Posts by James Anderson

European consumers are mostly saying 'non' to trading in their old phones

My local supermarket has reasonably usable smart phones for under 300 eur. Good for at least 4 years. Why would I buy an out mode second hand one?

AI can't replace devs until it understands office politics

AI meets RS

Most of these articles about AI especially in the mainstream media reveal an awful lot of RS.. Real Stupidity.

How Java changed the development landscape entirely as code turns 30

Re: The new COBOL

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.

Google's AI vision clouded by business model hallucinations

Decision Tree.

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.

Sudo-rs make me a sandwich, hold the buffer overflows

Re: Another day, another attempt to force this on us

C++ is highly unstable every release has newer weirdest features, and, depreciated older broken features. As for readability people complain about PERL but much of C++ code really does look like line noise.

The State of Open Source in 2025? Honestly, it's a mess but you knew that already

Re: Enterprise Linux

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.

Trump admin freaks out over mere suggestion Amazon was going to show tariff impact on prices

Si Next time I am in Miami

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.

£136M government grant saves troubled Post Office from suboptimal IT

In much the same way as thousands of corporate customers of SAP find their system is no longer suppoted, and millions of Microsoft customers find the licences they purchased are worthless.

When you outsource and/or license your core software you lose control.

Only 3,000 staff jump from SAP after 10,000 earmarked to be pushed

Re: Just the odd 10,000 …..

In the same way you shouldn’t vote for a president who managed to bankrupt a casino you really shouldn’t base your economics on a guy whose only legitimate child died of malnutrition while he was writing about his genius economic theory.

Europe's cloud customers eyeing exit from US hyperscalers

Re: "I think this is a realistic fear nowadays"

Ah but another persons bank in another country Iceland for example.

DOGE dilettantes 'didn't test' Social Security fraud detection tool at appropriate scale

Replacing stuff that works.

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.

Musk's DOGE muzzled on X over tape storage baloney

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.

British govt wants to mainline AI, but its arteries are clogged with legacy tech

Tech for techs sake.

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.

Palantir suggests 'common operating system' for UK govt data

The Constant Gardener 2

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.

Do not trust US tech bros.

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.

Datacenters near Heathrow seemingly stay up as substation fire closes airport

Re: How?

Absolutely. Madrid airport is an architectural gem combing a pleasing appearance with ease of use. Barcelona OK but mediocre. Alicante handles millions of pissed up foreigners ( guilty) on cheapo flights with aplomb.

CISA: We didn't fire red teams, we just unhired a bunch of them

GDP numbers

Government spending is counted in GDP.

It has to be to be enable comparisons between countries that privatise/nationalise differently.

Typically markets, investors treasury departments panic when GDP goes down. Gonna be interesting.

Scotland now home to Europe's biggest battery as windy storage site fires up

Profit making private company and prices set by government quango...... Best of both worlds look at how well this works for your eater supply.

C++ creator calls for help to defend programming language from 'serious attacks'

Re: Care to bet a fiver?

C is here forever. It was designed as a “portable assembler” and in that role it is pure dead brilliant as a general purpose language not so much… but the compiler was free or already paid for.

C++ on the other hand has always been my most hated language. The number of “improvements” that come with each new version just shows how wrong Soustrup got it first time round.

Payday from hell as several British banks report major outages

Re: Have you noticed?

Mainframe hard ware (basically IBM Z series as it's the only one still standing ) is usually refreshed every five years or so. The operating and related software systems although descended from 1970s MVS are actively supported and constantly updated. As are the probably COBOL based core banking systems (still some CICS assembly code out there though).

For the most part these systems just work and almost every large bank has at some point made a failed attempt to replace them with a more "modern" technology.

The current trend is to preserve the COBOL code and port it to a fake mainframe environment in the cloud.

Mega council officers had no idea what they were buying ahead of Oracle fiasco

Re: This is how it usually is...

By why single them out for making the same mistakes —- ERP is a con it does not work for anybody but the vendors.

Re: This is how it usually is...

For ERP projects to go overbudget, late or just plain fail is the rule rather than the exception.

The private sector has the luxury of hiding these failures unless they are really really bad, the public service is under more scrutiny and have to fess up on failures.

If you think the private sector does thing better have a butchers at this https://www.cio.com/article/278677/enterprise-resource-planning-10-famous-erp-disasters-dustups-and-disappointments.html .

SAP must shoulder some of the blame.

After all the council had previously spaffed millions on an SAP ERP system which SAP then declined to support any further and did not provide an upgrade path to thier latest shiny products. Its no wonder that the council went looking for an alternative. Sad that the alternative was rubbish sold by an even worse supplier.

If you license an ERP system you are effectively buying the sample application for a really crap programming language.

Time to make C the COBOL of this century

Re: C is the new COBOL

Using a custom type like Javas big decimal to calculate VAT at least four lines of code for each calculation and probably twenty times as much CPU — that’s a real improvement?

Re: C is the new COBOL

I think you are confusing a very useful regex parser with the language syntax which is pretty straight forward once you get the hang of the variable “$_” being “understood” if no specific variable is mentioned.

Re: C is the new COBOL

Have you tried fixed point decimal arithmetic in any of the above mentioned languages?

COBOL is designed to do maths as understood by accountants and tax collectors.

Re: C is the new COBOL

But COBOL really does move with the times.

Full OO support.

Built in XML parsing and rendering.

TCP/IP support.

Etc. etc.

Veterans Affairs reboots Oracle health records project for $330M

Whatever happened to there own system.

VA authored an open source system based on the venerable MUMPS database which ran for years and was used by several other organisations.

Before anyone shouts “legacy” it’s worth noting that there are two well supported current versions of MUMPs out there and while the default language is probably one of the worst ever the actual database is blindingly fast and incredibly flexible think a a nested Python Dictionary as persistent storage.

Windows 11 stages a comeback – still miles behind older sibling

Re: Don't panic

Aged.

She Who Must Be Obeyed's laptop was upgraded to windows 11 by stealth as she thought she was clicking the "piss off" button.

It's as if you sent the BMW in for a service and got back the latest model and a bill for several thousand.

Trump’s tariffs, cuts may well put tech in a chokehold, say analysts

Re: Shaking

Given India's long history of warrior culture the USA would almost certainly suffer an embarrassing defeat in a war with India. Pakistan and China were both easily seen off in the twentieth century.

The good old British empire took control of India by subterfuge and exploiting divisions between the various small kingdoms. They were quick to appreciate the military prowess and promptly coopted the various Indian forces into the British army.

Re: Shaking

The petro dollar was a convent unit for trading oil. When it became less convenient and it was easier to trade in the recipients currency then they did so. Also it was an accounting fiction no actual dollars changed hands.

Are you saying that the USA has the right to designate the currency other countries trade in?

Linux Mint 22.1 Xia arrives fashionably late

I would note that like many professionals I used to use Windows on a daily basis. Having a vaguely Windows like desktop on my personal machine just makes life easier as yo only need one set of muscle memory to run the UI. Especially useful at 2 am.

UK council selling the farm (and the fire station) to fund ballooning Oracle project

Re: costs mushroom from £2.6 million to around £40 million

I have said this before , but here we go again.

Councils are not in a position where they can easily change the way they work to suit an unsuitable software product. Most of what they do is subject to complex regulations set by central government and which they have no control over most of the rest are legal obligations; either they must do it that way or that must NOT do it that way.

AI pothole patrol to snap flaws in Britain's crumbling roads

Well an e-mail address would suffice.

If they really wanted to go high tech an app which e-mailed a photo and the gps coordinates would probably make the council money.

Still trying to locate some Real Intelligence. Seems to be Bert little left in the old country.

OpenAI's ChatGPT crawler can be tricked into DDoSing sites, answering your queries

Or many inventions were intended to benefit mankind but did immense harm instead.

Sometimes with no malicious intent e.g. Heroin, LSD, asbestos insulation.

Sometimes with negligent or plain malicious intent e.g. Oxycotin, Vapes, flammable insulation.

It looks to me like AI falls into the latter category. The investors/creators seeing only dollar signs and ignoring any downside.

Absolute Linux has reached the end – where to next?

Re: Not for me anymore.

I have some experience setting up Alpine Linux. The installation and setup were really simple.

The only really tricky bit was getting the UEFI config right -- which has nothing to do with Alpine as such.

To save the energy grid from AI, use open source AI, says open source body

AI looking for a use

Once again we have expensive and unreliable AI being proposed as s solution to problems that are solved by cheaper and more reliable programmed/algorithmic products.

ChatGPT what's the use of you.

Now Trump's import tariffs could raise the cost of a laptop for Americans by 68%

Re: Is this madness unbounded...?

It’s a case of government of the rich, by the rich and for the rich.

Cutting taxes for the rich, increased profits from their investments and exceptions for any measures that will affect them.

Your average billionaire is not going to be bothered about the price of a laptop when they are paying thousands less tax.

I can’t help thinking the average American deserves this for being so completely gullible.

How a good business deal made us underestimate BASIC

Re: Anyone who has a blanket rule banning GO TOs...

"you don't know how you got there ". But this is true of GOSUB , PERFORM and any subroutine call.

It's part of the point if having subroutines, they can be used by code you have know knowledge of.

The latest language in the GNU Compiler Collection: Algol-68

Re: I would try it, but...

You do have to shift for curly brackets but otherwise the standard US English keyboard has all the special characters easily available. I think it's more a question of these computer languages being developed on these keyboards leading to the choice of which characters to use than good keyboard design.

Eight things that should not have happened last year, but did

Re: Wit For A Limited Audience??

I actually remember and used MS Works. It was quite s nice basic but usable word processer and spread sheet that came free with s new PC. And it worked quite well.

As it negated the need for an office license it was quietly dropped.

Re: Skipped a "Musk of decay" issue...

They said that about VOX on Spain. But when getting into power and collecting bribesxxxxxadmirers mattered suddenly VOX were OK just reflecting ordinary people justified concerns as far as the PickPocket party were could see.

Kyndryl's consulting business may be less than it seems

Except "Managed Services" or "outsourcing you mainframe ops" to the rest of us is pretty much a dying business in the Cloudy modern world.

Re: Promising

I am assuming that kindly operates the same way as it's old parent IBM which has a long history of fiddling the accounts to match the stories they tell investors. They also have a history of shafting ordinary employees to enhance C suite bonuses. So the article seems enemently plausible.

Europe's largest local authority settles on ERP budget 5x original estimate

Re: Care

Acutualy this tax keeps house prices low and a really bad investment. So ordinaray people can afford a decent home without crippelling debt.

Re: Pretty much every large software implementation

But councils are stuck with central government regulations that say you must do it this way. Oops and a change of policy that’s says you must do it This Way now.

Ransomware hangover, Putin grudge blamed for vodka maker's bankruptcy

Stoli gone bankrupt! Has Patsi gone teetotal? Will Bollinger be the next to fall.

AI PCs: 'Something will have to give in 2025, and I think it's pricing'

Never going to happen. The whole corporate world is locked in to word excel and PowerPoint. Plus there is always at least one specialised app that’s only available on windows and perhaps a bespoke application written to twindows aAPIs that’s just too much trouble to port. MS has them by the short and curlies.

Thousands of AI agents later, who even remembers what they do?

Re: Doh!

Now that you and I are retired we become the unwilling victims of AI every time we interact with any largish organisation. Here in Spain the telemarketing industry has. AI on steroids. The increased efficiency means everybody gets two or three spam calls a day.

BASIC co-creator Thomas Kurtz hits END at 96

Re: Teletypes

These teletype machines are the main reason UNIX commands are so terse. “cp” instead of “ copy” meant you halved the risk of blistered figures.