Posts by Steve Foster

Dear Oracle, we need to talk about the future of MySQL

Dealing with Oracle

"The only winning move is not to play.", WOPR/Joshua

(cf. "WarGames" for any who need help with the quote)

Contain your Windows apps inside Linux Windows

Re: Yuck

For anyone with hardware [and/or software] that can only be driven under Windows, what else do you suggest?

(note that replacing very expensive or niche h/w or s/w with something else [that doesn't require Windows] might not be practicable, or even available)

DWP finds Copilot saves civil servants a whopping 19 minutes a day

"Our Survey says «two-tone raspberry of failure»"

19 minutes saving you say? Across nearly 2000 civil servants? About half a second each then?

Or is the claim 19 minutes per CS? Which seems likely to be utter BS, given the shambolic state of "AI" currently.

NS&I's IT car crash considers cutting legacy links to stop the bleeding

Re: The only banking app that didn't accept payments

"Because it costs less for them to maintain either an app or website than both simultaneously."

If cost is the primary concern, the solution is website only.

Maintaining an app normally means _two_ apps because there are two major device ecosystems, so they aren't saving money over just developing the website (just the opposite).

"Personally I find reading a bank statement easier on my 24 inch monitor than a phone so I can't say I agree with the status quo but here we are!"

Well, I've stuck with paper bank statements because they're generally even easier to read (though my annual mortgage statement is trying to prove the opposite by being printed at 8pt or 9pt! [for no good reason]). But yes, I find just about everything easier to read on a good-sized monitor than on my phone, and similarly it's much easier to enter text via a keyboard than with my fingers on 1/3 of a smartphone screen (which simultaneously shrinks the already too-small display or covers up crucial elements).

Re: The only banking app that didn't accept payments

Why is there even an app? If there's a functioning website, they simply aren't needed.

I'm increasingly fed up with organisations killing off (or severely restricting) their website functionality - that provides pretty much universal accessibility - in favour of [cr]apps that require a specific device (ie smartphone).

BOFH: Eight pints of a lager and a management breakthrough

Re: Ah yes, 6-Sigma.

"an ISO 9000 auditor"

ISTR I might still have one of those around somewhere too, but it probably says "BS5750".

I don't think it's shameful, as long as the limitations of that standard are understood: it's not really a quality standard, it's more a documentation/paperwork standard.

Global economy shrugs off US tariff shock, tech spending does heavy lifting

Re: Trick

Any non-US business that is dependent on US sales is already in trouble as there's no way to predict whether those sales will be profitable today, tomorrow or next week, or could suddenly have substantial costs added, be blocked entirely, or even be seized by the US military.

Therefore the rational response to the current US unreliability is to take steps to reduce such risk. That means cutting down on US dependency wherever possible and taking mitigating action for dependencies that can't easily be eliminated.

The cost of such action is at least calculable/predictable and is probably less than the cost of doing nothing.

Re: Trick

"Even if our governments do nothing many people I know are now actively seeking non-US products, even if it costs them more."

Canada has shown the way, destocking some US products (eg US alcohol sales to Canada have been decimated), and improving links with other countries for alternative supplies.

Other consumers and countries will follow.

Re: Trick

So presumably you think this story is bogus?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cjdjrnzj95zo

S Twatter: When text-to-speech goes down the drain

Re: for all those who say "it shouldn't be this difficult". apparently it is.

A previous vehicle I owned would tell me to take the turn for "Go Dall Ming". (Godalming ["goddlming"])

Of course, English pronunciation of names is often obtuse (apocryphally, to confuse foreign spies into giving themselves away), for example:

* Mainwaring ("mannering")

* Cholmondeley ("chumley")

* Featheringstonehaugh ("fanshaw")

* Mousehole ("mowzle" [ow as in cow, not as in tow])

* Worcester ("wooster")

* Towcester ("toaster")

* Leicester ("lester" [not lie-cester])

* Loughborough ("luffburraw" [roughly])

among many others.

Wine 11 runs Windows apps in Linux and macOS better than ever

Re: Hardware Support?

So WINE can load/use the 3rd-party Windows USB device driver? And let the manufacturer's Windows software talk to their device?

@Evil Auditor

"Back in the 1990s, moving (and merging) a Word document from one PC to another would screw up the formatting."

Back in the 1990s, Moving (and merging) a Word document from one PC to another would screw <ins>often screws</ins> up the formatting.

There, FTFY.

Hardware Support?

The primary requirement for Windows that I have to deal with is niche USB hardware. The manufacturer provides suitable USB device drivers, and their interface software uses the AccessDB file format (this makes it fairly simple to talk to from other software).

Does WINE support driving USB devices?

Does it support the AccessDB underpinnings (OLEDB/ODBC)?

Microsoft Windows Media Player stops serving up CD album info

CDDB

Other software such as VLC or EAC have long been able to obtain metadata from various CDDB sources when WMP failed or refused.

I thought MS had dropped their metadata service some time ago, but that might have only been for W7 and W8.

Finnish cops grill crew of ship suspected of undersea cable sabotage

Logical Next Step?

Perhaps it's time for someone enterprising to build miniature tunnel-boring machines that can be used to construct under-sea-bed cables/cabling ducts.

US freezes $42B trade pact with UK over digital tax row

Tactical Option?

As a "tit-for-tat" approach worked reasonably well for China, maybe the response should be to announce an increase in the percentage levied.

Xero to start charging developers API usage fees, replacing revenue share deals

@wolfetone

I assume you're referring to MTD?

I'd suggest that's probably not really an issue for most SMEs, as (like me) they'll leave it to their [external] accountants. They (the accts) will have the problem of keeping on top of the requirements.

@AMBxx

MTDSorted currently offer basic quarterly VAT filing for free. They have multiple "do-more" offerings for which a subscription payment is required, but (so far) I've not needed those, and as I'm winding down VATable activities towards retirement, I'll hopefully avoid that happening.

I used to file VAT returns directly with HMRC, but they used MTD as an excuse to close down their portal. So now I still fill out a 7 box online form, but it's done via a third-party corporate portal instead, thereby exposing my VAT data to commercial exploitation (potentially).

Windows 11 still barely pulling ahead of 10 despite end-of-support push

@ComicalEngineer

"various useless bits"

{cough} Copilot {/cough}

Newly launched civil service pension portal from Capita is crapita, users report

Launch timed to coincide with current XKCD?

How fortuitous that Crapita managed to time that launch so well, as it meshes with the current XKCD beautifully.

https://xkcd.com/3175/

Ford rolls into the Xen Project as hypervisor gears up for autos

"...from the infotaintment..."

I guess if things have reached that stage (infotaintment), you're already kissing your arse goodbye!

Apple knits up $230 sock for your iPhone in time for Christmas

Apple Support s[t]ock response

"You're wearing it wrong."

Sole trader dispatched almost 1M spam texts to hard-up Brits, says watchdog

Re: What I would be more interested in .....

This case might fall into the 5%, since for once there's no "corporate veil".

OTOH, there's personal bankruptcy as an option, though AIUI that's not trivial.

Anthropic's Claude is learning Excel so you don't have to

Hmmmm

Given that users already make a significant number of errors using Excel, it seems plausible that adding "AI" slop into the mix is unlikely to make much difference.

Re: Return

HMRC are unable to calculate tax liabilities accurately often enough already, and that's before rolling out "AI".

New boss took charge of project code and sent two billion unwanted emails

There's no real reason we couldn't alter the calendar to accommodate this.

Switch to fixed 28 day months, have 13 of them, and then an "intermission" non-day to round off the year. Two in a leap year. Any leap seconds (plus or minus) could also be included on "intermission".

c.f. Dave Gorman's Modern Life is Goodish [S3.E7]. (IIRC the name suggested for the "new" month was "Gormanuary")

Get ready to squint! World's smallest pixel is just 300 nm

Eye of a Needle artwork

So does this make the guy producing those extreme miniature replicas of famous paintings (sunflowers, the scream, and others) redundant? Pop a little 1080p screen based on this tech in there and use a slideshow program?

Britain's AI gold rush hits a wall – not enough electricity

Re: The obvious solution?

And if they offer to pay you more to send some back than you paid to charge up?

Firefox 144 brings fixes, features, and farewells for 32-bit Linux die-hards

Re: Password manager

Unfortunately, the modern "realm of the normal" is lots of websites and other online places that force passwords of increasing complexity without genuine need (while lots of places that do have genuine reason do idiotic things like use SMS for OTP codes).

I'm not going to invest any more effort in coping with such than is absolutely necessary. Using a PM is simpler than manually generating passwords (esp. if also forced to change them more frequently than is sensible).

Re: Password manager

"I never, ever let anything create a password for me".

Why would I try to invent a 8-20+ character complex password that contains some mix of upper and lower case letters, symbols and numbers as specified by random 3rd-parties when that's the sort of grunt work a password manager should be able to deal with? (assuming it's not fundamentally borked as Firefox apparently is)

Explain digital ID or watch it fizzle out, UK PM Starmer told

Re: And I assume

It's covered on the BBC News website too:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1792rk7ynko

And from their article, surprise, surprise, the company is reported to have conveniently gone bust:

"The judge ruled the company much pay £121,999,219 in damages, plus interest, however, it remains unclear how Medpro will pay the fee, with the company appointing administrators the day before the court decision.

Its last set of accounts said it only had £666,025 of shareholders' funds.

The court said the firm had until 15 October to pay the damages to the government."

Renewables blow past nuclear when it comes to cheap datacenter juice

Re: Easy Peasy

0.06% usage? Surely that can't be right, as no-one would build something so rubbish (not even the british govt!).

Re: Easy Peasy

Well, duh. We haven't built enough turbines (and probably never could) to harvest all the available wind energy, so it's not surprising that comparing installed vs potential doesn't work.

SpaceX Dragon huffs, puffs... and fizzles out as NASA aborts ISS boost

Re: SpaceX?

Except that SpaceX's model is "move fast and breakblow-up things".

Which is unlikely to work well when the object of the exercise is to preserve a fragile object.

Tree-hugging hippie datacenter runs entirely on green hydrogen and wastes zero water

This is probably a dumb question (as in it seems so simple I must be missing something), but would compressing plain air to store and drive turbines later be an option?

Politicos: 'There is a good strong case for government intervention' on JLR cyberattack

The only thing worse than being under cyber-attack is...

...being under cyber-attack and the government promising to help...

Europe's largest city council delays fix to disastrous Oracle system once more

Inevitable Outcome

Approximately 1 week after BCC announce they've finally gone properly live with their shiny "new" Oracle system, Oracle will announce that the particular version vN that BCC is using is unsupported (and has been for some time), and needs to be replaced with vN+8.

And the whole cycle will begin anew.

The Notepad that knew too much: Humble text editor gets unnecessary AI infusion

Re: Devil's advocate

Then the place to put it would have been WordPad.

Except MS just killed that with fire...

Inventor who encouraged Elon Musk to make Optimus says most humanoid robots today are 'terrifying'

"For tasks requiring empathy and humanity, why would anyone choose otherwise?"

Because the robot will work moreorless 24×7, won't require comfort or smoke breaks, demand pay rises, reduced hours, or better conditions, or generally whine about stuff (Marvin excepted).

Plus performance will generally be consistent (at whatever baseline is established), unlike us meatbags who sometimes turn up hungover or tired or emotional which results in output variability.

Also, a robot's bad interaction with an unhappy meatbag will not normally carry over to the next interaction (whereas our attitude tends to be affected/influenced by such for a while).

Senator blasts Microsoft for 'dangerous, insecure software' that helped pwn US hospitals

"secure by design"

was a promise Microsoft made a very long time ago (the Longhorn days, IIRC), but has consistently failed to deliver.

Some of that is of course due to negative feedback from enterprise customers ("but SbD makes our life harder because {mainly spurious reasons}").

Internet mapping and research outfit Censys reveals state-based abuse, harassment

Re: How ironic!

You can cut that list by a few entries as the 206.138.x.x /24 blocks are contiguous and can be merged into a single /22 block.

And Censys have two other ASNs [that I know of] - 398705 & 398722.

Not in my browser! Vivaldi capo doubles down on generative AI ban

Re: Good show

Brave has also jumped onto the AI bandwagon.

Meet President Willian H. Brusen from the great state of Onegon

Lazenby

So both the Reddit and Gemini contributions leave out George Lazenby - possibly because he only starred as Bond once? (though OHMSS is included)

Perplexity vexed by Cloudflare's claims its bots are bad

" legitimate AI assistants"

Ha ha ha ha ha ha

(hint: so far, there's no such thing; it's just bullshit all the way down)

AI: automated incompetence, anonymous idiocy, Arseholes Inc, etc., etc. ad infinitum [which fits too]

Meta declines to abide by voluntary EU AI safety guidelines

Yes, the "consent or pay" approach seems to be spreading like wildfire (a lot of "news" sites are deploying it).

Fortunately, blocking JavaScript usually puts a stop to it (so far).

Of Course Not

While Meta is fighting to not even obey european law, which is obligatory, they were never going to agree to abide by anything that's voluntary.

Coldplay kiss-cam flap proves we’re already our own surveillance state

"to many [...], the more important norm violation is..."

...going to a ColdPlay concert.

[disclaimer: I quite like ColdPlay myself, but I'm aware of the stereotypes: cf. Phill Jupitus on QI a few times]

Fujitsu sorry for Post Office horror – but still cashing big UK govt checks

Obvs...

/clipped Guinness tone/ "These are not the new contracts you've been watching for." /slow hand wave/

Boffins detail new algorithms to losslessly boost AI perf by up to 2.8x

Or...

...they could just switch the whole thing off and stop wasting energy and time.