Posts by Primus Secundus Tertius

Automatic UK-to-US English converter produced amazing mistakes by the vanload

Re: Surely simpler to stick with correct English

Like wot we does, surely.

Boffins warn that AI paper mills are swamping science with garbage studies

Re: Way Back...

The coin laundry I use is a very healthy place. No dyeing allowed.

Other AI

The other form of AI is the substandard student to be found at so many universities.

Marks & Spencer admits cybercrooks made off with customer info

Re: as a regular customer ...

I am one of those customers who rummage at the back for new stock. I refuse to buy end-of-life items, I will find something else instead. So put the new stuff up when you get it, please.

Unending ransomware attacks are a symptom, not the sickness

Conferences not needed

It does not need conferences or other bullsh*tting events to sort these problems. What it does need is for shareholders to accept lower dividends provided that the money is spent on doing the computing properly.

The Telegraph jumps the gun on World War III

Re: Torygraph, schmoreygraph

It is about time it was taken over by some competent foreigners. Even a pro-islamic bias would be no worse than the insistent christianity of the catholic telegraph.

30 percent of some Microsoft code now written by AI - especially the new stuff

Feeble Point

I cannot understand why the trade press burbles on about Power Point. The programs I use, in order of importance, are One Note, Word, and Excel.

Re: Number game bullshit

The software industry is already upside down. Why do they have to keep patching the rubbish product. I am glad I don't have to patch my car every year or more.

The State of Open Source in 2025? Honestly, it's a mess but you knew that already

Re: Motivations

Refreshing common sense in your point 2. I have upvoted.

Nationwide power outages knock Spain, Portugal offline

Not battery storage. Diesel storage for generating power.

As ChatGPT scores B- in engineering, professors scramble to update courses

Devilish thinking

As Ambrose Bierce almost put it in his Devil's Dictionary: ChatGPT: that with which we think we think.

Official abuse of state security has always been bad, now it's horrifying

Some secrecy needed

It is all very well to whinge about secrecy, but Britain and other countries do have their enemies, you know.

Having said that, we don't want secrecy abused. In the last resort, vote against them - if you think your vote is secret.

One of the last of Bletchley Park's quiet heroes, Betty Webb, dies at 101

The silent ones

As a child, I noticed that my father said very little about World War 2, where he had been in the Navy as a 'radar technician'. When I grew up and my own career became subject to the Official Secrets Act, I began to understand why.

Towards the end of his life, he told me had worked as a technician in the group led by Prof. R V Jones, developing scientific devices to win the war. He told me one or two things, but I am sure there is a lot I do not know.

Writing for humans? Perhaps in future we'll write specifically for AI – and be paid for it

I look forward to the day that AI techniques become public knowledge, easily found in textbooks or online, as opposed to proprietary trade secrets.

GCHQ intern took top secret spy tool home, now faces prison

Re: Disquieting features

When I once went to GCHQ for an interview, I had to leave my mobile at the gatehouse.

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

Happy as Larry

The front page has a picture over the headline to this report. It shows Larry the Cat sitting outside No. 10.

I suggest Larry knows more about tech than most of our civil servants and politicians.

British govt wants to mainline AI, but its arteries are clogged with legacy tech

Poor data

I do believe your comment about poor data quality. I have inherited various databases over the years. Each contained records with many minor variations, depending on who actually put in the data. As a result, it was not possible to get consistent database reports until I had cleansed the data.

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

Re: It's not a problem

If you're looking for adventure of a new and different kind

And you come across an AI that is similarly inclined...

Brit supermarket finds breaking up is hard to do as Walmart-Asda divorce stretches into fourth year

Misnomer

"retail entrepreneurs Mohsin and Zuber Issa"

Wide boys, more like it.

$16B health dept managed finances with single Excel spreadsheet. It hasn’t gone well

Excel-lent work

Spreadsheets are fine if you know what you are doing. But then they get handed over to clerical staff ...

Also they are a pain for quality assurance and auditors, as they are so easily altered with no record of what was done.

Microsoft tells abandoned Publisher fans to just use Word and hope for the best

Using Word, I was preparing an index of a book with many names: John Smith, Dave Evans, Sean Lafferty, etc. The Word indexer duly picked up the names as John Smith etc. Then a librarian colleague pointed out that names are conventionally indexed as Smith, John; Evans, Dave; and Lafferty, Sean.

Re: Scribus?

In my experience, Scribus fails to handle tables.

I have produced whole books in Word. It works well if you use themes and styles consistently. You can create a table of contents automatically.

The only advantage I ever found in Publisher was that it had more pdf options.

C++ creator calls for help to defend programming language from 'serious attacks'

Re: Speed of Transition

"What could such a plan be?"

How about educating programmers in what lists, pointers, and stacks are really about?

Governments can't seem to stop asking for secret backdoors

Re: Most of my comms I don't give monkey's

Everyone knows the Romans actually spoke English. The Latin language was simply a code to stop the English-speaking barbarians from knowing what the Roman army was up to. The Caesar cypher, they called it.

Time to make C the COBOL of this century

Real programming

C is for real programmers, not for wimps. We need more real programmers, rather than the wimps who proliferate today with all their half thought out bungled pseudo-systems.

Tesla sales crash in Europe, UK. We can only wonder why

What people really want

No ordinary person wants to buy an electric car. Their huge, heavy batteries make them an engineering nonsense.

Meanwhile, people cannot buy the petrol cars they want because the makers cannot sell enough electric cars to meet government rules on the ratio of petrol to electric.

It is time we had some real democracy, with the government responding to what people actually want.

Why users still couldn't care less about Windows 11

Who cares about the OS

I use computers for their office software and for internet browsing and email. The operating system should be something in the background that can be taken for granted. I see no reason for updating to Windows 11 except for the aggravation from Microsoft.

Microsoft vet laments a world where even toothbrushes need reboots

Programmers not very good

In my career as a programmer, I felt that many of my colleagues were not very good. Management made that worse by their drive to get it sold rather than get it right. I fear for a future where AI writes and tests software.

Bring back flowcharts - the two dimensional analysis of the logic.

Trump nukes 60 years of anti-discrimination rules for federal contractors

Re: Next up....

Henry Ford had the right idea: "History is bunk".

'Savvy' shortcuts produce near-instant speech-to-speech translation of 36 languages

Re: There is hope

The Romans just insisted that the barbarians should use Latin.

No worse than humans

"The tool also struggles in many situations that humans handle with relative ease"

You are exaggerating human abilities here. Very likely the tool is no worse than the average (as opposed to the best) human.

Google thinks the grid can't support AI, so it's spending on solar for future datacenters

Large areas

Raw sunlight is rated at about 1.4KW per square metre. So electricity output from a solar cell will be about 100W per square metre. A gigawatt will require 10,000,000 square metres; say 3,000 by 3,000. More than that when you allow units to be spaced out so maintenance, e.g. dusting, can be done.

So a lot of cabling required within the power station, presumably located in one of the US deserts; and a lot of cable back to a US city.

British boffins build diamond battery capable of working for a millennium or five

Low power

Clever stuff but: other reports quote the power output as microwatts. That should be quoted here.

BOFH: Don't threaten us with a good time – ensure it

Re: Brilliant

My user account has a user name PASSWORD and a password that is USERNAME.

UK sleep experts say it's time to kill daylight saving for good

Clock Embuggerance Day is a relic from 1914, when THEY thought that WE should be made to get up earlier to get to work. They also stopped us drinking at all hours.

The drink restrictions finally ended in the 1990s in England (in the 1980s in Scotland). It is time Clock Embuggerance Day ended.

Re: I disagree

1. If you want to get up early please yourself. But don't expect me to agree.

2. In the winter it means two hours of darkness better spent in bed.

Microsoft teases latest Windows 10 build despite looming end

Tw(X)itter

"X, the platform formerly known as Twitter"

It is time to end that dreadful circumlocution. It is Xitter, pronounced with an initial 'sh'.

Embattled users worn down by privacy options? Let them eat code

Cookies not needed

The original excuse for cookies was that computers were too small for the website owner to store details of 100,000 users. That is no longer the case.

Therefore the reason for cookies has gone, and cookies should simply be banned.

Brits hate how big tech handles their data, but can't be bothered to do much about it

Compulive cookie clearer

I am a compulsive cookie clearer; I do it when moving from one website to another. I do not want each website to know what else I have been reading. The downside is that I then have to tell each website: no, stuff your cookies up your posterior. I wish the default was always no cookies.

Extracting vendor promises won't fix cybersecurity. Extracting teeth might

You gotta pay for it

It is easy for customers and outsiders to say that software should be properly secure. But the vendors are entitled to reply that if you want it, you gotta pay for it. I remember a government department suggesting to us that we could make it cheaper if we skipped the ISO 9000 paperwork.

CISA boss: Makers of insecure software must stop enabling today's cyber villains

Re: Bullshit

It was always my impression that many of my programmer colleagues never properly understood lists, pointers, stacks, or heaps.

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

Re: That Z80 rig was state of the art.

I had an Amstrad/Locoscript word processor (Z80 based) and added a 10MB hard disk to it. It also ran Arnor/Protext (an alternative word processor), and a Pascal compiler.

China's top Office clone copies Microsoft again – with an inconvenient outage

Re: Non-Microsoft?

Answer: Libre Office Sheet (have I got the right vowel there?).

Juice probe scores epic fuel save after snapping selfies with Earth and Moon

Re: If we had the power

Apparently the universe started expanding more rapidly about five billion years ago. Someone got there before us.

If we had the power

If we had the power, we would just fly straight there. These intricate manoeuvres show just how feeble we are in planetary terms.

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

Re: I personally hated WordStar...

So who were the comedians, then?

Gladstone and Disraeli?

Jimmy Savile and Huw Edwards?

Arthur and Merlin?

Antony and Cleopatra?

Interesting, but ...

It is always interesting to try out such software, especially if it is free of charge. But for everyday work I use a modern version of MS Word, with all its auxiliary functions and check facilities.

Japan stops measuring train crowding by ease of newspaper readership

Luggage index

Worst of all are both student backpacks and wheelie-cases.

French internet cables cut in act of sabotage that caused outages across country

Resistant to breaks

The original internet was designed to be resistant to breaks in the network, with traffic re-routed around them. But who knows what the modern accountants have imposed on us?