Posts by James Anderson

Hyperscale, hypersensitive: US teacher cuffed for applauding datacenter critics

Most likely scenario

Construction starts. AI boom busts halfway through construction. Small town left with big expensive eyesore and a bunch of unpaid bills.

UK's seventh prime minister in a decade says he'll ditch digital ID scheme

Re: My problem with Digital ID...

For most of my adult life I have lived in countries where you need to register and get some sort of physical ID. Where I live now I also have a very handy digital ID.

Never had a problem with any of them. One thing it definitely stops is identity theft!

Bloody nightmare coming back to the Old Country try doing anything without a credit rating which has become the de facto and rather crap identity verification system. Had to take out a credit card to prove my existence.

You really need to know the identity of people you are dealing with why not do it properly?

IBM's mainframe sales get mugged by AI hardware panic, stock sheds more than a quarter of its value

Fix the US tax system.

Dividends are taxed, profits from selling shares not so much. Hence the markets obsession with shares which can rise.

For a massive operation like IBM it’s pretty much impossible to have a significant rise in share price, that all happened in the last century. So a stable company that consistently makes a profit and pays regular dividends is not an attractive investment.

MPs tell NHS to start packing Palantir's bags ahead of 2027 contract break

Do what the banks do.

The answer is NOT a single centralised system. Financial services companies, regulators etc. for years have solved these type of problems by publishing standard data formats and standard procedures for exchanging information. Each institution can use whatever they like to publish or consume the data as long as the standards are adhered to. It’s a simple and effective architecture that allows organisations from tiny specialists to humongous corps Taylor systems to meet their needs.

AI bills are baffling the C-suite after shift to usage-based pricing

Re: It's quite simple

The problem for the AI shysters is that for the lock in strategy to work AI has to do something useful. As most AI projects don’t add any value they can just can the whole thing. The only thing stopping them is the C suite egos will have to admit they were conned.

The new database world according to Google: Inexact queries and AI in everything

Snakeoil

This excellent car is exceptionally good for your heart and muscle tone due to its patented “push start” feature.

UK AI hiring surges as firms seek people to babysit the bots

More from the Gardian

Sadly the Gardian has now surpassed the dear old reg as a source of tech news. An article on the true cost of AI.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/16/starbucks-korea-shut-all-stores-tank-day-promotion

'It would be good for the world' to slow down AI sprints, Anthropic says

A cautionary tail.

This article from the Gauniad. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/06/starbucks-south-korea-tank-day-promotion-blunder

Staff too scared of the AI axe to pick it up, Forrester finds

Humans Hallicinate to order.

It’s not only AIs that hallicinate. You can pay high class consultants to confirm your wishful thinking, but only if you pay them big bucks. These charlatans have created a whole industry out of telling management what they want to hear.

Whitehall seeks lone C++ coder to keep airport passenger model flying

Re: Excel

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.

IBM stock dives after Anthropic points out AI can rewrite COBOL fast

COBOL is not obsolete

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.

6,000 execs struggle to find the AI productivity boom

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.

Summoning the spirit of the BBC Micro with a Pi 500+ and a can of spray paint

Does it have an any key?

Nuff said. I,ll get my coat.

Cops put Microsoft Copilot in holding cell after controversial hallucination

The police PR guilty of laziness

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.

£45B savings remain theoretical as UK digital roadmap delayed again

Maybe they listened

Maybe they paid attention to the numerous studies that confirm AI fails to deliver in the real world.

Unluckily but we live in hope.

The last supported version of HP-UX is no more

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.

Capita tells civil servants to wait for chatbots to fix pension portal woes

Failed to deliver

They failed to deliver using 20 years old database plus web site technology which is proven and works for hundreds of organisations. So now they are trying with new unproven tech which is known to work for 0 (zero) organisations. Classic Crapita.

Infinite Machine e-scooter is like the offspring of a Vespa and a Cybertruck

Re: $10,000 electric seated scooter

The Chinese have been making electric scooters for decades. Mostly domestic market only as cheap short range transport.

Hot for its bot, McKinsey may cut thousands of jobs

When a Kinsey gets a real job ……..

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.

British Airways fears a future where AI agents pick flights and brands get ghosted

No requirement for AI

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.

Workday project at Washington University hits $266M

Re: Mega IT projects like this

These suites need so much customisation to be useful you are essentially programming in a really c**p language.

In most cases you would be better of writing the software in a real programming language using proven software engineering techniques.

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

Would it be cheaper..

If all these victims/customers just bought shares in SAP and got the current management replaced by biard that actually card about thier customers.

Employee trust in SAP board dips amid ongoing restructure

Planet destroyed by imaginary tool.

Yest another example of the damage caused by AI before it even exists. The job losses, the global finial system, the ridiculous fossil fuel burn. All caused by a collective belief than AI will somehow be useful.

HP to sack up to six thousand staff under AI adoption plan, fresh round of cost-cutting

HP is already on most sensible peoples S***t list. Crappy lap tops, bricked printers ridiculously expensive ink crappy printer drivers.

Campbell's CISO canned after lawsuit alleges hour-long rant against staff and customers

Re: The Real Problem

He had to get another job first. If you sue an employer or take them to a work tribunal nobody else will hire you.

Senators propose to let users sue tech giants for harmful algos

Big tobacco….

Big Oil, Big Pharma and now Big Tech. They have the money, they have the playbook they have the contacts in Washington ….. no way will this bill get anywhere.

Software engineer reveals the dirty little secret about AI coding assistants: They don't save much time

Re: It's a tool, like any other.

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.

De-duplicating the desktops: Let's come together, right now

Re: Tried for HP/Sun/IBM/SiliconGraphics

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.

IBM cutting several thousand jobs in latest layoffs

A different take.

IBM unloading an illusory “cloud” division which has been eating up the profits from its neglected mainframe division.

Sadly the profits from zOS and friends will now be ploughed into a Real Stupidity, sorry AI financial /dev/null.

Ruby Central tries to make peace after 'hostile takeover'

Shopify the scammers friend

Shopify will let anyone set up a "shop" and use their site to market and collect payments. They allow blatent scammers to use the site and offer customers/victims no support. The company is completely immoral

UK government's £45B AI savings pitch built on broad-brush guesswork, MPs told

Re: Oh and

Actually it's Arithmatic. Simple counting and calculation

Mathematics covers Algebra.trigonometry. calculus etc. none of which is used in bean counting.

Senate report says AI will take 97M US jobs in the next 10 years, but those numbers come from ChatGPT

People like people.

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.

Big money is nervous about AI hype, but not ready to call it a bubble

AI vs dot.com

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.

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

Piss poor communication.

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.

Blockchain just became an utterly mainstream part of the global financial system

Re: WAT?

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.

Google-sponsored DORA report reframes AI as central to software development

Never ask a barber if you need a haircut.

And never believe a barber who tells you a new haircut will get you more dates.

AI is the new block chain and anyone promoting it is trying to get your money.

UK toughens Online Safety Act with ban on self-harm content

Effective laws would kill the business model.

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.

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

OS/2. Great programming environment APIs etc. Horrible UI !

The UK Online Safety Act is about censorship, not safety

Children must die to protect the business model.

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.

AI coding tools crash on launch, could reboot better in future

Re: Natural vs. programming language

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.

Open, free, and completely ignored: The strange afterlife of Symbian

Re: The Burning Platform

Food court quote is right on. I remember looking for s new phone and not being able to see any significant difference between the cheapest Nokia and the most expensive one at 5 times the price.

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.