* Posts by JimC

1937 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2007

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

JimC

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.

JimC

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

JimC

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

JimC

How many leavers.

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

JimC

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When your old system is running on antique hardware that's no longer maintained, the software version is no longer supported, and the whole system is hanging on by the skin of its teeth, begrudgingly and minimally assisted by vendors who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

JimC

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.

JimC

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

JimC

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

JimC

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

JimC

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

JimC

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

JimC

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

JimC

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

JimC

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

JimC

|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

JimC

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'

JimC

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

JimC

Hurrah, at last a real death ray!

What else needs saying?

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

JimC

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

JimC

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

JimC

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

JimC

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

JimC

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

JimC

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

JimC

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

JimC

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.

JimC

Re: But there aren't enough brightest and best to go round

And no matter how much money you offer that will still be the case.So the result of 3/4 of the industry offering top quartile salaries is that half the industry is paying top quartile salaries for non-top quartile people, and executive salaries ratchet endlessly upwards.

Getting to the bottom of BMW's pay-as-you-toast subscription failure

JimC

> Sailing boats cheerfully move at 90 degrees to the force on the sails

Well, sort of.

They can only do that because there is another lot of forces on the underwater foils/hull/whatever. That's why sailboats will move just as well in current and no wind as they do in wind and no current.

PEBCAK problem transformed young techie into grizzled cynical sysadmin

JimC

If its easy to get confused between different banking apps

I'm not sure that the user is the only problem here.

IBM shows off its sense of humor in not-so-funny letter leak

JimC

Re: Internal jokes is like helium. Eventually they will escape

Indeed. I once deliberately started a rumour about a daft policy change for amusement, and six weeks later management implemented it...

JimC

Re: Really?

'Packing it in for the day' is legit though.

Bad software destroyed my doctor's memory

JimC

All these comments are interesting in the light of

The often heard mantra that business processes should be adapted to fit off the shelf packages rather than vice versa.

Digital revolution at HMRC left 99,000 UK taxpayers on hold over five-day fiasco

JimC

Wish I could do it on line, but I don't have any of the official forms of I'd so it won't let me sign up.

Microsoft whips up unrest after revealing Azure AD name change

JimC

Re: what font...

Actually I submit that makes a lot more sense than much marketing b******s. The appearance of documents is a big part of the presentation, and a rag bag of different styles doesn't look great. And besides (to repeat a cliche I think overused) it does mean departments are prohibited from using comic sans. Incidentally I've seen incidences of a company mandating a single font on all its public facing documents as early as the 1920s!

Crook who stole $23m+ in YouTube song royalties gets five years behind bars

JimC

It doesn't mean that royalties are going "straight into the pockets of the streaming services".

So where do you think money that would otherwise be paid as royalties is going?

Europe's largest city council runs parallel systems to cover Oracle rollout mess

JimC

Re: The right question

Not only that, but the out of the box functionality tends to be simplistic and lowest common denominator. It all sounds so logical to alter the processes to fit the package, and our old friend Pareto suggests we can get 80% working just fine for moderate effort.

But then comes the fly in the ointment. The system has to deliver 100% of the business. Especially with local government where pretty much everything is mandated and has to be delivered. In the private sector if something is expensive and unprofitable you can sell it off cheap or in extreme cases just stop doing it. For the LA that just isn't an option. So much as the management consultants who trousered a huge consultancy fee for telling you to use Oracle/SAP/whatever out of the box might say its unnecessary, out in the real world there's no choice.

The other issue is that the existing system is full of issues where it handles things badly. Those issues are known about, understood, and there are ad hoc procedures to work around those problems. When it's ripped out and replaced you get a whole new set of issues, and all those have to be identified, understood, and new ad hoc procedures worked out.

Damned if I know what the solution is though!

Open source licenses need to leave the 1980s and evolve to deal with AI

JimC

Re: Let us hope that we can ignore licensing

Yep, it seems to me the only code that can legitimately be used for this game is actual public domain. But there's probably not enough of that to make it viable, so like many before they just steal.

Techie wasn't being paid, until he taught HR a lesson

JimC

Re: Unique keys

Names are a bloody nightmare. In the wilder shores of say social services you have clients who have multiple names for fraud, multiple names because they are trying to hide from abusers and other bad guys, multiple names because they are abusers and bad guys, multiple names for living multiple lives, multiple names as a symptom of metal health issues, multiple names because they just fancy it... When you've been there and see it in action its easy to understand why bureaucrats are so damn keen on ID cards and the like: its not so much some conspiracy to control the people, its much more that having a genuine validated unique key would make things so much easier. I suspect that they tend to underestimate how well the bad actors would be able to compromise an ID system, but I guess they figure that even a partial improvement would be worthwhile.

Time running out for crew of missing Titanic tourist submarine

JimC

> the submersible has bobbed to the surface undetected and miles from anywhere

But in that case the inevitable result of opening the hatch is that waves break over the submersible and it fills with water and sinks within minutes at best. A craft capable of surviving the open ocean is way more complex, larger and expensive. More of a submarine really. Or you could design a separate ventilation system that can survive the surface, in which case you have further compromises to your pressure vessel and increased risk of explosion.

JimC

Re: Most carbon fibre I've seen has had a weave,

Woven cloth is a convenience with a slight strength penalty. Its utterly normal for high end construction to have individual fibres oriented for the design loads.

Cunningly camouflaged cable routed around WAN-sized hole in project budget

JimC

The IT risks of gardeners...

Been there. Somehow failed to put "the Gardeners" on my list of potential service risks...

BOFH: Get me a new data file or your manager finds out exactly what you think of him

JimC

Re: What you're missing is that they're _right_.

Well of course they're right. But knowing that doesn't help.

In order to improve things I need to know what are the many crap things about their IT working environment, and then work out which are low hanging fruit that we can readily improve at a cost management will pay for. OK, maybe in an ideal world I would sit in the same office as these folks for a fortnight, do their IT training, do the same work as them, and inform myself of what improvements can be made. In practice though I don't have the training or ability to do their job, and there may be security/confidentiality issues that mean its undesirable for an IT geek to be parachuted in for a fortnight. So I'm dependant on the users to tell me what's wrong and to do so in a manner I can understand. And if they just wish the f*****g computers would go away and let them get on with sorting out people's lives then they're probably not going to be able to tell me what I need to know. All too often, even if you do get something its either bleedin' obvious but difficult ('I'd like the computers to log in twice as fast in the morning" "So would I, and believe me we've worked at it") or pointless ("If only we had Office 2021 instead of Office 2019 I'd be able to do, well, exactly the same stuff pretty much exactly the same way").

JimC

Re: would resist any change to get it removed,

Yep. Because these are people who are doing their jobs, have not the slightest interest in the tech or probably even the process, and from their point of view all you are doing is making their lives more difficult for no good reason. Its especially an issue with staff in people facing jobs, because what they care about is the people and the interactions, not the software and the administration overheads. It is immensely frustrating, especially when you go around asking what you can do to make their IT more efficient and more helpful, and they don't give a damn about any of that, and have no interest at all in spending time thinking about whether there might be better ways of doing things.

Virgin Galactic flies final test before opening for business

JimC

Re: Astronaut?

because if they don't use the word astronaut even fewer people will shell out all that cash for their 5 minutes of floating...

Windows XP activation algorithm cracked, keygen now works on Linux

JimC

Telephone activation does indeed still work. Used it this year when I reinstalled the XP VM that I use to drive my scanner. (Damned if I'm going to chuck a perfectly good scanner just because there are no current drivers.).

Nearly 1 in 5 academics admit close encounters of the anomalous kind

JimC

Re: UAPs, previously known as UFOs

Dunno, I think there's sense in UAP as a phrase. Flying implies a physical thing, so for that matter does object, Aerial phenomenom covers mirages, optical illusions, and doesn't make the presumption there's actually something there.

Electric two-wheelers are set to scoot past EVs in road race

JimC

Re: What do these give you that an electric bicycle does not?

Better brakes.

EU legislates disclosure of copyright data used to train AI

JimC

it's simply who has the better lawyers,

Which is why rights societies like ASCAP and the RIAA are so essential for the ordinary folk like us, and why the likes of Google have been so keen to fund the useful idiots who seek to undermine them.

South Korea prosecutes Terraform Labs co-founder Daniel Shin

JimC

The difference is...

There's a difference between something that might have worked but didn't, which is risk, and something that never could have worked, and the organiser knew it, which is fraud.

Admittedly the line between is awfully blurred, to say the least, with crypto currency, where it appears many of the proponents so naive and so full of self deceiving belief in their own bull**** that its hard to see where stupidity stops and fraud starts.

Ex-CIO must pay £81k over Total Shambles Bank migration

JimC

Re: Do you know what "nemesis" means?

Hubris rather than nemesis don't you think?