Posts by Steve B

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

Not the main reason MS "won" the day.

IBM may have gone with MS, but the real issue was down to Charlie Chaplin.

Back in the 70s, our OS had separate sections for code and data, and once loaded, the code could not be overwritten. Shame no one continued this simple solution. We also used to test the products before release!

However in the early 80s, there were a proliferation of good PCs about which ran DRDOS and CPM.

We used one to enable 4 users concurrent access to local computing for such things as word processing and also as remote terminals for our mainframe.

Then along came the very backward IBM PC with its simple OS, which was a mish mash of earlier OSs, which confused me slightly when they later started IPing the various bits such as disc format etc.

Meanwhile, I had been told back in the 70s that the US were rubbish at programming, but very good at Marketing and even now I have not really seen anything to contradict that generalisation, which leads us to the IBM PC.

IBM were the only computer company in the world according to a lot of Americans, so when IBM brought out their PC endorsed by Charlie Chaplin, well his character was in the ad!, the US businesses got behind it as they trusted Charlie and bought IBM PCs.

The PCs needed applications to run and that was where the difference lay.

The IBM OS was cheap, the IBM PCs were plentiful so developers concentrated on that platform.

Digital Research on the other hand were charging many times more for their OS, and with fewer units out there, unless there was a specified need, the developers either concentrated on the IBM PC or themselves charged the other arm and leg because of the multiple concurrent access etc.

When businesses decided to take the plunge, it was simpler and cheaper to go the IBM PC and compatibles route as there were already plenty of cheap applications about if they wished to expand later.

Unfortunately, the better PCs died off fairly rapidly condemning the IT sector to decades of floundering.

Another open source project dies of neglect, leaving thousands scrambling

Funny that you say that.

I always say the difference between UK comedy and US comedy is that UK comedy happens, you either get it or miss it, whereas US comedy, particularly film and TV basically has a "funny coming up" warning or two followed by the supposedly funny bit and followed by a "that was the funny bit" conclusion.

So you are right really!

Palo Alto kit sees massive surge in malicious activity amid mystery traffic flood

I used to pass the buck

Back in the day, whenever my neywork was attacked, I would inform the ISP responsible for the IP address.

If they did not address the issue, I then notified them that as I had already informed them of the problem, we would hold them personally liable for any costs arising out of damage to our systems caused by their network.

Surprisingly, most of them responded quickly, letting me know the issue was mostly hacked unpatched windows servers running in their farms and they were instigating new procedures to address the constant Microsoft patch requirements.

They also normally pointed out that they themselves had been targetted from further up the line and had notified those ISPs.

Whatever happened to the personnel since then?

I know that there followed a trend to hide contact details and abilities, and someone allowed it, rather than cutting them off the network until they resolved the detail.

Too many actual companies have gone the same route leaving no way to contact them other than writing to some third party in the middle of nowhere via snail mail.

Governments should be chasing things like that to address net fraud, rather than imposing "tracking" methods for normal users.

Hardware inspector fired for spotting an error he wasn't trained to find

US Companies?

It might just be the US companies.

I once got hired by a UK branch of a US company as a Quality Assurance Lead.

I ran a proper QA exercise on their new product and found multiple serious bugs even though their carefully scripted test found none.

I was called in to see HR and was told my QA job was not to find bugs, but just to run scripts which would highlight any bugs that existed!

I was told that I was not the sort of person they employed and was not even allowed back in to collect my coffee mug.

A few months later the whole company ceased to exist!

Europe's largest city council delays fix to disastrous Oracle system once more

Oracle, SAP cr@p, but basically poor management.

We had our own developers and designed systems that actually did what the users wanted, as well as what they needed.

We sold some of our solutions to other councils, police forces etc.

We were lucky at the time as the top manager was like a trout. Any salesman could present sparklies and he was there hook line and sinker.

He also listened to us, allowing us to override his decisions and correct them before it was too late.

For a while most of our budget was real money from external sources.

Then came the great breakthrough in recruitment and psychometric testing.

The good management was replaced by outside leaders with no idea of how and why councils worked.

Nice shiny cheaper servers were a budget godsend along with wonderful new shiny oracle software that could do anything straight off the shelf.

Saved money on unnecessary development staff as specialists were no longer needed.

Then they started to find the differences between what the users asked for, what the users actually needed and what the new shiny software could actually do.

Cracks appeared along with the complete loss of external income due to the fact the council systems no longer did what the council needed let alone work for someone else.

Then along came the answer to life, SAP, which could run all the processes as well as real life.

The management still had no clue that councils were not the same as private manufacturing companies so obviously the OTS system would work.

Stress levels reached new highs in time off due to mental health issues as for some completely unexpected and unknown reasons the solutions again didn't work.

All the while the top management were being lauded for keeping vague control despite their staff failing them constantly.

As far as I know, the management have moved onwards and upwards in life, but guessing from the constant reports of budget issues, I don't think the current solution is that effective either.

Is this what has happened with Birmingham?

Firefox is dead to me – and I'm not the only one who is fed up

Re: OK, but what now?

I am mildly surprised whenever I read FF is still going.

I used to use it and recommended it because I could do a search, trawl through the pages of responses highlighting important bits and moving on.

AT the end I could then use the browser to pull up the highlighted text and if necessary drill down to the original page again.

Saved me and colleagues hours on research time whenever we had to find the truth of something or other.

FF developers removed the facility stating that it was off no use, and when I pointed out I had been involved with networking etc since before "ethernet", I was told that it was time I realised that nothing from my time was relevant in this modern IT world.

As I was still laughing at the 30 year IT backlog caused by MS and IBM, I had to chuckle, but decided at the time that if that was the knowledge base of the FF developers, it would all be downhill from then and immediately switched default browsers.

Unfortunately OPERA has not lived up to its promise either!

Lucky I don't care anymore as I now use IT for fun.

37signals is completing its on-prem move, deleting its AWS account to save millions

Poor Management.

I was lucky in that my career was mainly when we led the world.

The Charlie Chaplin effect for IBM and Microsoft set back the IT world decades, but the lack of real management training and the proliferation of a little bit of financial knowledge led to a real dumbing down of company management.

I can remember a company external audit by a well known player where I was asked to define my role in the company.

They expected reams of items and were surprised when I stated I had one role, which was to ensure that my IT provision allowed everyone else in the company to fulfil their roles.

They were taken aback, but a couple of audits later their new auditor made the same general IT provision statement not realising that I was the original source. Had to chuckle there!

Meanwhile, earlier in my career, when I worked for a County Council, we had a brilliant workforce and led the way for putting computing on desks.

The in house teams wrote software that worked for the local CC staff and with minimal effort, sold it on as a commercial product for other Councils.

We developed other PC and hardware solutions and sold them on.

Than a consultant visited whilst I was on holiday and convinced the new management team that we were no good so it was pointless relying on internal staff to deliver world leading software, despite the fact that we also sold a product to the UK police Forces.

The new yes men management agreed and wound down in house provision, using outside contractors and providers with OTS solutions, leading to widespread County staff sickness epidemics due to stress, coincidentally losing ALL the external users who contributed real money to the budget.

Last I heard, whereas a user could contact the development team and point out a bug which would then be fixed immediately, it was taking two years of negotiation with the provider before they would even look at it.

So you need a good management team, not one that relies on adages like "you can't be sacked for buying xxx" etc.

Then you need a good team of workers who actually know what they are doing rather than those "experts" who don't.

My old CC lost all the good workers, but the management went on to bigger and higher wages even though the relative providion was down to about 10% of what we used to provide.

Pentagon declares war on 'outdated' software buying, opens fire on open source

Secure software rules out most of the US contributions then.

I am only going back to the later 70s, but cannot remember any US written code that wasn't bug ridden.

Prior to that I was told that IBM wouldn't let their programmers write anything longer than a printer page as they couldn't be trusted if they had to turn the page over.

They didn't like me taking the Micheal out of them at the interview either.

Europe's largest council kept auditors in the dark on Oracle rollout fiasco for 10 months

Re: Having worked in a UK based software house

You have hit the nail on the head.

Councils used to work with specific vendors to ensure that only certain products could tender, with most having to admit to a bit of a botch to meet all the requirements.

That was fine when the council officers knew what they were doing, but they all seem to have been replaced by officers prepared to ignore local requirements and enforce OTS products and processes, to meet short term budgets, satisfy inept management teams, but furthering their own career.

Even better if they can move on with a good CV before the SHTF.

That's one of the reasons for busted budgets and missing work targets. Locally, it also led to a significant increase in nervous breakdowns amongst the stressed workforce.

I still think it was short sighted to get rid of all the good council programmers.

Whereas our local council used to spot a problem, report it and get it fixed immediately, I have been told that there can be a two year wait just to get the OTS people to recognise the existence let alone dream of fixing it.

Meanwhile our local council is missing budgets by millions and constantly failing to meet targets.

Open source maintainers are drowning in junk bug reports written by AI

There is no such thing as AI.

All that exist are computer programs.

As such they are programmed originally by a programmer, who has laid out his flow chart for the program to follow.

Nowadays many don't use the flow chart method and very many programmers think they are excellent because one of their programs once worked.

MS and IBM put the world back decades with their PC and DOS and even now most of the operating systems have still not caught up to where we were in the 70s.

Modern techniques don't test properly and hence expose the customer to basic bugs, so quite honestly these "AI" offerings are quite frightening.

By sheer simple extrapolation, they are bug ridden at conception, even worse on release, and the people who are the targets have no idea and complete faith, which is also frightening!

Still, it is nice to know that there still exist some developers trying to improve their code. Many of the big companies have forgotten the concept.

AWS must fork out $30.5M after losing P2P network patent scrap

I was complaining about this type of network activity in the late 80s, early 90s.

Sending the same message to every node for just one to get through is a very pathetic way to use a network and back when links were slower they resulted in broadcast storms which wiped out wide area networks.

Most network programmers/designers moved away from this style of behaviour, but obviously there were a few over in the states who didn't actually understand what they were programming, as evidenced by the network behaviour of such as Novell, Microsoft, Cisco.

That probably accounts for these ridiculous late US patents that cover IT stuff we did in the 70s.

LibreOffice 24.8: Handy even if you're happy with Microsoft

Calc not so hot!

If I load a spreadsheet in Excel, it is there!

Load the same spreadsheet in Calc and go off and get a drink waiting for it to load.

Same goes for saving.

Not sure why they have such an issue, but it does tend to minimise the enjoyment.

It is not a new issue and has been dragged through all versions of Calc for years.

Internet Archive sued by record labels as battle with book publishers intensifies

Quite sad that the internet has been corrupted.

When we started the web, it was easy to find information as we all shared.

We also shared programming techniques and ideas, all to improve the world.

Then along came the rest of the world and completely destroyed our ideals.

IT phone home: How to run up a $20K bill in two days and get away with it by blaming Cisco

Lost a job interview because of that!

I used to be involved with the forefront of networking using my systems as test beds to make sure that when something new came along it worked for us.

When ISDN routers became a thing, it was obvious from the get go that they would connect as desired then drop the link when idle.

As the Connect Charge was higher than the usage charge, it was possible to easily make multiple calls in the short period of a "usage time unit" really tacking the bills. so I worked out immediately how to configure the device to keep the charges to a minimum.

I was trying for a job in a major local employer with international stores, who wanted a new network man.

As per usual, the job had been specced by someone who knew little about networks so the proposed content and context were a bit iffy.

As I was leaving a fairly secure position, I was concerned about where the job would "go" as the proposed function would not take the year plus they had allowed, but could be easily accomplished over a weekend, or maybe a week at the outside, which I pointed out when querying the role prospects.

I asked them what equipment they currently had and as soon as they mentioned the new routers they had, I told them they had to reconfigure them from the defaults before they used them or they would run up large bills.

They looked at each other and ended the interview. Apparently they had these strange large phone bills they could not account for and having had the cause revealed, they assumed I had been fed inside information by their previous network consultants in an attempt for them to get back into the company good books, thus ruling me out.

The good part was they hired a paper expert from "London" who took a year to do the job with an expensive solution and got it so wrong they parted company at that point.

Karma!

Ford seeks patent for cars that ditch you if payments missed

The US Patent Office should be disassembled

It is completely out of hand now and basically just feeding the US legal system.

All they need is a few school leavers to go through the patents, work out which ones are actually original and not natural extensions or rip offs from Sci Fi books.

That should cut it down to a few dozen!

If that is too much, then they should just start at the automatic disqualification of any software only patents.

You would not be able to patent a book or a story, yet software is only a language and there are only a few ways to arrange that language , far less than any spoken language, which makes patenting a complete non sequitur.

If I recall correctly, my Sky box will disable my viewing should I stop paying my bills. As Sky would not be visiting the house to effect the disconnection, then at least part of the Ford patent is already automatically invalid.

Scammers steal $4 million in crypto during face-to-face meeting

Why?

If they have $4m kicking about spare, why do they want more? Sounds sus to me.

Meanwhile, wouldn't wifi snooping etc catch the login dialogue?,

Quick bit of reprogramming and the encrypted strings can be inserted into a login dialogue from a different app.

It always seemed a fairly trivial task to me.

If your Start menu or apps are freezing up on Windows, Microsoft has a suggestion

And they want AI controlled cars!

High Salaries, Best programmers, Best marketers and Best Lawyers!

"triggered a bug" says it all.

Unfortunately since day one MS have been confused about the concept of bugs.

Whether it relates back to over confident programmers, who could never make a mistake, or just plain useless programmers is unclear but has always been part of the MS company mission.

Amazing how they can introduce a bug into their code and then lay the blame on others, also leaving the others to offer workarounds or forcing the customer to remove their non MS products.

Sounds like another Eu court case in the offing.

Microsoft is checking everyone's bags for unsupported Office installs

I'm still using Office 2000

If O2K doesn't accomplish the task I want, I use openoffice etc.

Already paid for 2K so no need to spend more!

Hive to pull the plug on smart home gadgets by 2025

Re: Thanks for the money but your stuffed.

I have just terminated my Ring camera contract as they decided to upgrade the service with unwanted extras for only a 40% rise in cost!

I should have stuck with my original plan to only use local storage devices. Now I need a new doorbell!

A tiny typo in an automated email to thousands of customers turns out to be a big problem for legal

Re: Fix the problem - safely - then worry about legal / senior management

I managed my teams like that which worked well until the Council IT top tier management team changed.

Obvious failures by my team members were resolved and owned, as one does.

The new "managers" were not up to their roles as we accidentally exposed time after time, so they used any failures as an excuse to shuffle me out (downgrading, dead end career progression, reorganisation etc).

They then promoted the worst members of my team into the team leading roles.

Karma being what it is, the management team all went on to enjoy massive salaries and pension benefits whilst the service and standards provided by the Council declined from the best value in England ( or thereabouts when I left) to the lowest levels possible.

It was always someone else's fault and they were such good managers they had managed to recover from some of the issues etc.

I can quite easily understand them taking hours to figure out how not to accept any liability at their level and getting that aspect sorted first before actually looking at the problem and ways to resolve it.

Frustrated dev drops three zero-day vulns affecting Apple iOS 15 after six-month wait

Have to agree coming at it from the other way.

I have never been an Apple fan, but although the Android phone I have basically works, it is being taken over by Google.

I have to have a Google email and user, I have to divulge my date of birth, can they have my credit/debit card for Google pay or the Play store? etc. My battery is winding down at alarming rates even though I do nothing and it turns out to be Play Services running round doing the above, which I don't want.

All I want is a phone that can take photos and access the internet as well as make and receive calls or texts, why do they insist on this tie in?

I'm thinking of going huawei just for the break from Google and Apple.

As an old programmer, I still can't see how any of these companies continue to develop code with so many ridiculous bugs in, when our techniques from the 70s would have precluded most of them getting as far as the test phase even.

If I remember correctly, my company was probably the first to decide that writing an OS in a higher level language would give them a far greater developer base to draw from. They found out very quickly that they only benefit was that the higher level language and new developers allowed for quicker development of bugs so they had to rethink the hiring policy.

It was interesting to see later major companies falling into exactly the same development paths. I used to phone one and tell them their next big issue, it correlated so well.

MS and Apple have unfortunately not learned all the lessons.

HPE campaigns against 'cloud first' push in UK public sector

Haven't got the staff any more though.

The Government policies have basically removed most of the intelligence and the best programmers from Local and Central Government employ.

If we wanted something done for our users we did it. It worked, and if we could we sold it to other Councils.

Then the outsourcing came in and after a change of the original management team, who had reorganised themselves into a nice redundancy or early retirement package, the new management team perfectly matched the new psychometric test requirements, whilst still being absolutely useless at everything bar attending meetings and agreeing with the perceived main person in the room!

Instead of the users getting what they wanted, they now got "bespoke, off the shelf" packages, which saved all the high development costs.

The fact they didn't actually meet any of the criteria was glossed over as unimportant, until the "users" started going sick with stress caused by the new systems and it got into the press.

The trouble is that once you have lost the real talent, you are stuck with the dross and can't recover,

Hence all the bills went up and none of the systems satisfied the users, which in our case also lost all off the external customers we had built up over the years, who were paying "real" money into the Council coffers.

The old management team would not touch "consultants", preferring to spend the money on training in house personnel. The new team, being completely incompetent, relied upon external consultants.

We found the first problem was that the "consultants" hired had usually read the book the night before, giving them "expert" status in the eyes of the new psycho management teams and our local relevant knowledge was ignored.

We were always found to be right, usually 6 months into the project, which led to a management team led restructure, rendering certain people surplus to requirements!

The management team performance bonus levels went up afterwards as they could now pass the buck.

When I dealt with Central Government, I found they suffered consultants exactly the same way.

In fact watching the pandemic fiasco and the Government advisors, I see it is exactly the same even now.

Everyone cites that 'bugs are 100x more expensive to fix in production' research, but the study might not even exist

I was old school and most of the bugs came out during the flowchart breakdown..

On my important projects, I used to flowchart them, then break the flowchart down and down.

I once ended up with a complete 12 ft by 6ft wall covered in a flow chart linked by ribbons.

It highlighted enough issues and so I knew which questions to ask to finish it off.

It caused a panic at the Home Office when I asked the questions as apparently I was months away from finishing the product.

They arranged an emergency meeting with the managers to discuss a new implementation timetable, meanwhile I had finalised the flow chart and typed in the code required all in less than a day.

My boss was well aware of how I worked and took great pleasure, after hearing their put downs about not hiring professional companies and needing months extra etc, when he looked across to me and asked when I would be ready for testing and I stated the booked session in the morning!

Cue lots of red faces when they admitted they had cancelled the sessions thinking we were months away.

It sailed through the testing as well!

Developing in C was the closest thing to that method as one could just create a stub routine and then expand on that later, breaking the code down to cover all possibilities.

The biggest issue with testing is that if an input has to be between 0 and 5, for example, the programmer will work in the presumption that the input is a single digit with largest value 5 and smallest 0, this can cause issues when the input is empty or a non numeric string.

Is this what most of the current windows problems are? buffer overruns.

The fact that data is being allowed to overwrite code is both a hardware and software design flaw that we actually overcame back in the 70s.

When I got to Visual Basic, I found that to be awful as there was very little comprehensive timeline linking.

It was there but hidden in the presentation which meant most new developers didn't have a clue how things actually worked underneath.

This means that most of the bugs found after the product has been released require a redesign, which doesn't happen. So welcome to the US patch city.

The PrintNightmare continues: Microsoft confirms presence of vulnerable code in all versions of Windows

Why are the US programmers so bad?

So you want to print on a remote PC printer.

Set up a connection, pipe the data, close the connection.

Simple so where does the requirement for the ability to execute code come into that?

The possibility of the "bug" should never have existed in the first place, just very poor design and even worse programming.

Compsci boffin publishes proof-of-concept code for 54-year-old zero-day in Universal Turing Machine

Shows we have lost the plot!

Nearly 50 years ago, our computers would only run precompiled code that had been loaded from a code library.

On top of that, code could only be loaded into memory designated as code memory and data could only go into data memory. Attempting to write data into a code block would cause an exception and halt the program. Attempting to execute data would also create an exception.

All very simple and going well until IBM and Microsoft came along with their high falutin marketing and destroyed IT for decades.

Spy agency GCHQ told me Gmail's more secure than Microsoft 365, insists British MP as facepalming security bods tell him to zip it

The good old oxymoron - Government Intelligence.

For the past few years I have not witnessed anything to confirm that intelligent life exists in Parliament or Whitehall, but lots to the contrary

Airline software super-bug: Flight loads miscalculated because women using 'Miss' were treated as children

And little did they realise that they probably didn't save money on outsourcing.

Isn't this the fault of the analyst?

Someone had to spec the system and present it to the "client" who would then sign off on the development.

I think the main difference to my day is that we would have tested the software properly before making it live.

They don't seem to be able to do that nowadays.

We did it by intuition, knowing what had to be done to achieve a 100% working solution, rather than scrambling with agility or whatever useless dogma they are currently promoting qualifications in.

You can't replace good programmers with processes and average programmers. The result is not the same.

Bournemouth, Christchurch, Poole Council awards reseller a multimillion-pound contract for Microsoft services

Oh how times have changed.

Only back in the early 90s, many of the staff from Dorset County Council, Poole Borough and Bournemouth Council used to astound the private sector with their all round knowledge as we did not have enough staff to "specialise" so each to had to become actual experts (rather than paper experts) in several fields at the same time and we often worked together to solve issues.

Private sector interviews used to have questions like " but who provided that service" or that system etc because "you can't possibly do it all as it is not done. You have to get companies in to do that".

I even had one interview where the interviewer turned round and said "but what have you actually been doing as none of the stuff in your CV is done down here".

Back in the day, good council managers used to hire good staff who were often better than them, but could provide the required services. There was a change in the late 80s early 90s when psychometric testing was adopted. From that point on, the management ensured that new employees were less qualified than the manager to ensure there was no threat to their position. During LGR in Dorset there was even a survey to gather every individual's actual qualifications to see who was higher qualified (ready for the purge).

Then came the 90s LGR and the consequent poor management team choices coupled with another more recent LGR, so today, instead of having in house experts working together across Councils to provide a cost effective tailored service, the local councils seem to be tied to inappropriate general software packages which do not provide the required service and meanwhile the in house IT quality has been watered down to rely upon these systems and outside "expert" (usually paper experts) help. And lots of consultants if our local paper is to be believed. I assume PBC (Poole, Bournemouth, Christchurch) has now been similarly inflicted.

Although from their figures, I can't see how an EXTRA £4m on software revenues yearly is going to help with the professed savings that the Council merger was supposed to bring about.

SolarWinds just keeps getting worse: New strain of backdoor malware found in probe

And this is different to Huawei how?

At least the Chinese back doors are supposedly coded in by design!

It's 2020 and a rogue ICMPv6 network packet can pwn your Microsoft Windows machine

Driverless cars!

I once ran a test team and took the stance that I was an end user not a clued in techie.

Hardly any of the products passed my tests so after a long "fight" and surprisingly at the urging of the development teams, the company totally changed the testing regime and programs started checking for invalid input which was dealt with before it crashed the systems.

This was the UK back in the 70s.

The other thing the company learnt was that by developing the code in a higher language, it did not preclude the necessity for the best programmers who knew what they were doing.

Along came the Charlie Chaplin advert and the IBM PC and MSDOS resultant world dominance by the U/S even though it was never the best PC and certainly not the best OS.

Here we nearly 40 (yes FORTY!) years later still at major risk from junior programmer level coding errors.

And they want to program driverless vehicles!

The internet becomes trademarkable, sort of, with near-unanimous Supreme Court ruling on Booking.com

Is this an open check for the registrars?

The domains are rented for a fee for a defined period.

What is to stop the registrar for that tld upping specific fees so that on renewal it is a couple of hundred or more K per year for Booking.

If it is not renewed it is not a major issue with the registrar but stuffs the company!

Also the company in question do not own the internet or even part of it, so how can they legally trademark something they do not own.

I would qualify that as US law, but thinking about it , our lot are now just as bad.

However it is the law makers at fault.

Amazon is saying nothing about the DDoS attack that took down AWS, but others are

What has happened to the monitors?

I used to help with a lot of network development and testing, helping quite a few companies to shape their switches and monitors, including some RMON devices.

They used to send me their latest hardware and software to install and beta test.

I moved on from that role to become an international corporate's IT Manager, but installed "non corporate" firewalls and monitors so that I knew what was happening on the network.

Many of the companies I "worked" with have been hoovered up by the bigger players or fallen by the wayside, but there is no excuse really.

If you are responsible for the well being of a major network which has impact upon business viability then you have to install proper monitoring mechanisms to let you know very quickly if a problem develops.

Even then I got fed up with attacks so used reverse DNS and who is to go after the US based ISP.

After the initial "nowt to do wi' us", the support chap realised that he was actually being attacked as well, but it had taken over one of his servers. A quick flurry of activity and problem solved. I later got an email to say that they had many servers susceptible which were in line for take over and they had now decided that instead of sitting back on server patches they were going to instigate a better maintenance schedule to minimise the chances of it happening again.

I did not really appreciate the effect of my monitoring on our companies, until the corporate Finance Controller left to freelance elsewhere. On a keep in touch visit, I was told that they had not realised that big companies still had major IT issues as there had not been any in 4 years with us, but were a constant occurrence in the other companies they had been into.

Parliament IT bods' fail sees server's naked OS exposed to world+dog

Re: it's probably

I used to love developing for QDOS.

Police ICT Company kills £500m procurement, no longer wants one box shifter to rule them all

Good Idea but never works.

We did that in Local Government. It ended up that if we wanted to buy something specialised we had to do the evaluation and negotiation ourselves, then the vendor would try to get on the supply list so we could actually procure it!

All well and good until other more generalised vendors got into price wars to get the preferred supplier option. This was obliviously at cost to something and if you weren't careful you had to buy the poor offering they were selling.

Meanwhile whilst with the Police, we noticed that every force had their own way of doing things complete with their own supplier and there was no way they were going to change.

Using the central supplier may help shortcut the procurement process, but what is really needed is a "Police team" consisting of the best workers, civilians, admin, audit, and even a few force managers, from multiple forces who have the capability to take the best available processes from each of the forces, tweaking them to suit every force and then amalgamate them into one system, easily paramatised to allow some local customisation, but in general just coming up with one system to put into each force. As it would be the same system, the data would be easily shared and manipulated with little effort as requirements grow.

The development team should be made up from proven in house programmers from the various forces and coopted specialists as required, making sure the expertise stays spread and in house.

It worked for us on a single force scale and we sold software on, but it would never happen now though! Crime Commissioners have to protect their empires.

Skype goes blurry, Office gets a kick in the privacy, and Microsoft takes us back to 1990

Microsoft - Quality Assurance Department - Giraffe.

I thought it was a joke, but remembered that when I returned to modern "Quality Assurance" for a US company, I did get a bit of a shock - and the sack!

When we started QA for an UK international computer manufacturer, we improved software quality by unheard of amounts simply by acting as real users.

When I went back into QA I ran the US company induction script as a real QA exercise on their about to be released product which had already passed its own QA with flying colours, I found around 25 deviations, one of which was major.

I was called in by personnel and informed that my job as a QA Test lead did NOT involve finding bugs. My job was to run the scripts and the scripts would log whether there were any bugs or not.

I thought they were taking the P, but I was then informed I was not the sort of person they wanted working there. And they would not even let me back in to get my coat and coffee cup, which were brought out to me.

The daft thing about it was that their new US director had visited the day before to recount to the company that he had spent a few weeks going round the major customers to find out their perception of the product. His findings matched mine exactly and I hadn't left the desk.

Until the companies realise that Quality Assurance is not there to sign off whatever you already have, but should actually work towards improving the quality of the product, things are not going to get better.

If at first, second, third... fourth time you don't succeed, you're Apple: Another appeal lost in $440m net patent war

Get rid of Software Patents completely.

Software is just another language like English. It would be a bit Naff if now we are going to be struggling outside the EU, we decided to up our income by taking every other country to court for infringing our language!

Basically the same thing as books and films. What some one says can also be independently authored by someone else to get the same overall story just as in software some ideas are natural follow ons from normal programming practice. That appears to ave been cover nicely by copyright laws so they could be applied as well to software.

IBM/Microsoft between them put the world of computing back 20 or 30 years, the US Patent System will probably kill all software innovation with their pathetic attempts to pander to the US legal system lobby..

Facebook to appeal against ICO fine – says it's a matter of principle not to pay 18 mins' profit

Does seem a bit ludicrous.

One supposes that every country on the internet is also lining up fines as their data could have been leaked as well.

Interesting law principle though, being found guilty of just the possibility of a crime relating to bad programming errors.

Microsoft should be quaking along with many network vendors that allow sneaky access to users' data through their less than diligent program testing.

Did Apple get fined in the UK for the fappening etc?

Microsoft yanks the document-destroying Windows 10 October 2018 Update

Re: "The guy who wrote the update"

Have to agree. I inspired ICL's Software QA team, but we were so successful, we were disbanded and product reliability took a nose dive again..

A couple of years ago I got a QA lead job in the UK with a leading US backup and restore company, but only lasted a couple of weeks because their flagship product had flawlessly passed its official QA but by running my company induction script as a proper QA exercise against the new product I found several bugs, one potentially serious, I was too new to know if it was or not so raised it with the development team for them to check out.

Cue a trip from HQ personnel and an unbelievable conversation:

"As a QA Lead it was not your job to find and report bugs, the QA Test Lead role is to run the supplied scripts and if there are any bugs, the script will flag them."

"... but I found 20 new bugs"

to which the response was

"You are not the sort of person we want working for *****"

I wasn't even allowed back to my desk to get my coffee cup, someone else had to get it for me.

Back in the 70s, our groundbreaking QA philosophy was that we were "users". As such, it was fairly important that the products worked as documented, but more important was that when we did things wrong they catered for the fact and dealt with it in the correct and safe manner. Even thought we knew more about the product than half the developers, we only used knowledge and traits available to users so if the documentation was wrong - tough - we followed it and the product failed until it was correct. If the user was told not to do something they could easily do because it caused an issue, we would incorporate it to ensure it didn't, because you could guarantee a user would do it at the most inconvenient time.

Back in those days, you had to apply OS patches and software package updates via punched cards and they refused to do a rebuild before submission to QA, so I insisted the exercise included the punching of the cards from when we started not before. Turned the exercise into a bit of a fiasco but as a direct result a new delivery system was devised and a new department formed to ensure the task of applying patches was a smooth infallible operation for the actual users. Job Done!

Product and operating system reliability shot up hundreds of percent.

We put it together in less than 6 months, but after they disbanded us and it all went downhill, the company spent the next decade rediscovering "quality" for the first time!?! And I am not sure they ever reached our level of success.

MS were just starting off then, bit it sounds like they still haven't caught up even 40 years later.

MIMEsweeper maker loses UK High Court patent fight over 15-year-old bulletin board post

All Software patents should automatically be invalid.

Software is just a set of instructions to the computer.

Anyone who can code can come up with the same or different instructions to perform the same task.

Therefore as one develops a program, they are all obvious and non patentable.

As with literature and books, there is some merit in look/feel but imagine if someone in the 1920s had got a patent for all stories where the hero is a government agent, fighting to right the wrongs of enemies of the state, which is basically what is being allowed with software patents.

RIP... almost: Brit high street gadget shack Maplin Electronics

Re: Well at least

Maybe the batteries last but why clog the spectrum? I used to have arguments like that with Novell, Microsoft and Cisco designers many years ago. Although it looks like there is plenty of "network space" available, there isn't if you clog it with rubbish. Every little bit counts.

Ex-Facebook manager sues biz after getting 'Zucked out of overtime'

All depends on how useful you are.

When I worked for a UK County Council, we were "salaried" and therefore expected to work all hours for nothing extra. As we could only do computer maintenance outside normal hours they expected us to work the normal day and then come back to do the maintenance.

On the second occasion I said no, not without pay.

I offered to do the maintenance during normal working hours, but it was their desire that I did it out of hours so I demanded payment.

Cue a meeting with the County Treasurer, Computer Manager and all the long time support team employees at which it was pointed out that it was "our duty" to do whatever was required when required etc., and never in the history of mankind had anything so dastardly been proposed.

One by one they asked the long term employees if they were willing to back down and do the work as requested, to which they all reluctantly agreed.

When it got to me at the end, I just pointed out that they had plenty of volunteers willing to do the task so my answer was still No.

About an hour later the management realised that no one else could actually do it without severe retraining.

We ALL got paid overtime for out of hours work after that!

And I never got a thank you.

Take that, gender pay gap! Atos to offshore hundreds of BBC roles

Isn't this illegal?

I thought tendering was supposed to be blind. from the dialogue it is as though this Atos lot KNOW they have to bid lower to beat the others, which implies they know the figures.

As to the solution, can't say I really know any BBC faces, so the fees should be lowered and if the faces don't like it there are now several hundred alternative places for them to seek employment.

The major problem with the equalisation of sexes was that it was done wrong - same as minority equality. People should get a job because they are the best for the role, not because they are the right shape or colour. The reward for the role should be the same whoever gets it. Simple! You now have the best staff for the company, but then the type and shape numbers would not necessarily add up.

As for ourtsourcing to India, one only has to look at BT and their support. I had a simple issue to deal with, but it took something like 12 phone calls to their support line to find someone who understood Queens English AND knew the BT product AND knew what to do. It was a simple request about their Alarm Call service *55*, but one conversation - after 15 minutes went "Have BT installed a special Alarm extension in your house?" My shocked response on the lines of enquiring if she was taking the Michael resulted in the line being dropped and back to square one. btw they were never able to resolve the issue because the problem lay with different BT departments/companies and there was no interaction.

I know the last series of Doctor Who was complete crap but maybe this outsourcing lark included script typing via the IT. that would explain why it never made sense and was non-sequiter from previous series.

Re: If there's no TV in the property...

That doesn't seem to apply in Weymouth. Looking through the "In the Courts" section each week shows at the bottom end of the scale for fines, unfortunate folk such as drug dealers, car thieves, Muggers, Burglars, Shoplifters, people with no car licence or insurance. Every week the top of the table is reserved for the heinous people with NO TV LICENCE, with their individual fines higher than the total of the unfortunates below them in the pecking order. And it is not just one or two, tis often columns of them! As far as one can read into it there appears to be no burden of proof required as hardly any of them even know they are in court and so do not attend!

Firefox doesn't need to be No 1 – and that's OK, 'cos it's falling off a cliff

Probably more to do with attitude

I remember many years ago, Novell were asked if they were going to change the way their network worked to make it more cooperative with other systems. Their response was " we have the lion's share of the market and therefore are doing it right, so no we will not be changing." That attitude did not serve them so well in the long term. Similarly I had issues with Firefox and got into discussions with the developer community regarding the USPs they were dropping with no good replacement. Their attitude was " we are the best programmers and therefore we know best. Nothing you old people know is relevant to us anymore." From the comments it looks like they have continued on with their cavalier attitude. Firefox hasn't been on my radar for nearly 10 years now and I haven't missed it at all.

One-third of Brit IT projects on track to fail

Coincidental with Prince.

I used to use proper project management techniques and all of my projects were delivered on time. Not necessarily when the management were expecting them on their plans but always as I promised from day one on mine. Then along came Prince and Agile to formulate the techniques and to make life easier for useless people to get qualifications. So basically the people who could not create a proper project management plan suddenly became qualified to prove that they could! Failure guaranteed!

Facebook in the dock: Web giant faces trial for allegedly ripping off data center blueprints

Re: Typical BRITISH RUBBISH....

We did both OS and Micros and they were much better, but unfortunately the US "stole" another British artifact -Charlie Chaplin, which IBM then used in an advert to convince the easily led that Charlie Chaplin endorsed the IBM PC and MSDOS to make their business great. Brilliant campaign as it worked and plunged the IT world into darkness.

FYI – There's a legal storm brewing in Cali that threatens to destroy online free speech

Summed up the real problem with "thousands of dollars"

If the process was cheap and affordable or free for the masses then these judgements would be fought, but while it requires "thousands of dollars" it is limited to the rich, who can therefore get away with anything and also rewrite history. After all they must be right because they are rich.

Obviously there is scope for an internet judge judy or whatever whereby an independent panel of internet users review supposed libel actions and decide whether the "review" goes to far. That would open processes up to the masses who cannot afford litigation in any country,

Why Firefox? Because not everybody is a web designer, silly

I loved Firefox when it came out but then they got meglomaniac

There were some fantastic innovations in Firefox which made my research time so much easier and more productive, but then they did the simple thing of removing the singular "active tab" X which up till then had always been i one place allowing you to open loads of tabs from a search engine query and then without moving the mouse to easily discard those which were irrelevant. All thoughts were on content, but suddenly there was the interruption to thought process as you now located the new "relevant" X position and clicked it, then you could get back to whatever? Many discussions on the developers bug forums evolved into them finally stating that they knew everything and as a long time IT professional ALL my knowledge was now totally irrelevant as it had been superseded and they were geniuses! No surprise they have dug themselves into a hole. I switched to OPERA and am still one of the few.

UK's 'homebrew firmware' Chinooks set to be usable a mere 16 years late

Supposedly couldnt fly by instruments.

Was it one of those that crashed in foggy Scotland and despite all IT advice and knowledge the MOD blamed pilot error for the first decade or so!