Posts by goodjudge

Hubble in a death spiral that could end as early as 2028 without a reboost

Re: 2028 sounds like a death sentence for Hubble

A satellite with attitude? Run!

Sword of Damocles hangs over UK military’s Ajax as minister says back it or scrap it

Re: Putting lipstick on a pig

"Each chassis that comes off the line is a different size."

The mind boggles at how that's even possible. Do Mercedes, Fiat, Jaguar etc have this problem with their cars? DAF or Ford with their trucks? How has the MOD or its appointed contractors not figured out the basics of vehicle-making, that have been around since Henry Ford?

Or am I missing something blatantly obvious?

UK to spend £23M on AI to tell benefit claimants where to go

Future-proofing?

This is a 4-year, possibly 6-year, project starting from 07/26. Given how fast AI has evolved in the last 6 months, the potential capabilities by next Xmas are anyone's guess, let alone 2030/32. So, what chance that the government contract will include any 'future-proofing' clauses to take advantage of technical developments, without triggering a provider "change request? that'll be £xxx squillion please" response?

Capita tells civil servants to wait for chatbots to fix pension portal woes

Meet the new Crapita, same as the old Crapita

"New chatbots and ways to contact CSPS will be going live in the coming weeks. As such, if your enquiry is not urgent, we kindly ask that you wait until these go live in the New Year before contacting CSPS again."

Here's a novel idea. Why not employ real people and *train* them properly? Rather than yet more AI nonsense that doesn't and isn't able to answer the actual question you want to ask.

The Roomba failed because it just kind of sucked

"So if you live in a bungalow with all the internal doors removed, it was wonderful." Some friends have one of these gadgets, don't know if Roomba or another brand, for their villa on the Med. Tiled floors, not carpets. Fairly large rooms with minimal furniture and clutter, as they're not there often and pack up everything when they leave. I can see the potential use there, if you don't want to (pay someone to) push a broom instead. For us lesser mortals, it's a solution in need of a problem.

52-year-old data tape could contain only known copy of UNIX V4

"it's a Unix system, I know this"

See title

Help desk boss fell for ‘Internet Cleaning Day’ prank - then swore he got the joke

Re: Has your tech team pranked colleagues?

""We sent a project manager out to Dixons to get us some more virtual memory once"

That could have backfired if he returned a large 10K rpm SCSI (swap) disk complemented by an equally large invoice."

Don't forget the 2 year warranty!

Machine learning saves £4.4M in UK.gov work and pensions fraud detection

Re: Dog whistle

" Only the little people pay taxes." Michelle Mone. Sorry, no, that was Leone Helmsley...

Taliban impose tele-ban and take Afghanistan offline

"Do you have the tiniest scintilla of evidence that this might be the case?"

Trump has forced ByteDance to sell TikTok to his tech / media cronies, including Murdoch and Ellison. The chances of it immediately being used to flood the market with pro-MAGA / Xtian Fundamentalist and anti-Democrat / Liberal videos are somewhere around 99.9999-recurring %. Yeah, ByteDance retains a minority stake. So what?

Workers: Yes, RTO makes sense. No, we’re not going to do it

Re: "gives people the freedom¹ to live² happier³, more fulfilling lives²."

Reddit r/overemployed has plenty of them, often swapping stories about how to avoid detection or to how to cover up if they think they may have been unmasked.

Space Command gets Trumped out of Colorado, voting conspiracy cited

Re: Message from Donald J Trump, President Of The United States

Viva El Presidente!

(Enter Mike, wearing a black trenchcoat and shades, whilst Vyvyan lurks in the background with a cricket bat and motorcycle helmet. One for the oldies amongst us there).

UK government trial of M365 Copilot finds no clear productivity boost

Meet the new shiny

Same as the old shiny.

The UK Online Safety Act is about censorship, not safety

Re: Not for the children

For example:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd0d31r423ko - "Police investigating death of French streamer seize equipment and videos", article includes "Raphaël Graven, also known as Jeanpormanove, was known for videos on the platform Kick in which he endured apparent violence and humiliation." Not covered by the OSA.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3dpmlvx1k2o - "Meta investigated over AI having 'sensual' chats with children." Not covered by the OSA.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c15lpwzzzqgo - "Firm apologises for saying it would not process LGBTQ+ payments", the root cause of the article is a Christian-fundamentalist campaign against anything online that doesn't fit their narrow prejudices. Which is pretty much everything - obviously not including the Bible, which starts with murder, incest (only one woman created, Adam only had two sons, where did everyone else come from?), and goes downhill from there including God 'nuking the site from orbit to be sure' and starting again with Noah+family. None of it covered by the OSA.

And that's just BBC articles I've read in the last 2 days.

Birmingham City Council's £131M Oracle rebuild in danger as go-live nears

National 'local' standards

Agreed. I'm sure there are a few things that are devolved to councils that should be nationally co-ordinated, just implemented by councils in their area. E.g. recycling - we buy the same things nationwide, recycling is all done by the same set of national / multinational processing companies, why does each area needs its own "what you can / can't" rules, number and colour of bins etc.?

Fujitsu sorry for Post Office horror – but still cashing big UK govt checks

Re: A Diabolical Shame which HMGov. is Aiding and Abetting and Fully Complicit In ‽ .

The downvotes are more likely because the two situations aren't remotely comparable. This is a situation where everyone involved at a senior level knew the software was faulty (though a certain person allegedly asked not to be told everything so that they could maintain 'plausible deniability'), they repeatedly lied to the postmasters who were reporting faults and unexplained cash losses (e.g. investigators would say "no-one else has reported this" when they themselves had dealt with the same matter many times elsewhere) and some people lied in court. It was an co-ordinated strategy over many years to stop bad publicity and expense for Fujitsu, PO head honchos, and government ministers who were supposed to have oversight. And people died as a direct result, whether suicide or stress-related health problems. Once it finally blew up in their faces, those same people wrung their hands and said "very sorry", and yet the government are STILL dragging out the compensation payments and Fujitsu, who created the software and therefore the problem, have paid the square root of £f/all. I.e. they've effectively all got away with it.

The only real 'punishment' was St Paula lost her Damehood. Oh noes, how terrible, sad face ... She (and others) should be looking out of prison bars right now.

Firefox is fine. The people running it are not

I get that this is a techie website

but does any of this article actually matter to the average user? I started out on Navigator, then switched to Firefox at home and, later, on the phone. I use Chrome at home for Gmail and Maps but try to avoid it otherwise, due to the tracking and lack of ad-blocking. It works absolutely fine for me. I don't need to run 40 tabs at once, nor use a million extensions. I don't time new-page-openings in micro-seconds. How many normal users actually do?

Or is it saying that it's the techies that really keep FF in existence, and if you lose them then the whole thing goes down?

Techie traveled 4 hours to fix software that worked perfectly until a new hire used it

Re: I touch it and it breaks!

My first real job in IT was in testing. My leaving speech was "This is one of the hardest jobs in the company". [Cue groans]. "Because you [pointing at product-speccing people] spend a lot of time designing something, then you [pointing at coders] spend even more time making it all work and you [pointing at graphics people] make it look great for the customers. Then we [testers] come along and say [puts on whiny voice] "You missed this. That bit is broken. This function doesn't do what it's meant to"."

It's a worthwhile job but it doesn't make you any friends professionally!

Fujitsu and its no public sector bids promises... what happened to them?

Snouts? Troughs?

No, no, no, you've got it all wrong. Move along, nothing to see here.

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

Re: Be careful where you type

That suggestion comes up here every so often. It's a BAD idea. Just a couple of weeks ago I spotted and had to edit some very sweary engineer visit notes, where he'd been using speech-to-text to report his findings whilst - allegedly - having a separate moan with a colleague about someone else, definitely not about the customer (according to him). Of course the mic just put it all into the report and he didn't sanity check before hitting 'submit'.

Elon Musk makes another cut – to his time at DOGE

Sticker seen on the back of a Tesla this morning

"I bought this before Elon lost his mind"

Trump blinks: 'Substantially' lower China tariffs promised

Re: Looks like China Learned the Lessons of the Opium Wars

"Silly me thought that the Irish were 'elbow deep' in the Great Hunger at about that time but perhaps they were trading opium for potatoes all along?"

As per Wiki:

First opium war 1839-42

Irish famine 1845-52

Second opium war 1856-60

Plus there were plenty of Ireland-born gentry in the upper echelons of the British / Imperial government and army. All parts of these islands had their role.

Re: Dementia

Problem is, there's precedent. Ronald Reagan DID have dementia during his 2nd term, it was covered up and Nancy (and her astrologer friend) took a leading role. And he's still worshipped by right-wingers that are old enough to remember him.

Trump tariffs to make prices great – a gain

Re: USA Brexit

"The only existing example that tried this is North Korea and they manage to have deadly famines while their relatives next door prosper in a first world country."

The only relatives that count in NK are the fathers and sons (and, allegedly, eventually daughter) who run the place. Whilst they stay in charge, and continue to prosper, they don't give a fig about the rest. The US seems to be going the same way, albeit DT and cronies rather than DT and family.

HP Inc settles printer toner lockout lawsuit with a promise to make firmware updates optional

I've just switched to laserprint as I do barely 50 sheets a year and was fed up with having to replace almost-full inkjet cartridges that had dried up and even several cleaning routines couldn't get them going again. (It also doesn't help that the only place I can put it gets a few hours of afternoon sun). I ordered online, salesbloke rang me the next day to say "we notice you haven't ordered a toner cartridge". I said "doesn't it come with a starter pack that does about 700 sheets?". He said "yes". I said "that should last me the next decade then". And I'll be putting something over it when not in use.

Re: Update optional?

I bought a new printer on Tuesday. I specifically avoided HP due to all their toner shenanigans. Brother got my money instead.

Mega council officers had no idea what they were buying ahead of Oracle fiasco

The downvoter has forgotten the GLC, which was abolished solely because Maggie hated Ken Livingstone - the man as well as his politics.

How mega city council's failure to act on Oracle rollout crashed its financial controls

"Birmingham's Oracle system implementation was rated as "red" before going live, but it did not explain why and how the council's management, officers, and members made such a decision."

Because the senior person whose bright idea this was, or the councillor in charge of Finance, or both, who would suffer great loss of face if it didn't go live, ignored the constructive criticism and technical feedback and told them "you're all just a bunch of whingers, get on with it".

Why does the UK keep getting beaten up by IT suppliers?

Re: It's a lack of understanding

"Which had a new feature in Excel that one department really wanted."

Or, how about telling that dept: "stop constantly badgering us for 'the new shiny', just because, and work with what you've got."

Windows 10's demise nears, but Linux is forever

All these comments explain why there's still general public resistance to Linux - quite apart from the fact that many people think "the computer" = "Windows" and have never heard the phrase "operating system", let alone can tell you what it is. Mint, Solus, Debian, "Ubuntu with a smattering of Devuan and Slack" and 1,000 more. And that's before you get onto "forking" to make things work.

How on earth are the general public supposed to know the difference and make an informed choice? Yes, I get it's all *nix, but most people aren't and don't want to be techies, just like most people who drive a car have no interest in and couldn't tell you about torque points or what "revs" actually means, or the relative effects of different PSIs. Windows, for better or worse, just switches on from the get go, you create an account and you never have to worry about anything else "technical" again, except occasionally to reboot for an update when it prompts you.

Also, I've used, or tried to use, Libre Office. I have a few hundred Word docs dating back a decade or more that include multiple small images, anything from half a page to 60-70 pages. Certain headings in bold text. All in the same font style and size. When I last replaced my computer (to Win11, boo hiss), Libre Office blew lots of the formatting out the water - at random. Some bold headings were now partly or non-bold, and some in a new font. Text that had been beside some images was now under them. Some text columns and small inserted tables weren't displaying correctly. And these are fairly basic features and functions so it should have been a seamless transition. I lived with it for a few months then bought Office again.

I hate all the prompts to use Office 365 (I just want a single install and I don't need to access anything from elsewhere except email), and backups to the cloud (I've got far too much data for that to be affordable so I'll stick with my various removable hard drives). But unless *nix can establish itself in the office (pardon the pun) environment so that people can become familiar with it, and until the 'every developer makes their own version' number of products can reduce to - at best - a few product names, nothing is going to change in the mass home market.

User said he did nothing that explained his dead PC – does a new motherboard count?

Re: My "support days" are hopefully over

"'Well, of course it isn't working! You're on the phone with me!'"

I have an album from circa 2000 which includes the lyric "Call me now, I'm not online". Which has aged even worse than that one from The Streets' first album, "you won't find us on Alta Vista".

Now Trump's import tariffs could raise the cost of a laptop for Americans by 68%

"That’s if he ever gets to the mid-term elections…"

That's if there are any mid-term elections...

Ransomware hangover, Putin grudge blamed for vodka maker's bankruptcy

Re: Extremists

Ye gods! Unicum. There's a blast from the past. 20-year-old me and some friends in Budapest, 30ish years ago: "Ooh, look at the name of that drink, fnarr fnarr, snigger snigger." Then after 1 sip: "Bleurghh... Jesus Christ, someone actually LIKES this stuff?"

Mega defense corp Thales faces Anglo-French bribery and corruption probe

Bribery and corruption in the weapons industry?

Insert Claude Rains "shocked" quote from Casablanca here.

NASA fires up super-quiet supersonic X-59 aircraft

I came here to upvote the sub-heading

That is all

WinAmp's woes will pass, but its wonders will be here forever

It works, so why change?

I'm old fashioned. When I listen to music, I generally want to play a whole album front to back. So I've been using Winamp since I can't remember, most recently last night. I have the .exe saved so that as and when I replace the home PC (yes, PC, because affordable laptops don't have enough TB to hold all my files) it gets reinstalled. Do adults *really* care about the range of skins? Are you looking at the screen - and the programme - the whole time you're listening to whatever?

Severe solar storm could disrupt power, communications

Re: More X flares have happened in last 48 hours

Flares, you say? Green ones? The chances of anything coming from the sun are a million to one, but still they come.

UK Regulatory Innovation Office vows to slash red tape – but we've heard it all before

Pickles hated the local government sector and did his best to destroy it. It's when councils started having their real terms funding *really* cut. The preferred alternative being, of course, outsourcing to private sector companies who knew exactly the right thing to do for residents. Arconic, Carrillion, Barnet's "EasyCouncil" model, etc. etc.

Happy birthday, Putin – you've been pwned

Re: Msg to Chris Williams

"So hacking Russia is good, Russia hacking is bad."

You do realise it's not a zero-sum game? Ukrainians defending their homeland is very different from years of FSB / CIA / MI5 / MSS etc. general snooping and sabotage for no good reason.

Personalized pop-up was funny for about a second, until it felt like stalking

Customised pop-ups

My very first IT job ('97-8) was working with another person (Hi LN, if you're reading) to develop an Access database to capture staff overtime. We were young, dumb and sometimes bored, we thought it would be fun to have an intro screen that randomly said things like "I used to be a toaster", "what's 93.31242130 x 12329.22790 - there, how do you like it?" and an 'amusing' comment about the senior manager who was nominally in charge of the project - originally "[NAME] is fat" (which he was) but before the first public demo it became "... is fab".

I cringe now at the fact we then demo'd this to management, then rolled it out, with these greetings still intact, and that we were even allowed to do so.

UK government's bank data sharing plan slammed as 'financial snoopers' charter'

Re: Stupid proposal

The money would be better spent on making the benefit fraud-reporting website fit for purpose. I reported someone who was working cash in hand whilst claiming UC and housing benefit, also subletting her rented flat on Airb+b, also rinsing her ex-husband by claiming she was poor as a church mouse, and was (no doubt still is) transferring her cash to her birth country to invest in property. The reporting form had ridiculously low character limits in each field and would only allow very basic punctuation marks, and not : or /, so I couldn't even give the URL for her AB+B advert.

Re: Return on investment

£320m would barely buy Michelle Mone a yacht plus a year's fuel and crew bills. How do we expect our 'trusted friends of government' to survive on such a pittance?

War on Texas law requiring ID to savor smut online heads to Supreme Court

TBF, which politician is actually going to stand up and defend the right of adults to watch pr0n? Even the "I was looking at tractor pictures and my cursor slipped" guy wouldn't defend it once caught. (Yes, looking at work, as he was, is another matter entirely, whereas I'm talking about the general principle).

Julian Assange to go free in guilty plea deal with US

Re: Sweden

How does exposing US war crimes make him a "traitor", given that he's Australian, not American? In any case, publicly embarrassing a government (which is essentially what the US were punishing him for) shouldn't be a crime in any country.

Julian Assange can appeal extradition to the US, London High Court rules

Re: Corruption all the way down

"He got a load of information and dumped all of it on the web with no consideration for the dangers it might have caused for individuals. "

Except that's totally untrue. He spent months reading and redacting it before releasing it. The only "dangers for individuals" is causing political embarrassment all the way to the top - which is of course the most serious crime in the whole statute.

Council claims database pain forced it to drop apostrophes from street names

Re: St[.] Mary's Walk

One of the two main programmes I work on uses "St Marys..." and similar - except a few years ago some bright spark renamed all the "St" road names in the DB as "St." and the address search won't return any results unless you include the full stop. But whoever made the change forgot that there are a couple of blocks of flats starting with "St ****" and those remain dot-free.

Confused? You will be.

Thankfully the other programme uses boolean searching and doesn't care whether you type the full stop or not.

Turns out teaching criminals to write web code keeps them out of prison

Re: Yea, a big improvement

"The American prison activity for years has been only to punish everyone"

The American prison activity for years has been only to make money for the companies that run the jails, so it helps to keep their 'customers' in a position that they become regular visitors, e.g. by not attempting to rehabilitate or educate them or giving them anything to survive on when they leave.

Belgian beer study acquires taste for machine learning

Belgian AI-le

"Corresponding author Kevin Verstrepen, professor at Belgian university KU Leuven, said one of the biggest goals is now to help make better alcohol-free beer."

In Belgium??? What a waste of a good idea.

"Schreurs admitted that the team did celebrate finishing the paper with the alcohol-containing variety. With some Belgian beers touching 15 percent alcohol by volume, he didn't say how bad the hangover was."

I've just come back from a week, with friends, of sampling the liquid delights of Brussels and Ghent. We got through an extensive range and there was not a single hangover. Nor in similar previous visits. There's something in their brewing that filters out whatever crud causes it everywhere else. TBF we rarely went above 9% but the 15% beers are equally rare - generally the strongest on a regular menu is around 12%.

Belgian ale legend Duvel's brewery borked as ransomware halts production

24% limit

Ta. Am off to Belgium next weekend to sample their wares, will keep that in mind. Duvel's not high on my list TBF. But if the hackers hit Cantillon, it's definitely war.

City council megaproject to spend millions for manual work Oracle system was meant to do

Don't worry, the important stuff (for councillors) isn't being cut.

"All of which pale into insignificance with the £200m being spent on housing acquisition and development over the next four years and £880m on council housing improvements."

You may have noticed a lot in the press in the last 2 years about damp and mould in social housing, and forthcoming government regulation on the same. You may also have noticed a large fire in a tower block a few years ago followed by (stable door / horse) government regulation on the same. You may have read articles on the number of people stuck in temporary accommodation or hotels, that are costing councils a fortune. You may also have noticed numerous press reports about how Britain has some of the least energy efficient housing stock in Europe. And you may recall that Maggie T (boo hiss!) expressly rigged the Right To Buy process for council tenants so that councils couldn't spend the money on replacing lost stock.

So councils nationwide have an aging housing stock, often thrown up in haste after WW2 and nearing (or even exceeding) the end of its effective life, that the government is requiring them to spend vast amounts of money on, otherwise the tenants will sue them or the housing ombudsman will fine them or the government inspectorate will take them to the cleaners. Or more likely all 3.

TL:DR - sorting all of the above is never going to be cheap.

And of course the governing party, with a large number of landlords in their ranks, is resisting rolling out similar legislation to protect the millions of private tenants.