Posts by J.G.Harston

The 'End of 10' is nigh, but don't bury your PC just yet

My home machine *IS* my work machine.

Will ChromeOS respond to SYS RegQueryValueEx or SYS "FindNextFile" or SYS "GetTextFace" or respond to a file access to "directory\directory\name.extn" or execute the Windows applications already have that I use, or execute the Windows applications I write for other people to use?

"Here's some code I've written, I haven't compiled it because I don't have any tools to compile it, and I haven't tested it because it won't run on my computer, that's $400 please."

Tech suppliers asked to support single electronic health record across England

Re: Can we talk to others

Look at the existing systems *HERE* that already work. SystmOne, EMIS, Vision, Melchett (or whatever, memory fading).

A vendor marketing their system as "our product cannot import your new patient's data from the GP they have left" is not going to get any sales.

And suppliers such as TPP (SystemOne), EMIS, Vision, etc. already have existing processes to transfer patient data, as it's a major sales negative to market your software with "this cannot import patients from other systems when your patent transfers from another GP".

If Google is forced to give up Chrome, what happens next?

If the problem is with a search engine company developing and owning a browser, whay are most of the touted options for another search engine to take over the browser?

People find amazing ways to break computers. Cats are even more creative

Re: rotating cat

The Wikipedea article has *THE* cutest animation of a falling cat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falling_cat_problem

Computacenter IT guy let girlfriend into Deutsche Bank server rooms, says fired whistleblower

Hold on, he let his girlfriend *and* his partner into the premises? Methinks there's something more complex going on.

Top sci-fi convention gets an earful from authors after using AI to screen panelists

"stolen without permission"? Is is possible to steal something *with* permission?

808 lines of BBC BASIC and a dream: Arm architecture turns 40

Re: alive and well in the 1980s under Maggie Thatcher

The assembly language, maybe, but the actual instruction set: no. It has loads of bits of "this is useless, swap it out to do something else" rather than leaving it purely orthogonal. Can the 68000 do a move to an immediate? No, it "escapes" out to do something else.

Re: alive and well in the 1980s under Maggie Thatcher

There weren't any ARM 16 bit CPUs. ARM is 32-bit.

Wellll..... you could call the PDP11 a 16-bit ARM. Transistioning from ARM programming to PDP11 felt like I was just programming a smaller version of the same thing. ::)

What the **** did you put in that code? The client thinks it's a cyberattack

Way back when Rubik's cube was a novelty and Regan was still alive, I dug into Dynix (remember that?) and found loads of test error messages. Things like "It's an error Jim, but not as we know it." Somewhere I have a printout of the ones I managed to capture.

起名兒北走向房子

Nationwide power outages knock Spain, Portugal offline

Welcome to your free sample of Net Zero. We hope you enjoyed it, and please remember us when we go full-service.

Techie diagnosed hardware fault by checking customer's coffee

Online Wang museum.....

Microsoft mystery folder fix might need a fix of its own

On many default-configured systems, even standard users can run the same command,

By default, non-Admin have write access to the root??????

America's National Science Foundation tells DEI, misinfo studies: You're fired

Re: Institute for Pure American Physics

And al-cohol.

Mid-East ? That's New York isn't it?

Or do they mean MIDDLE East?

Need a Linux admin? Ask a hair stylist to introduce you to a worried mother

Re: Qualifications

I had a recruiter ask me "what training have you done?" So I reeled off loads of instances of me training people in various operations and processes, all the way back to after-school "cram school" teaching. "No, no..." he interupted. "What training have *you* had?". Well, none. Just 30 years of actually *doing* stuff.

Legacy tech is the gift that keeps billing for UK's tax collector

Please please please don't change the front end. It's clunky, but It. Works. I dread the prospect of some tech-wanker insisting on replacing it with *requiring* taxpayers to install local software to submit returns, or worse an "app".

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

I remember back in the 1990s receiving a regular newsletter (actual real paper!) from Vogon Data Forensics with articles detailing excatly these specific problems and issues surrounding gathering and validating data evidence.

Users hated a new app – maybe so much they filed a fake support call

Or even something more basic such as the postcode.

I've had that sort of stuff.

* "You've just done a Doncaster call, I've got another Doncaster, can you do it?"

* Ok, where is it?

* "DN36....."

* Errr... That's *GRIMSBY*. No, it's not even Grimsby, it's 20 miles *past* Grimsby.

* "The postcode is Doncaster"

There is this obsession with putting things on computers when inappropriate, the prime example being electronic maps.

I need to see 20km of landscape. *AND* I need to see the details visible at 1:50,000 scale. How do you do that on four inches of screen?

OK great, UK is building loads of AI datacenters. How are we going to power that?

Practical matters like being 1 of most expensive energy regions

What the hell? SUBS!!!! ONE!

UK officials insist 'murder prediction tool' algorithms purely abstract

"Instead of throwing money towards developing dodgy and racist AI and algorithms,..."

If reality is racist, refusing to use tools that reveal that racism is going to be futile. Reality gives zero tosses what humans think.

FreeDOS 1.4: Still DOS, still FOSS, more modern than ever

When you are building a widget to control some industrial machinery that will be sealed inside the casing with only a big red "GO" button interfacing to the outside world, WTH do you want to build it with Windows 2792 on it?

Please sir, may we have some Moore? Doesn't look that way

Re: Coders have to code

There is a dire need for efficient coding.

Get that through the head of the recruiters. There is a clear preference to recruit idiots and morons. Being a decent coder makes you unemployable.

Tech trainer taught a course on software he'd never used and didn't own

Re: been on many courses where the trainer has no answers

If Dabbsey was still on staff, I'm sure he'd be joining in with memorable occasions of turning up to run a training course and finding at the last minute it wasn't quite whar he was hired to do and had to learn/bluff his way through :-)

I once turned up for a training course, and discovered they thought I was there to teach it!

Re: been on many courses where the trainer has no answers

Had a lecturer who was only one page ahead of the class. Z80 assembler programming was his subject and I had magazine articles/solutions published on the subject before I went to University.

Similar to my university experience, then. I spent three years wondering when the course would actually get to any of the things I'd already done four or five years previously, and spent most of my time doing my own coding and writing magazine articles. I was continuously telling myself: I'm just a student, these lecturers clearly are wiser than me and know what they're doing, they *must* be because they're the lecturers, I'm just the lowly student, clearly we'll get to some actual real stuff soon.....

Re: been on many courses where the trainer has no answers

he claimed this title via a 2 hour lecturer on a very obscure part of his field (Economics), delivered while facing the blackboard at all times and talking quietly in a monotone.

Bueller? Bueller?

RISC OS Open plots great escape from 32-bit purgatory

Looking at the ARM64 instruction set, I don't think anybody at ARM have even heard of ARM.

Microsoft to mark five decades of Ctrl-Alt-Deleting the competition

Just give me XP with some sort of patch so ReturnOSVersion returns "win12" so that browsers that can respond to websites that refuse to work if the broswer doesn't respond the way they demand will work.

Revenge of the nerds: Teachers, professors sue to undo Trump science funding cuts

Werrlll, when the universities stop using government funding, then the government can stop telling them what to do.

Congress takes another swing at Uncle Sam's software licensing mess

The problem is, so many people don't understand the difference between what buying software has become, and buying anything else. We bought those bookcases and used them in Premises Management, we're going to use them to Contracts Admin instead. We bought that software to use in Premises, OF COURSE we're going use it in Contracts instead.

Microsoft's many Outlooks are confusing users – including its own employees

Why on earth is *Outlook* trying to open any file? If it's a document, the word processor should be opening it, a spreadsheet file the spreadsheet program, an image, an image editor/viewer, a video file, the video player. etc. etc.

4-day work-week pilot due in tech land by early summer

I'm already struggling to get home in time in order to get on with my life, making it even *HARDER* to get home in time after work will cripple my life. Going up to eight hours a day - which, in reality, means 10-14 hours out of the house - to 12-18 hours out of the house, will destroy my life. Leaving home at 9-ish and getting back at 4-ish would be much more sane.

After three weeks of night shifts, very tired techie broke the UK’s phone network

which was indicated by a green light turning red.

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Which was indicated by THE GREEN LIGHT FUCJOING GOIJNG OUT AND THE COMPLETELY DIFFERENT LIFGVHT TURNING OJN!!!!!

wYHO THE FUCK ARE THESE MORONS WHO INSIST ON USING A single INDICATOR TO INDICATE two DIFFERENT STATES??????????

What they have there is "an illiminated light becoming....... an illuminated light".

Oops, they did it again: Microsoft breaks Outlook with another dubious update

The computer in the library doesn't have Thunderbird. My tablet I use at work doesn't have Thunderbird. The PC in my mate's house doesn't have Thunderbird. My smartphone doesn't have Thunderbird. The *entire* *point* of accessing email via web access is accessing email via anything that has a web browser, without needing to have controlling access to the device you're using or even having to have a device that even has the concept of "controlling" it.

I've not been able to get into my parish council emails from home. We don't have the budget to fight this mess, and as you said, there's nothing our IT chappie can do about it because it's the underlying fundaments that's gone titsup. Like demanding the janitor restore the electricity when the substation is on fire.

Names, bank info, and more spills from top sperm bank

Not so impregnable.....

Apple has locked me in the same monopolistic cage Microsoft's built for Windows 10 users

Re: Security & updates

I have a little black&white TV from when I was at university in the 1980s. It lives in my basement, and was fed by coax from the RF out on my cable box. Yes, I had to point the remote up the stairs at an angle to change channels, but it worked. Until last year when the cable box was upgraded to one without an RF out. :(

Re: Let's be honest

It's not "Windows 11 won't work on this hardware", but "I don't care what Windows 11 runs on, Windows XP works perfectly fine on this hardware, and all the applications I need run perfectly fine on this hardware, but out of all my usage needs, *WEBSITES* have become so ****ked up that the only web browsers that can cope with them refuse to run on XP, so I can't do anything web related on it, so am forced to buy a separate system specifically for web stuff, and discover that this secondary system won't let me run my software that runs perfectly fine on my Windows XP system.

Re: Horses for courses

Organee, see?

Re: If you want a general purpose computer ...

But the OS that allows the software I need to run has a built-in timebomb that self destructs at some arbitary point determined by the manufacturer. I still use one PC with Windows XP for PDP11 development because it Just Works(tm). But I can't get a web browser that manages to not crash under the bloat of most websites nowadays to run on it because the self-destruct has been triggered. And the later OSs kill my PDP11 development environment.

Kudos to El Reg, I'm typing this reply on Firefox 53 on WinXP through my firewall and it Just Works. If I just wave Farceberk anywhere near it it dies so hard I have to press the proper hardware reset button.

Glitchy taxi tech blew cover on steamy dispatch dalliance

Re: Hilarious

Shirely the horrendous pain in their ligaments in their hand, wrist, elbow and shoulder when they tried to press the buttons would be some sort of hint they were using it wrong.

Tech jobs are now white-collar trades that need apprentices, not a career crawl

Re: Communication "Preferences"

Yes, I was off for a month over Christmas, and back at work my mind had gone completely blank how to "get into" the asset database, and my notes made no sense. Because I'd omitted the cruicial step: Edge -> Favourites -> Asset system. :p

Re: Communication "Preferences"

Why do you need all 65 options in your setup documentation? Just document the options you need to select.

I'm installing some payment pinpads currently. There are about 30 options that can be configured. But, all I need is:

Menu -> APPADS -> POS Parameters -> POS COM -> Protocol 9 -> USB -> 115,200 -> Yes -> Stop

You're a programmer? Ah, that's "IT". We've got this IT job here, unloading computers from lorries and putting them on desks. Waddaya mean? It's COMPUTERS! That's IT!

Re: Communication "Preferences"

I much prefer documentation that can be condensed to a single page along the lines of:

Site address:

Site code:

Old SN:

New SN:

Log on as Engineer Admin

Install S:\Apps\blah\fubar\thing

Install S:\Apps\blah\thing\wotsit

Install S:\Apps\blah\driver\timmy

Test:

[ ] Sheet Printer [ ] Label Printer [ ] Scanner

Log off

Shutdown -> Restart -> Confirm boot screen

30 pages of document with screenshots filling every page, or even worse VIDEOS - HTF are you supposed to follow them when trying to actually get the actual job done? I usually spend the first week of any job making copious notes and trying to work out what on earth the existing socumentation is actually supposed to mean, and rewriting them properly.