Posts by JimC

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

Re: Menai Straight Bridges

This doesn't in any way invalidate your point, but pedantically there are two bridges over the Menai Strait, and neither were designed by Brunel.

Thomas Telford’s Menai Suspension road bridge opened in 1826 and the Britannia Bridge, once rail only and now road and rail, opened in 1850, a box-girder design by William Fairbairn and Robert Stephenson.

https://www.visitanglesey.co.uk/en-gb/explore/towns/menai-bridge

Brunel of course designed many fine bridges, the Royal Albert over the Tamar and Clifton Suspension bridges being among the best known, and many of them are still in use. Its probable though that most older bridges have been appreciably upgraded over the decades, if for no other reason than loads are far greater than they used to be.

Techie left 'For support, contact me' sign on a server. Twenty years later, someone did

After digging out an old utility

and modifying it for a new job, my PFY looked at the code and said "when you wrote that I was in primary school". He seems to be a significant player in AWS now, but nearly didn't survive that day... And mate, if you're reading this I reckon you're pretty much as old now as I was then. How are your PFYs?

The open secret of open washing – why companies pretend to be open source

Re: MIT, BSD, etc... freer than GPL ...thanks to years of large tech companies

Not at all. When I've put my trivial bits of code out with an NCSA license its as a pay forward in recognition of all the developers who've put sample code out there for me to learn from. I'm not concerned with end user freedom to study, share or modify. Apart from anything else I'm well aware that 99% plus of them neither wish or are able to take advantage of that highly notional freedom. What I am concerned about is the freedom for other developers to take it and use it without having to worry too much about licenses.

Re: Not a universal definition

The statement is reasonable. GPL places restrictions on how the source code can be taken and modified that are not present in the more open licenses. Whether that is good or bad depends entirely on your viewpoint. The people that GPL doesn't want are those who develop software that can not or will not be licensed under GPL.

> relatively recent phenomenon

I study the history of railways in the UK, and from my reading its quite evident that outright lies and dishonesty were just as prevalent two hundred years ago as they are now. Probably worse back then actually, with so much less regulation.

A nice cup of tea rewired the datacenter and got things working again

Re: Yep, rush at your peril...

I used to work on a Novell Directory Services installation with in excess of a hundred servers. If there was a serious problem to fix it was vital not to rush, since the databases needed time to sync up after making changes. So when there was a big fix to do I used to bring in a book, and stop and read a chapter when the directory needed to be left in peace to do its processing. Impatience was always an enemy with NDS, and reading the book took away the psychological pressure to do something when it was better to wait.

NASA will fly Boeing Starliner crew home with SpaceX, Calamity Capsule deemed too risky

Re: Billionaires only do things for money

And fame and ego. Especially ego. Never underestimate a billionaire's ego.

Brit tech mogul Mike Lynch missing after yacht sinks off Sicily amid storms

Re: the mast

> You can't send a boat to the bottom due to windage on bare poles in flat seas,

You reckon? Elsewhere someone posted a video of a vicious storm event which included a big yacht being blown onto her beam ends. and in a harbour.

WordStar 7, the last ever DOS version, is re-released for free

Re: As has been hinted at but not explicitly mentioned (unless I missed it) ....

And I for one can't remember a code editor I liked better then Wordstar. Especially the ability to move copy and paste blocks rather than lines, which I was particularly fond of. And most of all, of course, never having to take hands off the keyboard to grab the damned mouse.

Stop installing that software – you may have just died

Re: what happens when people who shouldn't have power

In my experience its more what happens when people who aren't chosen for independent thinking and initiative (not generally desirable attributes in a security guard) are given totally inadequate briefing and instructions.

I had a fair sized run in with a security guard at a past employer who threatened me with physical violence when I wouldn't leave the building with the job half finished and potentially hundreds unable to work on Monday morning. The company had just abandoned having a 24 hour security presence and his idiot management hadn't given their security guard any clues as to what to do with an emergency. I passed up through my line management that I felt the problem was entirely due to his line management and that I felt no blame attached to the security man. Thereafter we were good mates, which was pretty damn useful at times.

Breaking the rules is in Big Tech's blood – now it's time to break the habit

killing music...

We should note that the successive waves of piracy and streaming have indeed pretty much killed music.

Tech luminaries warn United Nations its Digital Compact risks doing more harm than good

Hmmm, technically the tech led approach has worked brilliantly but...

We have also created arguably the most avaricious and exploitative mega corporations of all time and a paradise for criminals and misinformers.

I stumbled upon LLM Kryptonite – and no one wants to fix this model-breaking bug

Re: ... best computer language would be to use the English language?

Grace Hopper for one. That was the idea behind Cobol.

UK government faces £17.5M shortfall from UKCloud liquidation

Re: Weren't they the cheapest bid?

Well of course they were. That's procurement rules. You have to go with the cheapest bid unless you can demonstrate that its not going to work.

Yes but:...

That's exactly what you pay a consultant for. A good consultant finds out what's going on from the people who know, takes the good ideas, discards the bad ones, and presents a complete package to senior management in a form they can understand.

If Britain is so bothered by China, why do these .gov.uk sites use Chinese ad brokers?

Re: braindead

Gets you out of the house, active and meeting people, plus making a contribution to the community by helping keep the library open. For folk who are not employed its not obviously worse than lying on the sofa watching Netflix reruns.

Re: my local library there are literally more people to say hello at the entrance

Wouldn't be surprising if they are volunteers. At least some UK library services recruit volunteers, and saying hello at the entrance is a suitably low skilled task.

UK county council misses deadline for £7.3M RISE with SAP system launch

> few, if any, people in local councils who can actually grasp the complexity

And, as is painfully obvious from the naive comments every time this comes up, no-one out of councils either. The typical local authority is probably an order of magnitude more complex than any business.

Sleuths who cracked Zodiac Killer's cipher thank the crowd

> pronunciation hieroglyphics

Sudden vision of someone converting a message to pronunciation glyphs before encoding it...

> odd spelling from a language pronounced quite differently

Plus current english pronunciation is quite different to what it was when the spelling started to be standardised.

Local councils struggle with ill-fitting software despite spending billions with suppliers

Anyone with a brain would provide a single, central, authoritative system

"OK, so here's the situation.You have to write a software system for 317 clients."

- "What 317 different customers? Can I just resign instead?"

"Oh Sorry, that's a bit misleading. There are lot more customers than that, 317 end user departments, 317 IT departments all with different compatibility requirements, 317 finance departments and 317 chief executive's offices."

- "I think I have to go on sick leave..."

Re: Problems and solutions not welcome

Very much so.

And consider it from the point of view of the end user department who considers the IT system a necessary evil that gets in the way of delivering the service:

"OK, let me understand this. You want to take away the system we have, and which pretty much works and whose numerous flaws we know how to deal with. You want to replace it for no good reason (the supplier doesn't want to support it any more is a not a good reason in our book) with a new system. You want to run this system as it comes, which means that we're going to have to adapt all our working practices and so on in order to cope with the things it can't do. We're going to have to retrain all our staff, taking them off actually delivering a service to the public. No doubt the changeover period will be full of bugs and disruption and problems, not to mention all the effort in trying to figure out how to make it do what needs doing. And for all this disruption, loss of productivity, focus, compromised public service etc, the gross benefit to the public is going to be pretty much exactly nothing. You want us to find some enthusiastic people to help you implement this unnecessary change who are going to be taken off the work they like and were employed to do. Do you understand why we might not see this as a good thing?"

BOFH: So you want more boardroom tech that no one knows how to use

But surely...

The BOFH missed a trick here. Bearing in mind a conference room filled with top of the range gear none of the users are capable of using, then isn't the correct response is to accept a large budget, and spend none of it (except perhaps a can of spray polish) in the conference room? Shuffle a few bits of kit about and remove the dust, and noone is going to know the difference.

UK council won't say whether two-week 'cyber incident' impacted resident data

Pilots have an axiom for emergencies:

Aviate, Navigate, Communicate.

Where do you suppose talking to the press comes on that list?

Work for you? Again? After you lied about the job and stole my stuff? No thanks

Re: Norse gods

When I worked for a local authority, although all internal stuff had boring but meaningful code names, we decided we wanted something more obscure for external facing devices, so everything on the DMZ was named after villages in our territory. The particular advantage was so many unique names, although we avoided anything long and hyphenated.

Re: Ah, Joy

Grief, that reminds me of a boss I had who'd ambush his staff in a team meeting with unexpected questions and if he didn't like the answer would ask exactly the same question again. Whilst I like to think I have pretty good tolerance for ignorance and well meaning fools, I am not so great with deliberate idiocy, and in those days I had only been in IT and offices for a very few years, having spent the beginning of my working life in, shall we say, much more robust environments. Consequently this particular form of idiocy rather lit a fuse that was a lot shorter in those days, and I fear I tended to respond to the same question repeated with the same answer, but much louder. Apparently, for the few months this doomed working relationship lasted, our team meetings were rather legendary in the organisation!

Tesla's Cybertruck may not be so stainless after all

Re: It's 301 stainless apparently

And wait until crevice corrosion gets in the mix, especially with road salt.

Unit4 software's budget bungle leaves schools counting the cost

How many leavers.

It is, I believe, the biggest payroll in South East England.

if you've got something that works, why do you replace it

When your old system is running on antique hardware that's no longer maintained, the software version is no longer supported, and the whole system is hanging on by the skin of its teeth, begrudgingly and minimally assisted by vendors who are only really interested in having you replace it, and you really don't have any choice but to spend a damn fortune you'd much rather spend on education or social care or something else that actually helps people.

Whether to move off Oracle is the $100M+ question for Europe's largest public body

Re: an organisation should modify its business processes to conform with the vanilla package.

At least that's what IT people are taught. The rest of the world tends to think of that as arrogance, inflexibility and incompetence, and a complete reversal of all logic.

Well, if you knows of a better 'ole...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Bairnsfather#/media/File:Well,_if_you_know_of_a_better_'ole,_go_to_it.jpg

One person's shortcut was another's long road to panic

Re: If you share you password with me...

Yes its appalling practice. But in the days before widespread remote management it was also mightily convenient, especially as its also appalling practice for first and second line IT support to have admin access. The temptation was always there, and less IT aware management would often approve doing it, no matter how much the likes of people like me objected on principle. I'm moderately surprised it still happens though because now there are alternatives.

The rise and fall of the standard user interface

Re: This far down in the comments

Personally I claim that there is yet to be a really good Windows Word processor.

The 'nothing-happened' Y2K bug – how the IT industry worked overtime to save world's computers

It was complicated... I was confident all the systems I was responsible for stored dates in suitable fields, and the worst I was going to run into were display problems, but there's always the niggling concern: suppose I tell the management there's absolutely nothing to worry about and something comes out of left field. So we did a lot of what turned out to be unnecessary stuff. But you know, it was insurance, and that's the nature of insurance. You pay a lot of premiums and seem to get nothing in return.

Nearly 200 Boeing 737 MAX 9 airplanes grounded after door plug flies off mid-flight

Re: " a trust of the people involved "

But of course you're putting a similar level of trust on everyone around you on the road, and with even less justification.

Ransomware payment ban: Wrong idea at the wrong time

Another approach

Might be to consider an attack on critical infrastructure a national emergency, and have government level resources to help for organisations to recover. Given sufficient resources recovery from ransomware attacks in a reasonable space of time ought not be too difficult, but of course your average hospital, power company, whatever hasn't got any such capability, nor the money to buy iit in. Maybe there should be recovery capability at national level. We consider police and defence to be national priorities to be funded out of taxation, is it time to consider whether ransomware recovery should be similarly funded?

Artificial intelligence is a liability

AI Spam...

Saw my first AI assisted spam post today on a forum I frequent. Standard link spam, except that the content was relevant to the topic discussion to an extent a human unversed in the topic would be unable to manage.

Cloud engineer wreaks havoc on bank network after getting fired

Re: Credentials after leaving

I happened today to come across the email I wrote after leaving my employer of many years listing all the accounts and passwords I had that should be deleted/changed. I have no idea whether they did though, never tried knocking on the door.

Bank's datacenter died after travelling back in time to 1970

|Solidarity

In far off days before a good number of you were born, payroll for a large organisation (and this was a very large payroll, one of the biggest in SE England) was done by running a batch program which took some hours and generated a computer tape (yes, one of those big reels beloved of old school SF films). The tape was then couriered off to the bank, and the bank would process the tape which would make all the payments to the right accounts. Usually.

This was not to be a good day. There was a problem with the output, which was thought resolved by editing the tape. Tape went off to the bank. There was a further problem and more editing, but eventually the tape was run. And it made all the payments. Into a single building society account. This was spotted, and the building society stopped the money actually appearing in the lucky person's account. However they refused to actually return the money until all the i's and t's had been dotted and crossed, which I suppose is not unreasonable with the sums involved.

Trouble was everyone needed to be paid on time, so my late employer had to borrow the money for the entire payroll until they got the original money back. The interest payments on such a large sum were appreciable, and it was reckoned to have been the most expensive ICT cockup in the organisation's history. There was a big post mortem, but it allegedly failed to find out where the fault lay. I always believed that the technical staff on both sides very deliberately failed to find out where to pin the blame in case it was their side!

What's the golden age of online services? Well, now doesn't suck

CIX confusion.

Think you've got your CIX muddled up. CIX - Compulink information Exchange UK with Ameol etc (which still exists) was then a vague equivaent to Compuserve, but UK based. originally one would sign onto CIX with a modem,

CIX - Commercial Internet exchange AIUI was a US initiative to bypass US state control of the nascent Internet.

EU lawmakers scolded for concealing identities of privacy-busting content-scanning 'experts'

Re: Stupid see, stupid do

And technically he's right. You don't get prosecuted in Australia (or anywhere else) for breaking the laws of maths or physics.

We're getting that fry-day feeling... US Army gets hold of drone-cooking microwave rig

Hurrah, at last a real death ray!

What else needs saying?

FTX crypto-villain Sam Bankman-Fried convicted on all charges

Re: Given how much most politicians know about tech,

Well maybe, but, especially in this context let's note how useful 'crypto experts' discussing the finer points of digital currency have been, or for that matter how much use the majority of financial experts were in the lead up to the banking crash.

No-one can be expert in everything, and in our political system politicians move around between utterly different roles so often that most probably they can't be expert in anything. My own argument is that the key skill a politician needs is the ability to spot bull***t and know which people to listen to. To what extent they have that ability is of course debatable. One thing's for certain though, there's no shortage of self appointed 'experts' queueing up in front of them, not to mention the dangerous phenomenon of activists who claim to be experts, but who are always going to, quite possibly unknowingly, present dogma as fact..

It is 20 years since the last commercial flight of Concorde

but without Airbus's support,

> Virgin Atlantic founder Richard Branson offered to snap up the retired aircraft, but without Airbus's support, it is difficult to see how long Concorde could have continued operating.

Au contraire. Its very easy to see. Without manufacturer support it wouldn't be allowed to fly *at all*. Full stop. Branson was just publicity hunting.

AIUI BA were still making a profit on Concorde, and didn't want to stop flying it. Air France were not, so it doesn't take much of a conspiracy theorist to suggest that Gallic pride would provide a motive for Airbus to remove support. I imagine, too, now I think of it, that if BA would have been required to pick up Air France's half of the support costs then the economics of continuing to fly the aircraft would have been severely compromised at the very least.

Buyer's remorse haunts 3 in 5 business software purchases

Compulsory Purchase?

One wonders how many of the regretted software purchases were voluntary and how many were forced because the current installation had become unsupported.

I do have one memory though. I was (unusually) put on the group to visit a reference site for some piece of software, I forget what. When the vendor rep was out of the room for a minute I popped what I thought was the obvious and vital question: "OK, with the full benefit of hindsight, would you buy this product again?" My colleagues were horrified, and told me I shouldn't put them on the spot like that. "Why not?", I said, "its what we're here to find out isn't it?". Apparently not, and I was very rarely asked to go on such visits again!

Excel Hell II: If the sickness can't be fixed, it must be contained

A bad workman blames his tools.

And a good workman has and uses the right tools for each job.

One door opens, another one closes, and this one kills a mainframe

Re: Tech support call

I once saw water 6 inches deep in a machine room false floor after an air conditioning fault (ie major water leak). Everything was running normally with all the power connectors and many data connecters under water. So we pumped all the water out, and got a big hot air blower to dry the space out, which really put some stress on the newly repaired aircon. It was, IIRC, winter thank goodness so we could have all the doors open.

Hell no, we won’t pay, says Microsoft as Uncle Sam sends $29B bill for back taxes

Re: Relying on KPMG - really?

A fine example. It looks as if KPMG's auditors reported exactly what the Carillion execs and directors wanted them to report, which is of course how you get your contract renewed. A trial starts soon to investigate the behaviour of said execs and directors, after which presumably one may be more forthright about their honesty - or otherwise - during the affair.

AI girlfriend encouraged man to attempt crossbow assassination of Queen

Re: You are responsible for stupid/bad shit you do

Mmm, but there are people who are, through mental illness or capacity, judged not to be legally responsible.

Oracle at Europe's largest council didn't foresee bankruptcy

Re: Standard Functionality.

Pareto - standard functionality does 80% of the job for 20% of the cost.

But the problem is that the other 20% still has to be done. And as I often said, "its the detail where you fail". Every strategy plan looks just fine - and probably is until you hit the exceptions and the problematic cases.