Posts by Tim 11

IBM stock dives after Anthropic points out AI can rewrite COBOL fast

I'm not too sceptical that AI would be a viable tool for migrating away from COBOL, but does that 13% figure really represent the proportion of IBMs business that is COBOL related?

Re: “AI can assess"

"spit out some variation of what it has been given to ingest" - that sounds very like a description of porting to a new environment

I'm no AI fanboy by any means, but COBOL is a pretty dumb and verbose language. Today's AIs should be pretty competent to port the code, including generating automated tests and verifying the new code passes.

The Microsoft 365 Copilot app rebrand was bad, but there are far worse offenders

Worse offenders?

Also don't forget "Sharepoint groove" which was renamed to "Sharepoint offline workspace" and then renamed to "OneDrive for business" (which obviously had nothing in common with OneDrive)

I don't think those other examples like twitter or meta are even in the same ballpark as Microsoft's constant switching of product names.

Rebranding a company happens all the time and is the preserve of the marketing department - everyone says it's stupid and moves on.

Renaming products so that two distinct product sets with different features are now called the same thing causes massive difficulty for users and IT staff, especially when you quietly withdraw one of them.

Re: Don't forget Outlook:

don't forget hotmail has also been renamed to outlook - although you can't access it via outlook.office.com; you have to access it using outlook.live.com (I mean, outlook.office.com will let you log in with your hotmail credentials but will then tell you that you don't have an account)

Everything you know about last week's AWS outage is wrong

it was a software fault, but not in DNS itself; it was in the synchronization of multiple processes trying to update DNS

Re: Keeping it up is hard

This exactly.

As someone who splits their time almost equally between AWS and Azure, It's impossible to overstate the difference in reliability between the two providers.

This also applies to accountability - it's difficult to beleive Microsoft would even be able to diagnose what went wrong, let alone whether they would be prepared to explain that to their customers. The attitude of "if anything goes wrong just try it again and it might work" applies throughout all MS software and services I've used.

Windows 11 is a minefield of micro-aggressions in the shipping lane of progress

Re: Just don't use Windows

As a freelance developer, what moved me back to Windows is that there are some customers with some apps that still aren't 100% portable (asp.net pre-core, PowerApps custom controls, and even excel spreadsheets).

Most of these can be overcome if you're persistent enough but I don't get paid for trying to fix my development environment so I need to spend my time being productive.

If you really need both Windows and unix-like, I think WSL gives the most seamless experience compared to dual-boot, parallels, wine, vmware etc.

Google’s Gemini refuses to play Chess against the mighty Atari 2600 after realizing it can't match ancient console

I tried to use my iPhone 18 to hammer a nail into a piece of wood the other day and it broke. I found my old hammer from 1970 was actually much better at this task. So much for modern technology

Techie fixed a ‘brown monitor’ by closing a door for a doctor

Re: Does not sound like any kind of fix to me

is black a colour at all?

Dev loudly complained about older colleague, who retired not long after

Re: "Why had it taken management so long"

IMHO there's 2 approached to management.

If the job is relatively unskilled or predictable you can have a command-and-control model where the boss is in charge and treats the subordinates as resources.

However if the term members are highly skilled knowledge workers (which should be the case in most IT teams) then the management should be more of an administrative function who's responsibility is to ensure the self-organising team has a clear understanding of the priorities and removes impediments to them working at their most efficient.

Windows intros 365 Link, a black box that does nothing but connect to Microsoft's cloud

If (and that's a big if) it doesn't suffer from all the friction an costs of running a full windows desktop machine, the savings could outweigh the purchase cost

UK govt data people not 'technical,' says ex-Downing St data science head

Re: I'd go further

Most people are interpreting this content to imply that public sector IT is inferior to private sector, but I think that's missing the point.

Bad management and bad IT happens all the time in the private sector, but those companies go bust and the investors lose their money. That's the cross-check feedback loop.

In the public sector that can't happen so we really need to have better skills than in the private sector to stop those projects going bad

The post-quantum cryptography apocalypse will be televised in 10 years, says UK's NCSC

Re: SMS

And email will continue to be completely unreliable and insecure

Oh and your credit card will still have the "secret" cvv code printed on the back

Privacy warriors whip out GDPR after ChatGPT wrongly accuses dad of child murder

This strikes me as being quite similar to the situation with software warranties.

Software in general is so complex with such high probability of bugs that if we forced software manufacturers to warrant that their software was free of defects, they would just pack you and go home.

But such is the usefulness of software when it does work properly, that at the end of the day we all have to take the risk, and build safeguards into society to handle the inevitable failures.

Show top LLMs some code and they'll merrily add in the bugs they saw in training

Re: AI "intelligence"

If you believe "real" people contain some magic secret sauce undetectable by scientists then this may be true. If you believe the mind is synonymous with the brain then you have to accept that it's theoretically possible to build an AI that has the same mental capabilities as a person.

That's not too say that today's AIs are even close. As many have said, they work in a totally different way and are just machines for generating plausible-sounding sentences.

'Uber for nurses' exposes 86K+ medical records, PII in open S3 bucket for months

Microservices mentality

I have seen this in several apps and I believe the microservices mentality plays some part here.

It's trivial to set up a number of separate cloud data stores or APIs accessed through the same SPA, anonymously or with an API key, which encourages people to put all the business logic and permission checking in the front end (often with API keys hard-coded). I'm sure some naïve developers don't realise that even if your app has a login page, access to the underlying data store is not tied to the logged in user.

Designing a secure app is a lot more complicated than that and you'll have to either authenticate every data store and api using the user's credentials, or build a single authenticated API at the back end and funnel all your requests through that.

Naïve Reg hack thinks he can beat Christmas food comas once and for all

Re: Suburban Walking Tips

I've found that on ubran routes, organic maps (other OpenStreetMap apps are available) includes a lot of footpaths missing from Google maps.

The walking route feature is good at avoiding main roads and often taking you down footpaths and through parks, providing nicer surroundings at the cost of not necessarily taking the fastest route.

Guide for the perplexed – Google is no longer the best search engine

The elephant in the room...

.... is that the way advertising will work in the AI world is the AI will adjust the answers it gives depending on who's paying for advertising, and it will be almost impossible to detect the degree to which this is happening.

There will not be a clean differentiation between the search results and the adverts like you get at the moment.

Re: I asked it the question we are asking...

This is the real issue with consumer AI - the most effective way to get adverts out there in an AI scenario is not slapping advert boxes on the side of the search results; it's for the AI to skew its answers based on advertising. For all I know that isn't happening yet but it will do soon, and it will be a lot harder to work around than google's advertising model

AWS says AI could disrupt everything – and hopes it will do just that to Windows

porting legacy .net applications

I'd bet a pound to a penny it won't translate ASP.NET web forms, which is the biggest reason most people are stuck with the legacy .NET framework.

GitHub's boast that Copilot produces high-quality code challenged

What I find it is great for is if you want to do a simple task that you know lots of people have done before but you don't know the syntax or don't know the exact an API. For example "how to get all values from a set in javascript" or "how to generate a presigned URL to upload a file to s3 from python". these are things you could easily work out from the documentation but why bother?

once AI has generated the code and you've tested it, it's usally pretty self-evident whether it's correct.

However it is prone to hallucinations. It once had 10 goes at code to list the allowable keys from a typescript type at runtime before I decided to research and found it was impossible.

Microsoft starts boiling the Copilot frog: It's not a soup you want to drink at any price

I had a really instructive copilot session yesterday when I asked it how to do something in typescript (iterate over the keys of a type). Over the course of our consersation it generated about 10 variations of a function, always taking into account my feedback and trying to fix it. None of them worked at all. I looked on stack overflow and discovered it was not possible to do what I wanted. I didn't have the heart to tell it.

Undergrad thought he had mastered Unix in weeks. Then he discovered rm -rf

what does ~* do?

Can anyone explain that? I could imagine someone might invent a shell where ~* expands into a list of everyone's home directory, but I've never heard of that

The National Museum of Computing reboots Bletchley Park's H Block

Re: Well Worth a Visit!

I went to Bletchley park last year and though I would quickly nip over to the - TNMOC - ended up spending more time in there then Bletchley (though I have been to Blethley before). Their enigma/bombe section was more in depth than Bletchley too.

That hardware will be more reliable if you stop stabbing it all day

if it's not common sense, it's not agile

Broadcom makes VMware Workstation and Fusion free for everyone

VirtualBox is much slower in my experience

I used VirtualBox for a while but switched to VMWare because it seems much faster to me.

However now I've moved to WSL2 which isn't quite a direct comparison, but it uses much less memory than a full VM and meets my needs

I made this network so resilient nothing could possibly go wro...

Re: redundancy and diversity?

the problem with the 'diversity' approach is that if you want a redundant system you usually want it to be identical to the master system in every respect so you have a high degree of confidence that it will work once failed over. If there are significant differences you'd need to re-test the failover every time there was a software or configuration change to any part of the system

Techie took five minutes to fix problem Adobe and Microsoft couldn't solve in two weeks

Re: PITT

I had a problem where Windows had hung so I couldn't use the restart option on the start menu

Every time I pressed the power button it just did a fast start and resumed into the broken state

even holiding down the power button for 4 seconds didn't work because the system had successfully hibernated before the 4 seconds was up

the laptop battery wasn't removable so I couldn't pull the power

IIRC I ended going into the bios setup screen and leaving it there until the battery died. then I could finally get a cold start

AI code helpers just can't stop inventing package names

Re: I am getting very bored of the never ending pitch for LLM's !!!

LLMs can be used in critical situations but only where it's possible for a human to evaluate the output.

Several times I have used LLMs to generate a small snippet of code where it was easier than wading through a load of StackOverflow posts or API documentation (e.g. date formatting in java!!!)

Fujitsu wins spot on £600M framework after vowing to sit out public sector

Is fujutsu really the problem

I'm sure Fujitsu has its problems like any large software development organisation, and maybe they could have done things differently in the Horizon case, but the scandal was down to outright corruption in the Post Office, and a law that let them get away with it, not down to anything within Fujitsu.

Microsoft's Copilot 'Wave 2' is a tsunami of unanswered questions

Other Microsoft 365 services

"...the same security and compliance measures that apply to other Microsoft 365 services would be in effect"

I think we all know what that means :-)

China-linked cyber-spies infect Russian govt, IT sector

Re: Ironic

"The enemy of my enemy..." one of the biggest fallacies ever

Windows 11 is closing the gap on Windows 10

Re: In other news...

yes that was a significant factor in me deciding to stick with windows for my main OS and use wsl2 for most of my development

Nearly 20% of running Microsoft SQL Servers have passed end of support

"...inconsistent approach to backward compatibility"

SQL server is probably the one piece of MS software I have very few criticisms of, and I think they have done an excellent job in backwards compatibility. Even when they made massive changes to the engine in 7 and 2000, they still provided an easy upgrade path

compare this to windows where they regularly delete important features with no regard for users' needs

Fragile Agile development model is a symptom, not a source, of project failure

"My experience is that when allowed to figure it out for themselves, competent people will evolve a system that works quite well for their project. It won't be agile and it won't be waterfall"

As far as I can see, that is exactly Agile.

Lords of May-hem: Seven signs it is Oracle's year end

Re: Year end insanity

In my company we used to get big customers and prospects call us at end-of-year to proactively look for discounted deals. Our response - "actually our numbers for this year are a bit ahead of where we'd like them so if it's OK with you we'd rather slip this deal back a couple of weeks so it goes into the next financial year".

AWS customer faces staggering charges over S3 bucket misfire

Re: This is just one example

yes but for smaller customers there are probably more gains to be had. A number of my customers host web apps on azure for less than $15 per month, and they don't have to employ an admin to configure firewalls or do windows updates

Europe gives TikTok 24 hours to explain 'addictive and toxic' new app

Re: Is social media 'lite' as addictive and toxic as cigarettes 'light'?

This is all very true but I'm concerned by the fact that nowadays we seem to expect other people (even governments and large corporations) to take responsibility for our mental health.

Looking after your own mental health is not only possible; it's primarily your own responsibility and it's probably your biggest responsibility.

75% of enterprise coders will use AI helpers by 2028. We didn't say productively

Re: Maybe for writing tests ?

In the future I can quite imagine an AI would be able to examine the code to identify test conditions and generate a complete set of regression tests.

It couldn't prove the existing code was doing what the user wanted but could ensure nothing got accidentally broken by a bug fix or an update to third-party components or execution environment, which is the main reason we use test automation.

This could apply to end-to-end testing as well as unit tests.

Microsoft forges One Teams App To Rule Them All

Too little too late

The only people still using Teams are those in big corporates and government bureaucracies that only have one account anyway

Meta's pay-or-consent model hides 'massive illegal data processing ops': lawsuit

Re: basically proposing you pay it in order to enjoy your fundamental rights under EU law

I can't imagine EU law does gives you the fundamental right to enjoy any service you like without paying for it.

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

Re: Being polite is great

I would simply have informed them of my consultancy rate and terms for this project

Chrome engine devs experiment with automatic browser micropayments

Re: Good luck

google makes about a quarter of a trillion dollars a year from adverts - $30 per man, woman, and child on this planet. I suspect they make most of their money out of "people like you" (i.e. educated westerners) so $10 per month doesn't seem like an unreasonable estimate

BOFH: Looks like you're writing an email. Fancy telling your colleague to #$%^ off?

"coloured pencil office"

He better not be referring to the software development team...

Fujitsu will not bid for UK.gov business until Post Office inquiry closes

Re: Fushitesu

I'm not defending fijustu for a minute but let's not forget it's not fujistu that wdongly sued and imprisoned innocent people - it was the government that did that.

Artificial intelligence is a liability

Re: Wrong

Glad someone here is talking sense. for AI to be beneficial it doesn't have to be perfect; it doesn't even have to never kill anyone; it only has to be have a better track record than people. In many respects it's already over the line

Doom is 30, and so is Windows NT. How far we haven't come

This was a little later - around '95 I think - I was working for a small but multinational company, having one office in the UK and another in the US. We (in the UK) used to have an after-work deathmatch with the US guys while they were on their lunch break using our E1/T1 lines. It seemed absolutely revolutionary at the time.

Microsoft to intro dedicated mode for Cloud PCs

Re: Windows 365 Boot?

It's not remote desktop - remote desktop is a legacy technology that was around in the 90's and allowed people to do the kind of things they wanted to do in the 90's. Cloud PC is a completely brand new cutting-edge name for the exact same technology which now enables people to handle today's workloads.

Sysadmin's favorite collection of infallible utilities failed … foully

Defragging isn't a big deal anymore

yes partly because disks are faster but mostly because 99% of PCs don't use disks nowadays

Brit borough council apologizes for telling website users to disable HTTPS

A month to renew an SSL cert for a site that's gone offline!‽‽

Now that's what I call bureaucracy