities are probably as sneaky/nasty/competent as the UK ones, but I know he got away with it for a year and was very nervous about a random tax bill from the Republic who never chased him up. Plus it was a few years ago when travel budgets were a lot more generous than today... I flown super-economy - and bring your own sandwiches if I need to travel...

1st class flights

I know someone who retired but got hauled back to do something apparently only he could do.

Rather than deal with the evil French tax authorities he agreed to do the work for free as long as the flights were all first class and the accommodation was equally good. He racked up a lot of airmiles going between France and China for free for a year or so. He (and colleagues) had even a guided tour of the terracotta army by the museum director while it was closed to the public...

The big AI companies are going to see their margins disappear

It's better than talking to a teddy bear, but not worth the money they want for it...

I've used the various Gemini models for programming at home and at work. It's an improvement on a Google search or talking to my teddy bear, but it's prone to absurd hallucinations and makes bold but inaccurate suggestions. It can be useful and I don't deny it's a useful tool for helping solve problems, but I wouldn't trust it to write new code, even simple stuff yet. The economics are clearly scary, if the AI companies are losing money on every query made, while burning through resources like there is no tomorrow.

If the models improve considerably and hardware improves considerably, and so the cost falls considerably then I can see a future for the AI, but not the stupid companies that have wasted billions on something that just isn't worth as much as they are claiming...

While I know AI is used a lot, a lot of companies have bans or restrictions in place, because the data or the code is confidential, or belongs to the clients, so it's not as universal as you'd expect.

Brace for the patch tsunami: AI is unearthing decades of buried code debt

The Spooks won't like this

On one level the spooks who've been using some of these flaws for years won't be pleased that all these flaws are going to be exposed and fixed as they won't be able to exploit them any more... That is assuming there is the skill to fix them all all, I see the Linux kernel doesn't have the resources to fix the recent tranche of defects and will simply delete the code at risk...

Given the shoddy code I see daily inside SAP systems, you do wonder how some systems even work at all... You don't need AI to scan most ABAP code in a SAP system, you just open the code in the editor and look, it's usually dreadful, and SAP's own code is often the worst...

Bullet train upgrade brings 5G windows and noise-cancelling cabins to Japan

Re: Cancelling noise from mobile phones?

Going on a long journey on a packed train on a hot bank holiday weekend, the whole carriage was subject to an annoying student in the seat opposite us telling everyone his whole personal love life stories. Eventually he ran out of charge or credit and loudly told the other end he was going to have to drop the call. Several people in the carriage clapped at that point...

Project Glasswing and open source software: The good, the bad, and the ugly

I believe there was a static code analyser firm that previously offered to scan open-source code for free, providing a long list of bug reports.

While it's easier to find bugs than it is to fix and regression test them, this isn't that useful unless someone is also going to pay for or help to fix the code...

Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 spends $20K trying to write a C compiler

AI is okay if it can steal the answer...

I've used Gemini on a few tasks and for things that are well documented it can steal an answer quite well and can be more effective that a plain Google search.

For SAP, Gemini is dismal. It often proposes solutions that should exists but don't, suggesting I use a class or function that simply doesn't exist. When you challenge it and say the field doesn't exist in the table/structure, it says that I should just add it and that will solve my problem. Basically Google trained Gemini on the published information which consists of lots of unanswered questions, SAP's own terrible documentation and lots of bad and incomplete advice on the SAP Developers Network. It's hardly surprising it hallucinates more often that it says something sensible.

House of Lords votes to ban social media for Brits under 16

Ban advertising

While I think commercial social media is toxic irrespective of your age, and I think it's right that society should do something to protect people, this isn't it.

I'd propose that people declare their age (without any verification) and if under 18 there is a total ban on all forms of advertising, data mining or use of the data by the companies - that way the social media companies wouldn't be so keen anymore.

For everyone 18 or older there are strict limits of advertising, and any advert reported to be illegal carries a prompt and hefty fine on the social media company.

While I think parents should take more responsibility, many don't and won't. Government bans like this don't work as we know, so we need to tackle the problem from the other side - these companies are making a fortune from knowingly selling illegal advertising and get more views from various forms of shock and horror than calm and dull. Take their revenue stream away from them, and they will change their behaviour - they only want to make money they don't care if people die in the process as long as they can squirm out of any responsibility in court.

Airbus exec: Most CIOs in Europe will not finish SAP ECC6 migration by 2030

It depends

S/4 is better than ECC.

Upgrading is easy if you haven't hacked your ECC system to death.

S/4 public cloud is toy and unusable unless you're tiny, but S/4 private cloud is actually good.

A lot of SAP's new stuff is have complete, and buggy so best avoided, but the core in S/4 is basically the same as ECC but improved.

Is it cost effective to upgrade, I don't know...

Another open source project dies of neglect, leaving thousands scrambling

See also XYZ..

I remember an interview with the creator and main maintainer of DNSmasq. He gets the odd payment to fix/change things but basically everyone uses his code and 99.9% don't contribute anything.

It's a common problem and too many big firms are good at taking and not so good at giving back.

Retail giant Kingfisher rejects SAP ERP upgrade plan

They can't migrate

I know people who worked on their ECC system, it was so bespoke they haven't got a chance of migrating it to the S4/Hana without a lot of pain. They spent a fortune on re-writing the core to do their own thing - that won't play well if they try to migrate to a new version of SAP...

Solar flair: Logitech's K980 Signature Slim keyboard runs on rays

Re: Pah

While most glass does block most UV, I believe most solar panels have peak sensitivity in visible light, and most solar things like calculators etc seem to work perfectly okay indoors - though the really cheap ones struggle.

I can't comments about Citizen watches but my Seiko SOLAR watch has worked perfectly for a decade, and in the winters it hardly ever sees light... Even today if I leave it in a drawer for over a week it's fine - though I know the "secondary battery" it contains only has a lifespan of about 15 years.

I suppose it comes down to a question of quality - if the panels are good quality and sensitive then they will work indoors okay and if the battery is a good quality one then it will last for years and if the electronics are efficient they then won't need much power... While it can be done the question is really more around how much profit can they make....?

It's the final countdown: Windows 10 hits end of support in less than 30 days

Got my mother-in-law's laptop to upgrade to Linux this weekend

Only my mother-in-law runs Windows 10 everyone else in the immediate family runs Debian/KDE, so this weekend, I'll erase Windows 10 and install Debian 13 for her then copy back her documents and pictures.

She mostly does everything with a browser (Firefox) and plays the odd desktop game so the migration should be simple.

My sister-in-law has been running Debian 11 & 12 for a while now and has been happy, so I expect my mother-in-law will be fine too. My wife has Debian on her computers, but does volunteering at the local IT group and so many pensioners struggle with Windows 10 or 11 - though 11 is the worse of the two.

I run Win 11 on my work's laptop which is not as horrible as the consumer version, which is really awful and a lot of people who can upgrade have been holding out as they don't fancy the pain.

French datacenter biz signs 12-year nuclear pact with EDF

EDF is up the creek...

Correct, most of the fleet is of a similar age and coming up on their end of life. EDF has begged for extensions, but as last year proved they are all getting old and though historically reliable, they aren't as reliable as they used to be. We were advised by the government to expect unplanned outages last year - several reactors were offline for planned and unplanned maintenance at the same time and blackouts were expected.

EDF is fighting tooth and nail against renewables, as they are so much cheaper than their new ERP reactors, which are over a decade late and tens of billions over budget. The next generation reactors will obviously been cheaper and built on time (where have we heard that before?) - you just need to believe enough - and hand over another billion or ten to EDF...

This summer I visited remote Brittany, where France built on of their first nuclear power plants - it's still not been fully decommissioned - it will have spent more of its life being built and unbuilt than it did actually running. All that time not generating electricity it just sucks money in - and gives nothing back....

The French left and right both love nuclear power, but no one wants to pay the eyewatering cost of building the damn things...