Posts by Antony Shepherd

Sysadmin summoned to explain italics – to a user with at least two degrees

Fail to the Chief

The lawyer had attended an Ivy League university and held both law and business degrees

Future President of the USA right there.

LG monitors are using Windows 11 feature to serve adware

Unlucky Goldstar, more like

What fresh hell is this? A monitor should do no more than display the image being sent to it.

I do not want a monitor which has an app, FFS!

Comment in code read 'Dear future me, sorry I wrote this'

Somebody Else's Problem Field

I once did a y2K fix on some code where I could have fixed it PROPERLY but that would have impacted a whole load of other stuff some of which was out of my jurisdiction, code wise. So I had to do a moby hack and do a temporary fix with minimum change. This worked, but in the words of Susan Ivanova, "There's always a boom tomorrow".

So I worked out when the code was going to fail catastrophically, and I left that as a comment in the code, together with a comment on how it could have been fixed properly.

Ending with the words "Hopefully by then this will not be my problem!"

As things went, the company went into liquidation and so it became nobody else's problem. I would have hated to be pulled out of retirement to fix it had they still been going.

Microsoft open-sources Comic Chat, its cartoon IRC curiosity

Let's be FRANK

Somehow I had either been unaware of this or it had long since been forgotten, and normally I wouldn't care, but...

JIM WOODRING!

Whoa, this makes me want to dig out all my old Jim Woodring comics for a re-read tonight!

New humanoid robots from China look like creepy pop star action figures – complete with slightly dodgy lip-synch

While the Doctor's away the Nestene Consciousness will play

Are we absolutely certain these are not Autons invading the earth? A step up from shop window dummies?

Every employee’s password was stored in a single Excel file

The Boss' passwords

In my last job I knew my boss' passwords. One was his first name and second initial but backwards, and the other was the type of aeroplane he used to own. At times this came in handy when I had to diagnose problems with insufficient information and because he was in Australia the time difference meant I couldn't get the information I needed when I needed it.

I think I was the only person in that company who had any basic idea of security. At one point I had to create a web-based accessory to the software the developers were working on, only to find to my horror that the developer who had created the user registration database had stored the passwords in plaintext.

AARGH!

It took several emails arguing over this with both the developer responsible and the boss to fix that one.

'Resistance is futile,' says Qualcomm CEO. AI agents will be become invisible, inescapable, follow you across devices

Agents of Misfortune

Resistance is Futile?

Seriously? Another tech dude who watched SF and took completely the wrong thing from it?

He saw the Borg in Star Trek and that's the future he wants?

We need a tech crash to wipe out these guys before they wipe all us lower-value humans out.

That an app 'Fits on a Floppy' is still a useful measure in 2026

Re: Software engineering isn't really engineering

It's not engineering if you can't smell the oil!

MySQL faithful launch OurSQL Foundation to keep Oracle honest

Splitters!

So when is someone going to set up YourSQL?

Japanese Space Agency names arrival date for BepiColombo Mercury mission

The real reason for tardiness

The real reason BepiColumbo is going to be late arriving at Mercury is because, just as it was leaving Earth orbit, it turned around and asked "Just one more thing.."

dBase debased: Database titan fades to black after 47 years

dBase III+ Survivor...

I worked for a company which when it started in 1992 was using dBase III + files for its financial data, with Clipper scripts to enter data. When I started in 1994 the head of the data department was very keen to upgrade to Oracle but the boss was "Why would we do that? dBase works fine, always has, always will" and so we were still using the dBase III+ file format in 2016.

My job in the mid-90s was to replace the old Clipper code with new C++ code, and having worked out that a dBase III+ file was basically a text file with a binary header, it was a doddle to knock out some functions for reading and writing data from/to the files, with the hope that one day we WOULD move the data to an SQL database and I'd only have to change the read/write routines - hopefully?

As it stood that never happened, and after the banking crash the chance of getting the boss to shell out for new servers and temp staff to parallel-run the data for a few months just wasn't going to happen as we slid towards liquidation. I'd worked out how to transfer it all to MySQL by then though the insane levels of inconsistency in file structures was a nightmare.

I was the last man standing who knew how any of that stuff worked, but by the late 90s had moved over to being responsible for all our Linux systems.

Google is to journalism what Vikings were to monks. Now their man will run the BBC

Re: Ahem

Not to forget he was a regular guest of the then Prince of Wales (now King) Charles.

Jeff Bezos' rocket company Blue Origin applies to launch 51,000 datacenter satellites

Hey Siri...

Hey Siri, how do I say I want to induce Kessler Syndrome without actually saying "I want to induce Kessler Syndrome"?

Because with Bezos and Musk engaged in a "Who can shit out the most data centres into space" willy waving contest, that's how we'll get Kessler Syndrome.

Former Microsoft dev trains AI to survive the arcade's most chaotic stress test

Re: Damn I'm old!

"Coward. Fight like a robot"

And bloody Evil Otto who could go through walls, the bastard!

Repopulate! Repopulate! Two lost Doctor Who episodes turn up in private collection

Bob's not so Full House

When the news came out that the late Bob Monkhouse had amassed a huge collection of off-air recordings with early reel-to-reel video recorders, I did think that if only he'd been a Doctor Who fan the BBC would probably have been able to get all the stuff they deleted back in the day.

60 years since humanity first touched the surface of another planet

Re: Reality Bites!

True that, we've learned far more about other planets in the solar system by sending out robotic explorers than we will ever learn by sending fragile human meatbags into the most hostile of environments.

We evolved to live on this one planet and cannot live on any other planet in the solar system.

Planets on other solar systems being too unspeakably far away to even consider travelling to given our technology. People sending a robotic probe to visit the nearest extrasolar planet would be retired or dead before it got there.

"Space is big, really big, you might think it's a long way down the street to the chemists but that's just peanuts to space"

But then, hey Elon, if you're not going to Mars, give Venus a try. Go on, I dare you!

Once upon a time, saving your bits meant punching holes in floppies

Re: Good memories of simpler times

I also remember copying a program by hand out of a computer mag at the time, in BASIC

BASIC? Luxury! I had to type in two kilobytes of hexadecimal code out of Electronics Today International and then go over it a few more times to find where i'd mistyped the odd digit before I could play Space Invaders on my Microtan 65.

You tell that to kids today and they'll go "What the hell you on about old man!""

pencils

This is getting dangerously close to one of those social media posts with a picture of a cassette tape and a pencil, asking what the link is.

Hotel's rotary switchboard so retro it predates the concept of crashing

Re: who have not seen such a device in the wild (or at least outside a museum)

Or the function of the A/B buttons on public telephone boxes ?

To give small children the hope that if they pressed button B they might get sixpence the previous caller didn't bother to retrieve.

DWP considers chatbot work coaches as AI-fueled job losses loom

Re: Mass Dickensian destitution inbound?

I was recently unemployed for a few years and really it got to the stage where I had to regularly apply for jobs I had no chance of getting just so I could put them in my UC Journal to keep my work coach happy.

A sequence of work coaches each of which tried to recruit me as a work coach, and sent me on several wild goose chases to things where my years of IT experience were no use at all (Retail, hospitality, etc, all things I've never worked in, rather than things I have worked in). Every interview I had (including several of the 'pre-recorded video' interviews) was entirely due to my searching rather than any input from a work coach.

My last work coach before I retired tried twice to get me to apply for a job as a driving instructor. "There's lots of demand!" he said.

I told him (both times) that I couldn't apply for a job as a driving instructor, because I do not have a driving licence.

He seemed to think that shouldn't deter me from applying.

The same guy's last idea was that I could set up a training course in AI for the Over-50s, sell that to the DWP who'd pay me to do it.

I think telling the over-50s that AI is all bollocks wouldn't have been what he was thinking of.

If they replace work coaches with AI chatbots, are people still going to have to traipse out to their local jobcentre to chat with it?

How much worse is this going to make the system, which seems to have been designed to be more punitive than helpful.

Edit: I remember that Iain Duncan Smith's original idea is that anyone on Universal Credit must spend 35 hours a week IN A JOBCENTRE searching and applying for jobs, until someone had to tell him that the DWP did not own enough office space or computers to make that happen.

UK names Barnsley as first Tech Town to see whether AI can fix... well, anything

Re: AI Resigns

My Dad used to tell me that his Dad (a coal miner so reserved occupation during WWII) told him "If they ever drop a bomb on Barnsley, it'll be by mistake".

OpenAI will try to guess your age before ChatGPT gets spicy

I suspect this will be something like the system used in the old game "Leisure Suit Larry", where if I remember rightly players had to answer a few questions where it very much depended on being an American of a certain age to know the answers.

Concorde at 50: Twice the speed of sound, twice the economic trouble

The TU-144 was later fitted with 'rabbit ears' in an attempt to improve the aerodynamics a bit, but its main problem was that it didn't do supercruise. To fly supersonic it had to use afterburners all the time which used vast amounts of fuel.

Royal Navy's helicopter drone makes its first autonomous flight

Re: Blimey!

Back in the noughties when I was learning to fly I went to do all my aviation exams in a week with a guy down in Bournemouth. On the last day he took us to the pub and seeing an autogyro at the airfield said “You’d never get me up in one of those. Ken Wallis can fly them ‘cos he’s a fuckin’ genius, but they’re fuckin’ deathtraps”.

How CP/M-86's delay handed Microsoft the keys to the kingdom

There are definitely alternate universe 'What If's to be had, not only what if IBM had gone with CP/M-86, or indeed with a 68000 processor and CP/M-68, either running GEM.

Re: "handle 16 separate segments of 64 KB – for a total of one whole megabyte"

I always disliked that segmented memory model, just didn't have the elegance of the 6502, 6809 and 68000 processors where the memory was a contiguous address block.

IT team forced to camp in the office for days after Y2K bug found in boss's side project

At the company I used to work for I found a bunch of Y2K problems which were my job to fix.

The problem was that to fix these problems properly a whole bunch of other stuff would need to be changed right up to the software system we sold to our customers (major banks and financial trading companies around the world), which also meant a big change to a piece of code the boss had declared sacrosanct and Must Never Be Changed.

So instead a bodge was applied which would fix it for now but the code would Go Horribly And Terminally Wrong at some time in the future.

"By then", I hoped, "It'll be someone else's problem not mine."

Luckily, the company went into liquidation in the mid 20teens and the bodge was nobody's problem any more.

Speccy clone storms back for Christmas without a shred of Sinclair code

I still liked the Oric badged mini printer/plotter I had, which used four tiny biros to draw on a roll of paper not quite as wide as a bog roll.

Was kind of fascinating to watch it writing out a program listing in 80 column mode!

Re: squishy "dead flesh" type keyboard

To be fair the original Oric-1 keyboard with its keys that looked like the old "Beech-Nut" chewing gum wasn't pleasant to type on but gave your fingers a real workout.

Icon for the EXPLODE keyword in Oric Basic.

Thanks for the clarification!

I see the "collector's edition" comes in white and has a joystick, but the printer's thermal not a sparky one like in the old days.

Click through to the retailer.

For example, in the UK Smyths have them on their website and in stock now.

Though clicking HMV says '"The Spectrum Console" has now been discontinued and is no longer available.'

That could mean HMV have stopped selling them or it could mean the discounted price at Smyths is more a 'reduced to clear' thing?

I've been good. No really. I had a page up only last week and was merely a click away from ordering one for a mere kibblesworth short of sixty quid.

But I didn't. I told myself I absolutely didn't need one.

Setting up a speccy emulator is pretty trivial, so the real appeal of this particular device is that it has the appropriate keyboard.

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

Had to check the date

No really, it is November, not April. It seems the birth rate is approximately 60 per hour, and fools and their money are soon parted.

From Intel to the infinite, Pat Gelsinger wants Christian AI to change the world

There was an article in The Guardian about this guy recently and about how he wanted to "hasten the coming of Christ's return".

These people are genuinely nuts.

Shield AI shows off not-at-all-terrifying autonomous VTOL combat drone

Re: Vulcan

I remember reading about Vulcan pilots who all knew that if they ever had to set off 'for real' then even if they managed to get back there'd be nothing to come back to.

Boris Johnson confesses: He's fallen for ChatGPT

Idle so&so

I always figured that Johnson's columns in the Mail that net him a million quid a year weren't written by him.

I'd always reckoned that he just went to ChatGPT and told it to write however many words on whatever subject in the style of Boris Johnson, then posted the result into the Mail before opening his second pint of champagne of the day.

So I wasn't surprised to find out that he uses it and loves it because it calls him brilliant.

He'd probably shag it if he could.

SpaceX's Starship: Two down, Mons Huygens to climb

Spam in a can. That's not got the right stuff.

Re: Gerry Anderson - space visionary

I always wonder what happened to Fireball XL1, XL2, XL3 and XL4...

Microsoft moves to the uncanny valley with creepy Copilot avatars that stare at you and say your name

Re: Share and Enjoy…

D'oh! Of course it's the Marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation who were first against the wall when the revolution came.

Rookie error on my part and I used to edit the fan club magazine back in the day so I ought to be ashamed of myself!

It's been a long, long time since I last read, listened to, or watched The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Maybe it's time to re-read/listen/watch!

Share and Enjoy…

We are getting closer and closer to “Your Plastic Pal who’s Fun to be with”, aren’t we.

Maybe Microsoft should remember what happened to the SIrius Cybernetics Corporation’s complaints division?

British spreadsheet wizard will take mad skillz to Vegas after taking national Excel crown

When they make the movie of this they could call it an "Excel Saga".

Mine's the one with "Hail Ilpalazzo!" written on the back.

Everyone needs an AI phone. No, don't hang up, it's true

Re: In the words of the late great Douglas Adams

I'm glad I'm not the only person who immediately thought of that!

Space Command gets Trumped out of Colorado, voting conspiracy cited

What's in a name?

Tommy Tuberville sounds like the name of a sentient potato in a pre-school cartoon series made to encourage small children to eat their vegetables.

Microsoft open-sources the 6502 BASIC coded by Bill Gates himself

My first BASIC

10K Microsoft Basic on the 6502 based Tangerine Microtan 65 was the first version of BASIC I ever coded in.

Press 'A' at the 'Memory Size?' prompt and it displayed "Written by Weiland and Gates"

Wasn't the first programming I ever did (the first being in 6502 machine code), but the first 'high level' language.

Haven't written a single word of BASIC in decades now.

Post-privacy AI glasses claim to listen to your every word

"The moment you put them on, you can answer literally any question," Nguyen told us in an interview.

Ask them "WHY?" and they'll self-destruct. It worked for Patrick McGoohan.

Commodore Amiga turns 40, headlines UK exhibition

Re: Atari ST

I had an Atari ST. I even had the special black and white monitor for it that earned it the name "Jackintosh".

But looking back I've often thought that maybe I made the wrong decision there.

End well, this won't: UK commissioner suggests govt stops kids from using VPNs

No Internet Please, We're British

So this government is just as stupid as the last government, they've had a big smackdown from Apple and the US Government on trying to put a backdoor in encryption, because surprise surprise the UK doesn't rule the internet.

But they're clearly not done with outright stupidity decided by people who do not have a clue about what they're doing.

Gove's "had enough of experts" line still echoes through this government, it seems.

SpaceX prepares itself for a tenth Starship flight test

There's always a boom tomorrow.

Microsoft keeps adding stuff into Windows we don't want – here's what we actually need

Maybe rather than spending time and money adding lots of new functionality that nobody wants, they should be concentrating on two things

1. Make the software work reliably.

2. Make the software more efficient.

Of course this will never happen. If they make the software more reliable, they can't sell "Newer! Better!" versions all the time.

If they make the software more efficient, the hardware manufacturers will go nuts.

Reckon you can put a nuclear reactor on the Moon?

Give me a bunch of Eagle transporters and building a nuclear reactor on the moon should be a doddle. Then we can store all the nuclear waste on the far side of the moon, no problem.

What could possibly go wrong?