Posts by Primus Secundus Tertius

Home Office staff still leaning on 25-year-old asylum case management system

Spreadsheets

Whingeing about a computer system that is 25 years old is pathetic. All that is needed is a spreadsheet or two. Something anyone can do, except probably a civil service arts graduate.

Galactic Brain space datacenter coming in 2027, pledges startup Aetherflux

No rent (yet)

You have to pay to put it into orbit. But you don't have to pay rent to keep it there. Not yet, anyway.

UK Covid-19 Inquiry finds early pandemic surveillance was weeks out of date

Wasting my taxes

The health world is full of busybodies who want to spend my taxes on more committees and more statistics. None of these will make actual people actually better. Then they will claim that because things are not getting better they are getting worse, and will demand even more of my taxes.

Windows boss defends 'agentic OS' push as users plead for reliability

Re: Paint

I've tried that, and it refuses to answer.

You would think intelligent software would recognise that I terminate it whenever I see it running. Ha ha!

Report blasts UK Ministry of Defence over Afghan data-handling failures

Re: Cockup or conspiracy?

All special advisors should be handed over to the Taliban, or the Norks.

You'll never guess what the most common passwords are. Oh, wait, yes you will

Not bothered

I sometimes use 'drowssap' against the more tiresome websites.

China uses Mars orbiter to snap interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS

What next?

Three probes in eight years. The b*st*rds are on to us. Fear for the worst!

Ex-CISA head thinks AI might fix code so fast we won't need security teams

Re: Bring back flowcharts

There are 'subroutine' boxes that summarise a lot of logic, and allow a global view of the program. E.G.

Init

Doit

Exit

Boxes have little boxes, item by item; little boxes have lesser boxes, and so ad infinitum.

Bring back flowcharts

I always argued that flowcharts were the way to design software. They show logic in two dimensions, making many errors and omissions much easier to see. But the industry has chosen the path of 'foolproof' programming languages, so the flow of disasters has continued apace.

I would like to see AI creating and analysing flowcharts to find and fix flaws.

EU biometric border system launch hits inevitable teething problems

Outrage

It is an outrage that the EU expect to fingerprint British citizens as if we were Arab terrorists. It is time Britain took countermeasures.

MX Linux 25 reaches beta testing – complete with systemd

Wot abaht ... ?

But what about the Office software? I don't use a computer to fiddle with the operating system, I use it to create and look at documents, spreadsheets, and pictures. I assume MX linux includes Libre Office, but which version? Are there any alternatives to LO?

British spreadsheet wizard will take mad skillz to Vegas after taking national Excel crown

QA probs

Spreadsheets are a disaster for quality assurance, because they are so easily altered without trace.

The Notepad that knew too much: Humble text editor gets unnecessary AI infusion

Should have used Wordpad

All this AI nonsense should have been added to Wordpad, while leaving Notepad alone.

BOFH: These office thefts really take the biscuit

Re: MAYBE THERE NEVER WERE ANY BISCUITS!!!

"Many many years ago, in another life,"

I once jokingly referred to a previous job as a previous existence. Later that day, a Hindu co-worker privately asked me if I had been serious about that previous existence.

NASA finds best evidence of life on Mars so far

Re: as we don't know it

Bacterial life seems to have begun at least 3,500 million years ago. It was another 1,000 million years before eukaryotic life appeared, and another 1,500 million years before worms began leaving fossil trails. So a very long time to really get going.

Word to autosave new docs to the cloud before you can even hit Ctrl+S

Lucky?

A long time ago, a British comedian had the catch phrase, "You lucky people". Sarcastic, of course.

Viking 1 at 50: NASA's first raid on the red planet

Re: Bicentennial

I wonder what England will do in 2066.

We should have done something in 2010, the 1600 anniversary of the end of the Roman Occupation, but didn't.

OneNote for Windows 10 support clock counts down

Re: Nota bene

And another thing, it is a great pity there is nothing like One Note in Libre Office and other products.

Nota bene

I use One Note in Office 2019 as much as I use Word and Excel. But the free, cloud-only version, is not worth having.

Dwarf planet Ceres may have been habitable - for microbes - a couple of billion years back

Older life

The solar system is 4.5 billion years old. The galaxy is some 12 billion years old. A civilisation twice as old as ours may exist, and would regard us as very primitive, not worth bothering with.

Bank reverses decision to replace 45 customer service staff with AI chatbot

Desperate

"management being drafted to help answer phones"

Gosh, that really is desperate! Obviously something had to be done.

IETF Draft suggests making IPv6 standard on DNS resolvers - partly to destroy IPv4

Well said. IPv6 was conceived in a total lack of engineering realism, and is only alive today because of all the efforts to force it onto people. Scrap IPv6, and design an IPv7 which includes IPv4 as a proper subset.

The real place for a successor to IPv4 is not the core of the Internet but in large private networks.

Physicist models new use for nuclear waste: Turning it into super-rare fusion fuel

Tritium has a half-life of about eleven years. So, hot stuff if you keep a lot of it about.

Timekettle T1 AI translator helps you scale the Tower of Babel

Lots of errors

"approximately 90 percent accurate"

That equates to about one mistake in every sentence. OK, it is 90 times better than just guessing, but really it is not very good.

No more 'Sanity Checks.' Inclusive language guide bans problematic tech terms

Sticks and stones

"perhaps saying things differently can save a coworker unnecessary discomfort, then why not?"

Answer: people should be a bit more robust. Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words will never harm you. That was always what I was told as a child when other children made hurtful remarks.

Re: My inclusive reply

Or 'Sod the lot of you'.

Re: Quite possibly

It is a black day when 'spade' is banned.

Re: Quite possibly

Give the Editor of El Reg a break. It is fucking August.

Mexit, not Brexit, is the new priority for the UK

They don't listen

SODGR, sod yer. Mexit will need PPE graduates to listen to the techies, and that would never do.

Your CV is not fit for the 21st century – time to get it up to scratch

How depressing

There is no doubt some truth in this article. How depressing!

Banning VPNs to protect kids? Good luck with that

Be constructive

I can understand that perhaps the Online Safety Act needs constructive criticism. But I have no time for the kowtowing to US Big Tech that just wants to walk all over us.

More important, British ideas of free speech are different from American ideas. Britain has always recognised that slanderous or criminal speech should be restricted. It is outrageous American imperialism that they dictate their own ideas on free speech to the rest of the world.

As companies race to add AI, terms of service changes are going to freak a lot of people out

Re: try the real world

If you are using Excel properly, you assign a data type (text, date, floating) to each column.

Re: try the real world

"Data needs to live in a database – not an Excel file."

An Excel file is an excellent way to implement many a simple database.

AI data-suckers would have to ask permission first under new bill

AI like humans

"AIs don't learn like humans do"

It seems to me there are many likenesses between AI and the majority of humans. Both sweep, or are swept, through a vast amount of data with very little understanding.

Large Hadron Collider data hints at explanation for why everything exists

Re: Science prize

Yes, science is infinite. But that does not mean every scientific paper needs to plead for more.

I am a scientist, and not religious.

Science prize

One day someone may publish a scientific paper without the conclusion that more research is necessary and funding applications are being drafted. Such a paper would deserve a magnificent bonus prize.

Ordnance Survey digs deep to prevent costly cable strikes

Re: We who are ignored

You are right that it began as a hypothecated tax, but that was changed. If it were not for World War 2, Winston Churchill would be remembered as the finance minister who raided the Road Fund.

But all that is just playing with words. We motorists pay more tax because we use cars, and we are entitled to demand decent roads in return

We who are ignored

More and more car journeys are being disrupted by road works. Especially at night it can be difficult to find a way home.

We motorists are being ignored, even though our road tax pays for the roads. Anyone who wants to dig up a road should reimburse 10,000 motorists, directly, specifically, by name, and in real money.

GPS on the fritz? Britain and France plot a backup plan

Re: maps?

With a lot of people, maps don't work.

Post Office and Fujitsu execs 'should have known' Horizon IT system was flawed

Re: The scandal continues

Send them to prison first. Let them appeal from jail.

UK charity bank CAF branded a 'disaster' after platform migration goes wrong

Re: Test, test and test again

Or is it a 'used the cheapest bidder' problem?

LibreOffice adds voice to 'ditch Windows for Linux' campaign

Re: If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice

"We had to take a decision, so we decided to wait and see".

Researchers claim spoof-proof random number generator breakthrough

Re: Thought Experiment

You should repeat that experiment a thousand times. It would probably happen once. The probability of it not happening is 0.37. It might happen twice, but probably no more than that.

The one sure prediction is that randomness is unpredictable.

Re: What is a true random number?

What are a criterion to determine if an English sentence be grammaticle!

Not prolific

Not exactly a prolific source of random numbers, e.g. for overwriting previous contents of a hard disk.

The glib reply, I guess, is that you generate a billion pseudorandom numbers using a truly random seed.

Danish department determined to dump Microsoft

Re: how to do it in half a dozen mouse clicks

WYSIWYG in MS Word and its competitors were a major upgrade to the markup languages previously available. Who remembers runoff, unless like me they have bitter memories? Latex was another cross I had to bear for a time.

But WYSIWYG alone leads to large documents that are inconsistent, as the article and Mr Barnes both note. Styles and themes are a major upgrade to WYSIWYG. As others have noticed, however, few people know how to use styles and themes.

I have also met spreadsheets where the author inserted a hand-calculated total rather than using the spreadsheet to add things up.

Google outfoxed by crafty squatters in $1B London HQ's rooftop garden

I once went down to the dustbin area of the flats where I live. Someone had used my dustbin as a lavatory. There are four pubs close to these flats.

Re: Fox's or Fox'es?

Perhaps scare the foxes away with the sound of galloping coconut shells.

Microsoft's plain text editor gets fancy as Notepad gains formatting options

I use an editor named Typora. It is a markdown editor, and liaises with pandoc to import and export Word files. The MS-enhanced-notepad seems to be doing something similar.

I find it useful for cleaning up a Word document without losing italics, headings, etc.

But Typora uses one specific markdown. It may crumble if presented with markdown from direct use of pandoc or elsewhere.

Microsoft dumps AI into Notepad as 'Copilot all the things' mania takes hold in Redmond

Genuine intelligence

A genuinely intelligent program would omit all this AI nonsense.