Posts by Martin Gregorie

Russian fake-news network, led by an ex-Florida sheriff's deputy, storms back into action with 200+ new sites

Re: Trump administration guts efforts to counter election disinfo

Hmm, somebody should start to dismantle MAGA real soon. Rebuilding the US education system would also be a good idea too: It'll need a big overhaul after the OT and his friends finish wrecking it. But I'm not holding my breath for either to happen: the US populace was far too micro-fractured for that, even back in the mid 1970s, and it seems to be even worse now.

Example: back then, I was a keen and competitive Free Flight model flyer, so when I got the computer system design and build gig in 1976 in NYC, naturally I took my models with me and joined the Brooklyn Skyscrapers, the local free flight model club. That was fun: I made new friends and did quite a lot of model flying too, but I was amazed to find that even the Skyscrapers had their fracture lines apart from the usual ones (all Free Flight models are gliders, but launch methods are very different: those using engines, tow-lines, rubber bands, or hand-launching all have separate competition classes and fly from different places on the flying field), but in the Skyscrapers the non-drinking members had surprisingly little to do with those of us who enjoy a few beers after a long day of flying, chasing and retrieving their models.

US tech giants pledge $42 billion in UK investment as Trump tours Blighty

Re: Hole

Unfortunately, "I'll believe these pledges when I see them turn into actual fact in the cold hard light of day.." is about the only statement I've seen that reliably summarises the Orange Turnip's history to date.

I've yet to read anything about him that gives a fair picture of his business activities apart from him:

- getting kickstarted with a large pile of dosh from his dad,

- building a few casinos in Atlantic City that went bust

- hosting a TV series

- building Trump Tower and a few few golf courses.

As for his political activities, 'erratic' seems to describe them best. It would seem unlikely that he'll ever be in the "Best US presidents" list.

Jaguar Land Rover U-turns to confirm 'some data' affected after cyber prang

Re: Pah computers

..and the real cosher Series 1 and 2 Landrovers all had galvanised steel mesh radiator grilles, held on by the two screws that also attached the front 'Landrover' badge. These were highly prized by the long-distance African Safari wallahs because the grille was easily detached and perfect for cooking steaks, chops, etc. on the evening campfire.

Series 3 didn't count because their front grilles were plastic and so useless for cooking.

FWIW my Landrover was a 4 cylinder petrol long wheelbase Series 2 station wagon with full length roofrack, so fully kosher, but we cooked on a petrol Primus because petrol was easily available everywhere that the Landrover could be driven to, and besides that avoided carrying cans of kerosene, which contaminates *everything*, or bottled gas, which wasn't always so easy to find along the Hippy Trail or in India and Nepal.

Uber India starts offering drivers gigs collecting and classifying info for AI models

Re: don’t detail how much Uber pays to complete digital tasks

Spot on - I've just been reading Vikas Swarup's "Q & A" and this reminded me just how chaotic Indian traffic (and life in general) can be. The very last thing any Indian needs is some additional task shoehorned into his daily schedule.

For those who don't read books by Indian authors, but have seen the "Slumbdog Millionaire" movie, its plot was a hugely cut down summary of "Q & A"'s plot and one that skips a lot of the sheer grime of every day life in big Indian cities: which is something the novel deals with: IMHO the book is amazingly good considering that it's a first novel. I just wish I'd read it a lot earlier than I did.

For those who prefer to listen to books, the BBC broadcast it on Radio 4 as a serial, around the time that "Slumbdog Millionaire" was released.

White House nixes NASA unions amid budget uncertainty

Re: I'm not a Yank but...

Many thanks for that link - it explains a lot.

It also shows that the President seems to have considerably more power than I expected would be the case since there seems to be nothing except the Constitution to hold that office in check, whereas in NZ and other Commonwealth members the country's Governor General, and in the UK the Monarch, holds this power.

I prefer this arrangement because it means the power to restrain governmental misdeeds resides in a predesignated person who can act immediately to correct any abuses as they occur, rather than in a document that can only be consulted to provide guidance for whoever might be eventually selected to take corrective action.

Re: I'm not a Yank but...

It would be very helpful if some knowledgeable American citizen, or one of El Reg's resident Vultures for that matter, could post an article or comment saying exactly what limits the US Constitution places on the President's powers.

I'm asking because, from where I'm sitting it seems that the Orange Coconut seems to be riding roughshod over the Constitution with little or nothing being done by Judiciary, Senate or Congress to reign him in.

I thought Nixon got his knuckles firmly rapped for doing less unconstitutional stuff. I'm also fairly certain that sitting Members of both the UK and NZ Governments would loose their seats for less harmful activities than Trump and his unelected appointees are and have been carrying out.

Saved you a click: Firefox 142 offers AI summaries of links

Re: I Don't want any AI contamination in my web browser

I came here just to say that.

I've been using Firefox for a long time and like it a lot, but if any and all AI contamination can't be permanently removed by a non-volatile switch setting, then it will be replaced by another (uncontaminated) web browser so fast it won't know what hit it.

Anarchy in the AI: Trump's desire to supercharge US tech faces plenty of hurdles

Re: "the risks and consequences are obvious to everyone"

Well said, Sir!

Personally, I'm just sitting back and waiting for the US of A to unravel into chaos under the governmental mismanagement of the Orange Turnip.

Pot calls kettle black as China dubs US 'surveillance empire' over chip tracking

Looks like yet another case of the pot calling calling the kettle black

... and neither like it up 'em, do they?

Why the UK public sector still creaks along on COBOL

Re: 'Legacy' does not = 'obsolete' or 'bad'

Well said! Its worth remembering that well-designed and carefully written COBOL was also pretty good at implementing technically oriented tasks too, as well as accounting and and payroll systems.

The most obvious example is IDMS, one of the earliest portable database implementations, which was written entirely in COBOL. The IDMS database drivers, maintenance and and support tools were all written in COBOL and, as IDMSX, a slightly enhanced version, it was the standard ICL-supported database for 2900 series mainframes.

AFAIK IDMS was never available on the 2903 and 2904 ranges, which ran standard 1900 code under a George 2 emulator on 2900 disk drive hardware.

Datacenter diplomacy: Australia commits to help Vanuatu build bit barns

Why pick on diesel generators for Vanuatu?

Diesel generators are nasty, noisy, smelly things and require some sort of regular tanker service to keep them fuelled up. Solar panels would seem appropriate bevause photos on Wikipedia seem to show enough non-agricultural land to to power a few data centres, though wind power may not be a good idea since the islands seem to be in a wind belt.

The worry about putting data centres on Vanuatu would be the cost of laying data cables to it, so it would be nice to know its situation w.r.t. to the potential users of the proposed data centres.

NASA boss calls for nuclear reactor on the Moon

Re: Fail? Really?

We're not talking about lots of megawatts if we assume the lunar outpost is adequately insulated, so presumably almost any of the smaller factory-built package reactors, due to be available Real Soon Now (or so we're told) could equally well be used on the moon and shipped up there as needed. Assuming a set of solar cells with an equivalent output to the reactor are also installed on the moon, the reactor only needs to be run for two weeks at a time during the lunar night because solar cells will provide power during the lunar day, so refuelling or replacing it shouldn't be an issue.

There's another benefit too: since it seems that moon-dust is likely to be a good insulator, that should make it easy to insulate the outpost well enough to keep the crew alive and warm(ish) enough to survive a two week reactor fail by shipping up a replacement unit from Earth or activating a backup reactor that's already on the Moon.

Lastly: if moondust is light and a good enough insulator, we won't need nukes on the Moon: just solar panels and good insulation for the moon base.

Air Force buying two Tesla Cybertrucks so it can learn to destroy them

Judging by the plots used in some novels, such as William Gibson's "Blue Ant" series, heavily modified Toyota Hiluxes (supercharged, armoured and fitted with bullet-proof glass) were readily available from London customisers in the early 2000s. They were apparently quite popular among Gulf Arabs and Saudis - and judging by a quick search, now have their fans in India too.

LG ordered to pay £150k after phone defect caused Scotland house fire

Re: Important lession here

Good point about never leaving devices charging on a a soft surface: thats something I don't remember ever doing, though I do have a number of devices that are fairly often given overnight charges:

- My phone is charged overnight on top of a bedside set of drawers holding a lamp and my home-brew wake-up system (built in 1978, it uses mains frequency as its time source to switch power for an ancient ITT all-band mains/battery radio that I bought in 1977 so we could get the BBC World Service news every night during my 1977/78 Landrover trip to Kathmandu and back).

- my razor is also mains charged as needed, alongside the ITT radio

- I also charge a couple of 12 volt 7AH YUASA sealed lead-acid cells on an as-needed basis. These power the radio, FLARM, T&B etc in a glider, as well as a hand-held airband radio. This collection sits away from walls, floor, etc on an unused ceramic floor tile, so is fairly unlikely to cause fires.

50 years ago, Gates and Allen made the deal that launched Microsoft

Re: Happy Days....

Sadly, or not, ICL 1900 kit sailed through the Y2K fiasco without a glitch. That's because all ICL 1900 computers held dates as a 23 bit "days since 1900" integer, stored as a signed 24 bit word. This means that the 1900's 'Y2K moment' will occur somewhere around 22982 AD.

All date conversions between the external dd/mm/yy format and the internal binary form were handled by a standard set of subroutines maintained by ICL.

As a result, Y2K was a pretty much non-event for anybody maintaining code running on a 1900 because these systems almost always expected dates to be input and displayed using the dd/mm/yy format. As a result fixing the problem was relatively trivial since it only required any programs we'd written that accepted and displayed or printed human-readable dates to be changed from using dd/mm/yy to using dd/mm/yyyy.

From memory, about the only program we ran that needed anything more than simple adjustments to date I/O formats was a payroll system we ran for a company that still had pensioners born in the 1890s on its payroll.

Happy Days....

In 1976, when ICL had an office on 5th Ave and a 1904 somewhere downtown, every few weeks I used to nip over the 39th on Broadway to visit the Computer Store and admire the those MITS boxes with their rows of switches and red LEDs in the sidewalk display. However, if I wanted to play with anything, I always went inside to diddle with an SWTPC box, which was usually up and running

with green screen, keyboard and printer attached and powered up.

At the time I was working out at Longbeach programming an ICL 2903 in COBOL for a toy manufacturer.

On my return to London in 1977 I found that those trips to the Computer Store hadn't been wasted because the small London company I worked for had bought a somewhat bigger SWTPC system Uniflex OS-9 OS on 6809 microchips and capable of supporting 4 terminals and a couple of printers. We sold a reasonable number of these systems, which were quite popular with small family businesses, running software written in the Sculptor 4GL, which I liked a lot.

Out of interest, does anybody else remember using this hardware and software?

I only did that for 2-3 years before I switched back to designing and writing more complex systems running on ICL 2966 boxes, all written in COBOL and using IDMSX databases.

UN World Court declares countries must curb emissions or be held responsible

Dealing with sewage and (lack of) freshwater in places like the Maldives

Since you apparently know what the Maldives Govt are doing (or work for them), kindly let us know how they're planning to deal with the waste water and sewage disposal from all these new resorts and the tourists they'll attract. Come to that, where is the drinking, flushing and recreational water for those new resorts coming from? These questions should always be fully answered by those planning new cities, industry or resorts situated anywhere that land area and/or fresh water sources are limited.

The only place I know that has given serious thought to where its water is coming from and how it should be conserved and treated is Abu Dhabi. This city is built on a huge, deep sand deposit sitting on the seabed and is totally without access to any naturally available water, so its water cycle looks light this:

1: Sea water is distilled using locally extracted oil and the distilled water is piped to the many parks in the city

2: The distilled water, which tastes unpleasantly flat, is aerated by running it though the splendid illuminated fountains in all the parks

3: The aeriated water is collected from the fountains, fed into the citiy's clean water mains and used for drinking, cooking and washing

4: The used washing water is collected by the city's dirty water sewers and recycled by using it to flush toilets

5: The sewage is piped to sand farms just outside the city, where it is used to grow food

I've spent a fair amount of time in Abu Dhabi and can confirm that this scheme works extremely well (at least until their oil runs out), so I now consider that this system is the minimum that should be used in any place near the sea that lacks a reliable fresh water source capable of fully supplying all its current and planned fresh water requirements.

Not got local oil wells? I think same system should work equally well if driven by a small nuke or, for that matter, from solar mirrors in almost any hot seaside desert location such as Namibia.

Science confirms what we all suspected: Four-day weeks rule

Re: There's a lot more to this

I see another problem with this article: it is only relevant to shop and office workers. It is utterly inapplicable to manual workers, miners, agricultural workers, train-drivers, airline pilots, etc, i.e. everybody whose job REQUIRES them to be present and actively involved for a fixed amount of time during the working week, so bung it in the waste bin along with all the other imperfectly thought-out woo-woo lifestyle rubbish.

UK Post Office names public inquiry as risk to £410 million Horizon replacement project

That's easy: "Money for nothing and the chicks are free".

Brit watchdog says public service TV must 'urgently' join Team YouTube

Re: the BBC – affectionately known by Brits as "Auntie"

IME the BBC news is generally good in terms of coverage and the reportage is very little biased. The BBC World Service has always been excellent when I've been working outside the UK or travelling.

However, last time I tried listening to or watching US news it was all biased to hell and somehow managed to loose important items in a shower of adverts and bloody incomprehensible US 'football' and games of rounders. International News? Forgeddit - there was nothing.

Sacramento cops scoured energy records to target suspected weed growers, and the EFF has sued

Re: What do you run to get 2800 let alone 7000Kwh per month

Sensible or not, you find similarly built houses, i.e. poorly insulated and cheaply thrown up, in the USA outside California too: there are a lot of them in Seattle.

Damned if I know why so many houses are built the way they are: those shrieking that the UK needs more and better houses NOW should take a look at the Lockwood houses in NZ: these have been around since the early '60s: these are a set of standard designs that are designed to be sold as factory-made kits and assembled on a poured concrete platform. The structure is based around using 2" x 4" tongue and grooved wood walls and flooring. Walls are pre-drilled for water pipes and electric cables, so the entire house can be simply slotted together and pipes and wiring slid into pre-drilled channels on the walls. Once the concrete base has set, the rest of the house, including doors and windows, is delivered to the site and assembled, which typically takes just a week or two for a typical four bed house. They seem to be about as durable as any other wooden house and, thanks to their solid wooden walls, come with insulation built in. Later versions come with external pre-painted alloy cladding on the outer walls.

Something like the Lockwood house building system would seem to be ideal for solving the UK housing shortage, but of course that will never happen because:

(1) they weren't invented here, so:

(2) no UK Civil Servant or Minister has ever been known to get off his fat arse and check out anything that wasn't Invented Here.

Privacy campaigners pour cold water on London cops' 1,000 facial recognition arrests

Re: Just wear a Donald Trump mask

I never realised that, in the USA, convicted felons are regarded as upstanding citizens and so are electable as presidents, senators, city mayors, etc. This alone explains a lot about the way US democracy looks to outsiders.

Post Office and Fujitsu execs 'should have known' Horizon IT system was flawed

Re: 2028

Some documentation please:

Who is this Roger Lloyd, what was his job title and what did he do? He certainly wasn't mentioned in the HORIZON fault analysis report that appeared a few years back when the doubts about HORIZON and its management first became public knowledge.

Similarly, who at the Post Office owned the HORIZON project?, i.e. who was the individual or group who specified, agreed, and (should have) gotten its requirements documentation signed off before any coding was started and should have remained responsible it until it had successfully passed all system tests INCLUDING a set of WELL DEFINED END-USER ACCEPTANCE tests prior to it being formally accepted as fit for live operation?

I'd just remind you that by 1990 this was a well-understood system development process. I, and many others, were already using this approach in 1976 for chrissake, so there was really no excuse at all for anybody putting a complex system live without fully testing it first.

Mars was once a desert with intermittent oases, Curiosity data suggests

This looks like a spot of very nice work by the Curiosity project teams. Way to go, gals and guys!

'Elevated' moisture reading ignored before Heathrow-closing conflagration, says NESO

Re: Maintenance

I think you'll find the same attitude to system/subsystem maintenance in the UK applies to many other countries, including the USA.

It also applied to many ex-Soviet countries too. Several years back when I was a competitive free flight model flier, I used to know a lot of the top Soviet guys and one of their frequent sayings was "The State pretends to pay us and we pretend to work".

We also used to regularly visit Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania etc. to fly in their International competitions, where it was very noticeable that private dachas, etc were in *much* better condition than anything the State owned.

China successfully tests hypersonic aircraft, maybe at Mach 12

Re: Fake

.....and the fin that is almost pointed directly at the camera in that photo is quite definitely misaligned with the vehicle's axis, meaning that it would spin like a top on launch unless the control tabs on all its fins are offset to prevent any spin. Since the drag from the offset control tabs would have a large effect on vehicle performance, it seems likely that the photo shows a mock-up rather than anything seriously expected to fly.

Don't shoot me, I'm only the system administrator!

Re: That kind of danger ...

I've been deeply unimpressed by the housing standards in some parts of the USA.

Mid-town Manhattan was OK, but given that 3rd Ave and East 59th was, and still is, a block of brownstones, you'd expect that.

A block of flats I visited in Seattle was quite a shocker: unpainted asbestos external cladding with no impervious liner or insulation inside the external walls. Fortunately Seattle seems to be fairly well protected from strong winds.

The beach house I stayed in at Kitty Hawk during the First Flight celebrations in 2004 was a little better built and insulated, but still seemed unlikely to survive a decent hurricane.

Re: Land of the Free - to be shot

Now THAT sounds like some bits of mid-70s NYC as I remember it, with cops wearing .45s and lounging against walls scratching themselves. Manhattan from Wall Street north to the '70s, i.e. half-way up Central Park, was generally considered fairly safe: I went to rock concerts in the skating rinks at night during the summer and saw Arlo Guthrie etc.

However, we were warned against visiting Harlem, particularly at night and those with British accents were known to be unwelcome in IRA hangouts [thinly disguised as Guinness pubs].

Actually, I remember seeing more NYC cops in the frequent autumn-time street parades than I ever saw on foot patrol or chasing gangsters in armed patrol cars.

Gridlocked: AI's power needs could short-circuit US infrastructure

Re: Aicoin

Looks to me that you've called the situation about right, especially by asking whether any AI output is worth the cost of the power used to produce it.

Northern Ireland government confirms it did not ask Fujitsu to continue bidding for project

Re: Liars.

Don't forget that it wasn't just Fujitsu that deserves a kicking: at worst Fujitsu appears little more than just plain incompetent: its the Post Office that deserves a Rugby boot applied as hard as possible to their flabby arses: after all its the Post Office, not Fujitsu, that committed fraud in its dealings with the Postmasters.

UK students flock to AI to help them cheat

Re: Glorified calculators

IIRC slide rules were OK in exams for the top level three years of secondary school (this was in NZ, not the UK, and was before electronic calculators were available: I'd graduated and was programming ICL 1900s before I first saw a portable electronic calculator), but my best subject was Chemistry, which I later majored in for my MSc.

Consequently, my unofficial exam help was to memorise the Periodic Table, and to write it on the blank sheet of blotting paper that was on every desk in the exam room, as soon as I sat down. This was a really useful trick because it made quite a lot of the questions a lot faster and easier to answer, and wasn't considered cheating since I'd not carried any written material into the exam room. I never asked around, but I' be very surprised if nobody else did the same. There was no need to remember atomic numbers, etc because these could be easily deduced by scanning across a properly laid out Periodic Table.

Doomed UK smartphone maker Bullitt Group finally liquidated

Re: At least PWC were paid!

Same thought here, though mine has CAT emblazened on it. Its been a good, reliable phone for the several years I've had it.

The worst I can say about it is that its built-in camera's viewfinder image is too small and dark to be much use, but then I never need to use it as a camera because I also have a Panasonic DMC-TZ70 camera, 9 years old and still working as well as when it was new.

‘AI is not doing its job and should leave us alone’ says Gartner’s top analyst

Re: You can't replace people

It seems to me that some sort of company governance reform that ties board-level salaries and fees, etc. to the wages paid by the company to its employees would be a worth-while thing for a government to try.

UK dumps £2.5 billion into fusion pipe dream that's already cost millions

Re: Pipe dream

... and always remember that the R101 airship (the one that was going to fly to India but only barely made it across the Channel before crashing in France) was built on public sector wages with Civil Service management.

Meanwhile its twin (R100) was built by a private company Vickers), made a very successful transatlantic flight to Canada and back before being scrapped soon after the R101 disaster, and at least partly because its success embarrassed those who'd mismanaged R101 so badly.

If you want to know more, read "His Majesty's Airship" to get the dirt on R101 and Neville Shute's "Sliderule" to see how a successful airship should be designed and built.

Single passenger reportedly survives Air India Boeing 787 crash

Re: Pure speculation

Possible hazards:

- there are generally a lot of birds around Indian cities, and fairly big ones too: think Indian Vultures, and Brown Kites which I'd guesstimate at about half the size and weight of Indian Vultures: very similar to the Red Kites that are now fairly common in the UK.

- however, Indian Vultures largely disappeared during the early '80s due to the introduction of a bovine medicine or ointment that was poisonous to vultures, so by 2010 or so vultures were pretty rare in Indian skies and brown kites became the common replacement in the scavenger food train.

- In any case, although ingesting a fully grown Indian Vulture would be about as lethal to a modern passenger jet engine (think of the jet that landed in the Hudson after meeting the flock of Canadian Geese), Brown Kites are a lot smaller and could quite possibly go through a large, modern jet engine without wrecking it.

- However, Brown Kites are quite chummy, and often fly round in gaggles. If there was a gaggle on the climb-out path it should have shown up in at least one of the videos of the crash, but there's no sign of that in any of the videos I've seen.

- Given that the flight path looks very stable and under control, except that it descends after a normal-looking, if relatively flat, takeoff and initial climb, my guess is that the problem is connected with the engines (and possibly fuel contamination) rather than with the rest of the aircraft or the aircrew.

I've driven extensively in India and still remember the low and variable quality of Indian petrol (easily the worst to be found East of the English Channel in 1977/78) as well as other industrial contamination disasters (Bhopal), so I won't be surprised if the crash turns out to fuel related.

US lawmakers fire back a response to Trump's NASA cuts

Maybe the X-37 concept can show the way to a better Ground to Space transport vehicle.

"The ONE good thing that could come out of slashing NASA is nuking SLS and its rancid bacon ilk of acronyms and Greek mythology. These aren't small savings on a yearly basis. And they really add up when the zombies have been shuffling along to little purpose as long as this lot."

Couldn't agree more.

Seems to me that there is still a need for a Shuttle replacement, sized somewhere between the original Shuttle and the Boeing X-37 and redesigned as needed to improve its performance while making it fully reusable and human-rated.

* fully reusable should, done properly, should make it nearly as reusable as SpaceX/s smaller rockets and nearly as cheap to operate too.

* this would also make the current fleet of non-reusable spacecraft needed to maintain manned Low Earth Orbit satellites obsolete.

* their existence would most likely help drive the development of future Low Earth Orbit satellites as well as simplifying the design of Lunar and Mars transport vehicles.

AI can't replace devs until it understands office politics

Re: This is what I keep saying

In my experience, the best way to get a correct description of what a new software system must do and how its interfaces (to both people and other computer systems) must be structured is to start by collecting a group of people who understand what the new system must do: those who will be using it as well as those who will be designing and implementing, it in front of a *large* wall-mounted white board and enough felt-tipped pens. The first task is to ensure that everybody understands the notation that will be used to diagram the new system. That done, its best to nominate one of the designers as 'sketcher in chief', to keep the whiteboard from becoming a scribbled mess, and then everybody contributes to making sure that the whiteboard becomes a complete description of the data that the system needs to handle and its internal relationships. This stage of the design is complete when everybody agrees that all necessary data entities and their relationships have been correctly captured on the board.

At this stage, and not before, it is appropriate to specify the system's human interface(s) and the way people will interact with them. I've found James Martin's "Design of Man-Computer Dialogues" to be very useful here. It may be old but it is still well worth keeping as a reference because it describes a large number of ways to represent data and, equally important, the advantages and disadvantages of each.

This is the way we specified, designed and built Orpheus, the BBC's Radio 3 Music Planning system, which manages probably the most complex database I've ever worked with, because it contains catalogues of all the performers, composers, and separately playable pieces of music that Radio 3 has broadcast since 1982, as well as the complete broadcast history of every musical piece played on Radio 3 since Orpheus went live.

Other projects I've been involved in since then have used similar approaches and by and large have been similarly successful: others, which used other design principals, have been less so.

Automatic UK-to-US English converter produced amazing mistakes by the vanload

Re: Whoops

I once spent a month or two at SWIFT (great office, set in a small park containing a lake and a deer herd and with easily the best canteen and coffee of anywhere I've worked). However, as it's on the outskirts of Brussels all the keyboards were AZERTY. This was not the problem I'd expected: just somewhat annoying for about the first week then I got used to it.

Sci-fi author Neal Stephenson wants AIs fighting AIs so those most fit to live with us survive

Re: Handwriting

I've recently realised that, after years of writing and coding while sitting behind a laptop, my handwriting (imcluding signatures) is fast becoming illegible. High time I do a bit more a bit more handwriting to keep it legible!

Post Office finally throttles delayed in-house EPOS project

Why is it that nobody is willing to take the bull by the horns and sack the incompetent?

Is this due to a lack of people who understand the software development process as a whole and can make good decisions about managing it?

While its true that almost any form of incompetence can be found in application development workplaces worldwide, some places are noticeably worse than others,

For instance, while HORIZON is probably very near the bottom of the worldwide application development competence table, I've had contracts in a bank or two that weren't much better, and UK Government Departmental Management is only just just above these examples, In my experience of UK Government the EOs and HEOs in these departments have been pretty competent but anybody above that level, i.e. in management, could safely be sacked without anybody ever missing them.

Teens maintained a mainframe and it went about as well as you'd imagine

Re: Feeding the Beast

(I don't think it was supposed to be the whole of it but when it proved possible to crash it it really was)

That was typical for a 1904 running George 3, which was the set-up for the 1904s I was sysadmin on.

George 3 and any jobs it was running all had separate address spaces, each containing its own set of accumulators, address pointer, entry points, etc. and any job could have additional subordinate address space(s) containing the G3 scripts and/or binary programs it controlled.

There was another process that managed task switching, creating/destroying jobspaces, etc but this was essentially invisible to both users and operator unless George 3 was being started, stopped or reporting a system crash.

Techie solved supposed software problem by waving his arms in the air

Glider pilot here: Remember the phonetic alphabet? I USE it every day I go flying.

Microsoft to preload Word minutes after boot

That sounds about right if you're unable to control the size and content of the "preload" list. If the preload list's size and content is predefined by M$ or automatically extended by automatically adding programs as the user loads them for the first time, then I predict it will be soon removed unless it has a built-in ability to edit the content of the preload list and/or to kill the preload process.

IBM dragged down by DOGE contract cancellation roulette

Don't forget that IBM's founders were salesmen and that this path to high office in the company has never changed: if or when you're trying to work out what IBM will do next, remember this and you're unlikely to be far wrong; their engineers, technical people, etc are very unlikely to be found in senior managerial roles.

Brit soldiers tune radio waves to fry drone swarms for pennies

IIRC the Ukrainians have been building and deploying small, cheap attack drones and drone killers for at least a year, so go talk them about this technology.

In wake of Horizon scandal, forensics prof says digital evidence is a minefield

Re: It's not just a data integrity issue.

Indeed. From the material I've seen about Horizon, it appears that:

The Post Office never issued even a Provisional System Requirement for Horizon, let alone a definitive System Requirements document.

In fact the material I've seen seems to indicate that the only system requirement definition was a single Post Office Sales Terminal implementation that was shown to Royal Mail executives at the beginning of the project. This was apparently never documented or used to generate system documentation for the central financial and stock control databases.

Similarly, no Acceptance Test scripts seem to have been written or used before Horizon was released for live operation.

In short, its difficult to see how anybody could have expected Horizon to have been bug-free, since almost every one of the generally accepted rules of computer systems design, documentation, implementation and testing seems to have been ignored.

Trump tariffs to make prices great – a gain

Re: "For the offshore workers, there are no alternative jobs. It is this or hunger."

Well said.

Just go and work and/or live in the USA for a few months and you'll see that the post I'm replying to is substantially true. I went to New York and worked there for a year in the mid '70s: the original post applied then and has mostly seemed to apply each time I've I've been there since. Deviations from the above norm have been:

* Beer sold in NYC in the mid '70s was uniformly flavourless and weak except for that in Guiness pubs, but they were out of bounds to anybody with a British accent because they were full of rabid IRA members. The west coast and Denver beer used to be almost as dire until the '90s when decent beer started to appear on the West Coast up in Washington State.

* Back in the '70s and 80's meat in general and steak in particular was excellent pretty much everywhere in the USA, and then some prick invented feed-lot raising for beef cattle and so the last few times I've been over there the only decent steak dinners have been at Outback joints and even there I've had their waitresses look surprised and comment about the cost when I ordered a traditional US steak dinner.

* I've yet to drive a rental car in the USA that was built there and that I enjoyed driving: a Ford LTD I had in the '70s had an unexpectedly manky interior. Correction I've driven one good rental there, a red Mustang, in which I enjoyed cruising route 405 in LAX with the radio playing 'Born in the USA', but I only got that because the only other car they had available wouldn't start. IIRC every other rental car I've had there was made in Japan or Taiwan.