Posts by James Anderson 1321 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Apr 2007
Been there done that.
Excel for input is problamatic as users cannot stop fidling with it messing up headers, joining columns and otherwise improving it.
Excel for output is great! Output a sheet wuth the base data, and couple of sheets with standard reports. The recipients can play with the data to thier hearts content and you never get "can I have it in post cide order with sub totals" type requests ever again.
It is a domain specific langage for accounting and general business admin. It does arithmatic as understood by accountants and tax collecters that most other languages just dont.
Just as FORTRAN is an ancient but still relevent language for scientific applications.
Its long history is actally an advantage as incremental improvements have been well tjought out.
They used English words in the same way that Fortran used “IF” and “GO TO” just more so. FORTRAN was designed to make it easier to implement mathematical formula in code. COBOL was designed to make it easier to implement business rules written in plain English into code. There was never any intention to compile English or to have non professionals code.
The language designed for non programmers was BASIC and very successful it was.
There was more than enough reason to ban Maccabi fans who have a long history of violence and provocation.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/dec/24/amsterdam-football-violence-ajax-maccabi-tel-aviv-men-found-guilty
Allowing such a racist rabble to run riot through a diverse community would have been a disaster. What is basically a typo .. substitute Ajax Amsterdam for West Ham and the quote is true.
So the lesson is do not use Artificial Ignorance.
I always found AIX to be one of the better unixes. Early releases were a bit wierd as IBM marketing wanted features to distimguish it from other NIXs. Then they actually listened to thier customers who wanted a standard unix and went for 100% POSIX compliance. Still going strong and the hatdware ia ace.
This was probably the first and last time they took feedback form custpmers on board.
I lived through the debacle when Credit Suisse appointed a McKinsey bod to run the bank. After four years of chaos an billion dollar ( minus 1) losses the old boss was dragged out of retirement.
He also got his mate appointed CEO of Swissair. This guy was obviously mote talented as he bankrupted the airline in on two years.
Most people I know book with sky scanner or something similar. BA nearly always ends up on the second or third page cos it more expensive.
Been a while but when I was forced to use the firms outsourced travel experts you usually ended up on the most expensive flight and your hotel bill was twice what you would pay if you booked it yourself. So AI probably would not be much worse.
Except AI seems to be like one of those cheap screw drivers they used to sell at petrol stations. They looked like proper tools until you tried using them, the handle would come loose, the stem would bend the head would flatten.
Ask any proper professional they are obsessed with the quality of their tools, and, none of the AI tools seem up to scratch.
Oh god that brings back awful memories.
Trying to set install an application in CDE on an underpowered HP workstation. I could not believe how complex and fiddly this committee devolved desk top was. So a machine that cost three times as much as a windows box took an entire day to get the application up and running via CDE (a process that took 10 minutes on windows ) and ran slower when eventually started. And people wander how windows got its monopoly.
Take the 80% of food counter workers.
Most of these could be replaced by simple automation. E.g. those touch screens in hamburger joints. There are machines that can deliver a decent cup of coffee within seconds with minimal human intervention yet people go to Costa lot coffee and watch a human faff around for five minutes using the most inefficient technology and pay 6 quid for the privilege.
Point 1. The main players in the dot.com bubble had potentially very profitable services. Amazon had a very obvious and useful business model selling books I couldn’t get in the local bookshop over the internet.
Point 2. AI does not really exist. The successful applications are really just better pattern recognition or search plus cut and paste. I would be more interested if they labelled the products correctly.
Point 3. When in a few years time they get this stuff to work there will be some “good enough” open source software so profits will be non existent.
As far as I can work out from the garbled messaging what they are proposing is a couple of phone apps whereby an employer can verify your national insurance number via some digital certificate wizardry.
Much like the apps that confirmed your Covid vaccination status ( in the civilised world or the EU as it’s known ).
Just another example of the sheer incompetence and complete lack of political skill of he who is not Jeremy Corbin.
When I worked on a SWIFT interface many years ago the maximum level of service for a transfer was set at 3 minutes in practice it was about 5 seconds from the sending bank to the receiving bank. All the rest of the time was taken up with the various banks in the chain playing with you money.
Imagine a shopkeeper asking you to take the days takings to the bank but it took you two hours because you stopped off at the bookies on the way.
Incidentally they now a sane message format, when I worked on it the message formats were designed so they could be entered into the system manually via a TELEX machine.
Any effective law to block hate speech, libel, plagiarism and just plain lies would destroy social media’s business model. If they were legally responsible for the nonsense the proliferate they could not afford the manpower to vet all of the posts .. they would go bust.
So expect ruthless pushback on any attempt to make the internet safe.
This is not censorship this is about stopping harmful illegal content that is ruining young lives.
Social media just would not be a profitable business if they were forced to moderate properly and refuse dangerous, libellous lying content. So of course there will be a push back on any attempt to civilise the internet.
Big tobacco wrote the playbook, big oil enhanced it and now its big techs turn.
English is a great language for poetry and jokes. This is because of its lack of precision and multiple ambiguity’s. Also it will be years before a machine learned program will be able to recognise the subtle nuances behind the choice of words; say between “comfort station”, bathroom, toilet, jakes, bog or shithouse.
Oh the snobbery. It reminds me of the old school motorcycle aficionados who preferred an unreliable badly constructed British heap to a reliable Japanese machine because they liked fixing things.
The fact that Java allowed you to focus on the business logic rather than the quirks of an unsuitable programming language is a good thing too good to be true so they came up with J2EE so you could spend 90 % of your time dealing with the quirks of a bloated framework.
Good point about bits based on decision trees being better cheaper and more reliable tha fake intelligence.
Especially given that in real world call centres genuinely intelligent people are reduced to working there way through a pre programmed set of scripted questions and responses.
The problem is the amazingly complex things ordinary users do with EXCEL because asking the IT department to do it is a pain in the proverbial. Many of these just die or render unreadably when run in Libre. It just needs one or two of these “applications” in an organisation to veto any move of windows.
They will show the actual cost of a beer.
Currently if it's 5 dollars on the menu it gets to be about 12 on the bill after they add tourist, city, state and service charges ... Then aggressively ask for a tip.
Maybe Amazon should advertise stuff minus the tarrifs and add them in at the checkout. It seems to be the American way.
I don’t get this obsession with ditching perfectly well performing systems just because they are more than 10 years old.
In the analogue world we leave things as they are if they work well enough. E.g. Brunnelss bridge over th Menie straight. A couple of hundred years old built using materials and technology that no one would dream of using today but hey it works and trains travel over/in it every day.
So Social Security has not changed significantly in the last 40 years save the replacement of forms and snail mail with telephone and web sites to communicate with citizens. So I doubt there is any real requirement to upgrade the system.
Any rewrite would probably ditch an over inflated bill from IBM for an overinflated bill from AWS.
Er. You must be new here I suppose. Obviously not been following the news ( Fox does not count).
Just to enlighten you the South African racist claimed to save millions by ending a VA outsourcing contract. Turns out that it was an email service administered by disabled veterans that cost very little and the contract was due to end anyway.
How to run a successful project. Talk to the sponsor and nail down the problem area. Present your solution to their problem. Don't cry when they laugh at your proposal. Try again with an acceptable solution. Develop a detailed set of requirements and agree a definition of success. Then do it.
How to run s failed project. Listen to the salesman with the shiny brochure and enormous entertainment budget. Pick an unfortunate manager and force your solution on them. Develop some garbage that the users have no interest in. Go over budget developing more garbage. Label yourself an expert on shiny knew tech and go and fail another project at another company leaving the mess behind.
The scene is the executive suite if Big pharma Inc.
CFO: The African project did not go so well.
Head of Research: we did manage to develop drugs to cure conditions common in Africa.
CFO: There's no money in curing Africans.
Head Of Research: (jokingly) maybe we should test it drugs in a country that has the same medical problems as the USA. Maybe with a government we can control. (Luaghs).
CEO: We just got such a country. They speak pretty good English. I hope your guys like rain.
Apologies to the late great John LeCarre.
I have just finished reading “Careless People” apart from anything else it’s a really good read more like a physiological thriller than a business book.
I never thought these guys were particularly good, but the greed, lies and arrogance build with every chapter. The best Zuck could manage legally was a “cease and desist” on the author promoting the book. As she is not being sued for liable you have to assume most of what she claims is provably true.
Just plain avoid these US tech giants.
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