Posts by Nursing A Semi

Why the UK public sector still creaks along on COBOL

Y2K

I left a programming job 98 or 99 "Mainly Foxpro" and the next office was occupied by the company COBOL guy. He had been writing, maintaining and upgrading a system for a large steel factors for something like 7 years "IIRC it was upto 11MB in flat text format". I popped in for a visit some point during 2000 and was told he suddenly announced he had a new job and bailed out late 99. Turned out his god knows how many lines of COBOL was not Y2k compliant and he figured the job of fixing it could not be done in time.

'Trained monkey' from tech support saved know-it-all manager's mistake with a single keypress

Re: Monkey

I worked for a guy who sometimes signed his checks depending on what happened to have been on TV the night before "Yes this was a while ago". He once spent a day sending out checks signed Doris Day , not a one was refused by his bank who obviously never looked at signatures.

Re: Monkey

Nope, one of the TLAs but not going to say which one.

Re: Monkey

I saw so many examples of people who deserved a raise have to go elsewhere to get one that I came to the following conclusion as to business model.

Keep a small pool of good people who get promoted and paid at or above market rates, rest are recruited knowing little, trained to be useful and then expected to stay for one or two years before they leave for pastures new. Result is that when bidding for a new contract our people were mostly capable of doing the job and were cheap, competitors people were admittedly capable of doing a better job but were expensive.

Re: Monkey

To be honest the guy had given me my start in the company and was always supportive and I liked him, but likewise I was not shocked to the brink of a breakdown to discover his less than ideal view of the worth of the technical class "it was a company wide thing, technical folks were generally paid below market rate and company seemed to see itself as a training organisation for all the companies who paid better".

Monkey

I was once in a room while a director was having a rant at a manager in which he included the term "40k a year technical monkey". I spotted the moment when he realised I was there and was quite impressed when he didn't mis a beat but completed his tirade before turning to me and saying "No offense intended", I struggled to keep a straight face.

Microsoft pulls plug on generous Azure credit program for startups

Deformed

This elephant has no trunk surely?

Datacenters near Heathrow seemingly stay up as substation fire closes airport

Easy Lesson for Heathrow

Apparently they connect to three substations, with the remaining two acting as backup in case the supply from one fails. Weirdly though, it would seem to take the best part of a day to bring the backup supply into a state to cover for the dead "well toasty anyway" substation.

Easy lesson guys, if your backup can't take over straight away it isn't really a backup.

Eggheads crack the code for the perfect soft boil

Re: Delia Smith recipe, modified

Or put the eggs into the water when cold, then turn off as soon as it boils, works just the same.

Windows 10 given an extra year of supported life, for $30

So...

People paid for an OS "yes probably bundled with their desktop/laptop" which most sensible folk would admit is so full of design flaws it requires regular security fixes.

Now MS has drawn a line in the sand and said from this date you will need to pay us for those security fixes or leave yourself even more open than usual to viruses and malware of various flavours.

Had they not been developing the fixes anyway they might get away with that. But them knowing that a vulnerability exists thus a fix is required, developing said fix then refusing to give it to their customer base unless they pay extra? I smell a class action inbound to further enrich the legal profession.

LottieFiles supply chain attack exposes users to malicious crypto wallet drainer

Whats your favourite?

I really hate "malicious crypto wallet drainers" don't you? My favourites are the pythonesc crypto wallet drainers or maybe the cheeky crypto wallet drainers as still waiting for the slapstick crypto wallet drainers to be released.

What's your favourite?

Nvidia CEO whines Europeans aren’t buying enough GPUs

USA

I ended up by mistake on amazon.com rather than .co.uk the other day. Searched for a coup[le of graphics cards and thought I had stumbled on an early Black Friday sale or something similar. The prices were loads cheaper than I was expecting, then realised my mistake.

So Jensen "cool name by the way" if you want people this side of the pond to buy as many GPUs as our colonial cousins, how about giving up price parity as a good first step?

Want to feel old? Excel just entered its 40th year

Dark Side

Never mind Excel, Dark side of the moon recently had its 50th anniversary release, feel old now?

Yes, your network is down – you annoyed us so much we crashed it

Payback

To set the stage, large company known by a TLA having won a very large public sector contract to replace back office systems for local government and police forces across a couple of counties with a SAP system. Nobody will be overly shocked to hear there were one or two teething problems.

Agreed payment schedule was partially on a milestone reached basis. Said TLA were asking for the half mil for getting the POP system online, customer was refusing to pay as simply put it didn't work.

Things got nasty and words were bandied so finally customer agreed to pay. A week or so later the PE asked were the payment was as it hadn't been received, and yup suspect you have already worked out, answer was it was entered into SAP, if you want it we suggest you get it working.

Opening up the WinAmp source to all goes badly as owners delete entire repo

Re: Damn Shame

Have you tried Wacup? https://getwacup.com/

Kyndryl follows in IBM's footsteps with rolling layoffs likely affecting thousands

Re: Dangerous

If I self identify as shape shifting lizard alien, am I likely to get an invite to join the balcony group photo?

Long Arms

One of my favourite IBM memories is when the last remaining P-Series engineer at a particular site was benched "well subject of an RA" just before we had a major refresh of my customers estate. New P-Series turned up, I asked my boss who was going to build it he replied with the name of the Indian guy now supporting our P-Series, I explained he had better have long arms as by "build" I meant it is a collection of cardboard boxes piled up in the centre of the room.

If a cheesy '80s flick is a good metaphor for how you run projects, something is wrong

Airplane

During a particularly tricky and long lasting major incident, I was in a round table with the PE, DPE and a couple of IM people, news came in that the agreed fix had achieved nothing useful, I commented "looks like I picked the wrong day to give up heroin", turns out nobody else had seen Airplane and as a result the room went very very quiet.

Windows NT on a whole new platform: PowerMac

Have you thought of turning it into an Amiga?

Wells Fargo fires employees accused of faking keyboard activity to pretend to work

Or go the IBM route.

Generate so much pointless corporate spam that users need to spend 8 hours a day sifting through it for relevant stuff.

No they don't get anything useful done but at least you know they are busy.

Half a kilo of cosmic nuclear fuel reignites NASA's deep space dreams

Re: So how much is 1.5 kg?

But here in the UK, probably cheaper.

Boffins say they can turn typing sounds into text with 95% accuracy

So now

You can find yourself bombarded with adverts for cars after typing that its time for a change within range of an Amazon device? Just need to figure out how to get those adverts to display on my A500 with a HTML only browser.

First attempt by Japan's ispace biz to land on Moon ends in awkward silence

hmmmm

Anyone know if it was wearing a headband?

AmigaOS 3.2.2 released for those feeling nostalgic

My sleepless nights involved being able "or unable to stop" to play through entire levels of Populous as soon as I closed my eyes, think the RSI from several weeks of none stop Populous is still with me.

Global network outage hits Microsoft: Azure, Teams, Outlook all down

Re: The first domino?

Ahh but, I used Notes during a 8 year spell at IBM and do you know how many days it failed to work?

Spooky entanglement revealed between quantum AI and the BBC

Hmmm

So much overlap with what NSA and GCHQ have been doing for the last 75 years, bet they will be early investors just to keep their eyes on things..

‘Precursor malware’ infection may be sign you're about to get ransomware, says startup

Users

Eliminate the odd user who flat out refuses to learn. We had one who got infected 5 times over a 2 year period and this was with a policy in place of blocking attachments and users having to request they be unblocked "obviously there were exceptions on a trusted list". But sadly said user refused to change their behaviour and no doubt is still allowing bad actors into their system, happily though this is a SEP as I moved on years ago.

Conti ransomware gang's source code leaked

Re: Oooh, basement keyboard hackers are playing virtual soldier ! Fear the byte !

Yes you did you invaded Poland.. erm Ukraine.

Intel's mystery Linux muckabout is a dangerous ploy at a dangerous time

Different

It is hard to see how this will be enforced, with software DRM kind of makes sense but for hardware? If I buy a chip it is now mine, if someone figures out how to provide me with a free token to make it better then thats great, I don't see how anyone can complain about what I chose to do with MY chip although I am sure they will try.

Ransomware-hit law firm secures High Court judgment against unknown criminals

Basically

As close to a super injunction as they can get, obviously details of cases involving B list celebs in that data and they don't want the UK press to be able to publish.

Xiaomi builds a robot dog out of smartphone cameras and an Nvidia edge AI board

What vision?

Does it see at a quantum level?

Somebody is destined for somewhere hot, and definitely not Coventry

Re: The Usual Suspects

I lived in Acocks Green, hardly anything I sent that included my address made it through.

Time was

I investigated the logs to see why I wasn't receiving peoples CVs, turns out some genious had enabled a filter to block anything with the word "Sex" in it.

So Age: 25 Sex: Male etc etc was a no no.

All hands on Steam Deck: Fancy a handheld Linux PC that runs Windows apps, sports a custom AMD Zen APU and a touch screen?

Re: So You Think Microsoft Will Let This Slide?

"Hey Microsoft how would you like a couple of million new customers who will each pay you £8 a month plus offer themselvs up for other revenue earning opportunities". "Emn no thanks, we will break their ability to use our services instead". Hmmm doesn't look right to me somehow.

Re: So

Like everything Microsoft they want gamers paying a monthly subscription though, won't take much porting as already available on Windows PCs.

Ahh but, bet you want to fiddle with it under the blankets though!

So

For 50% of the cost of a half decent gaming PC you get a half decent gaming PC that can be used handheld, whats not to like? Suspect Microsoft will have xbox games running on this pretty quickly adding plenty to the proposition.

Re: Sounds interesting...

Yup, headphone jack on front next to a pair of volume buttons.

IBM insiders say CEO Arvind Krishna downplayed impact of email troubles, asked for a week to sort things out

Re: Hurry Krishna

Thumbs up, although you could have added a "Hurry, Hurry".

Free of customers?

When a contract goes out for tender, rarely is it the most expensive that gets the contract, usually it is amongst the cheapest with a reputation for being slightly less crap than those in a similar price bracket. IT companies know this and also know that after a couple of years the majority of customers will be dissatisfied enough to look for someone new to f...up their IT for them.

End result is a constant merry-go-round of customers moving from one badly run service to another. So sadly there will always be enough people looking to change supplier to ensure that even the worst IT services companies will have no shortage of new customers.

Google has second thoughts about cutting cookies, so serves up CHIPs

Was this article written for some other website then re-published by the Reg? Reads like it was written for people from Amish communities or maybe 3rd graders?

Ganja believe it? Police make hash of suspected weed farm raid, pot Bitcoin mine instead

Testing

West Midlands Police have issued a warning that because of the need for extensive testing of the banks of Bitcoin miners, they expect their utility expenses to be much greater than usual next quater, and possibly the quarter after that, and possibly ......

Not keen on a 5G mast in your street? At least it'd be harder for crackpots to burn down 'a flying cell tower in orbit'

How big?

Does your smart kettle need to be to push a signal to a receiver 600KM away?

Backdoored SolarWinds software, linked to US govt hacks, in wide use throughout the British public sector

Re: Yup time to fire off

Thanks, in hindsight I wish I had gone for something like, Nursin Assemy just to leave some room for doubt.

Yup time to fire off

An order for some more natural gas, if you don't mind, thank you very much.

There are two sides to every story, two ends to every cable

Re: Well

You forgot "please close all open windows." phone clunks onto desk, person walks off to do a round of the office.

Where's the mysterious metal monolith today then? Oh look, it's atop a California mountain

Mondelez Advert

I always knew they were evil, but seems they have developed a new way of advertising. Just wait until these things start to rust and turn yellow and all weill be revealed.

China prepares for launch of Chang'e 5 mission to Moon, which would make it third nation to return lunar sample

Waiting for trump to tweet...

China attempts to infect the moon with Covid 19!

Experian vows to drag UK's Information Commissioner's Office to court after being told off for data-slurping practices

Re: So why?

Yes but, this is a little like 500 page T&Cs, nobody reads them so pointless. Unless asked directly "Do you want to opt in to having your data pimped out" then a bank like any other company is on dodgy ground under GDPR.

So why?

Is the IC not going after the banks for passing them our data without our permission in the first place? Oh right, banks are based here, have ex cabinet ministers on their boards and friends in office.