Posts by Stephen Wilkinson

Uncle Sam mulls policing social media of all would-be citizens

Re: card-carrying communists

Can you be a non-card carrying communist?

Glitchy taxi tech blew cover on steamy dispatch dalliance

Re: Not so much over a dispatch system, but....

Lived on a farm until I was 40, we lost pregnant ewes and their lambs from panic as the hounds illegally crossed our land, never lost any stock to foxes.

Scientists create woolly ma-mouse by looking at mean genes from the Pleistocene

Re: I, for one,

Tell Slartibartfast they're definitely keeping the fjords!

Windows 10's demise nears, but Linux is forever

I installed Mint Cinnamon on an Acer Aspire 5552 (AMD Athlon II X2 processor P320) with 3GB of memory (ex-Windows 7 laptop) and found it really struggled and ended up installing Mint Xfce which worked far better. That is probably my lack of Linux use as I've not really used it much since I used Redhat and Mootif back in the late '90's.

The Automattic vs WP Engine WordPress wars are getting really annoying

Thank you for reminding me of OpenText, and therefor Livelink ECM!

I thought I'd buried those thoughts a long time ago :(

NASA's X-59 plane is aiming for a sonic thump, not a boom

Re: Thump, not Boom, was what Concorde sounded like

I lived near the coast in North Devon and we were on the flight path of Concorde, always loved hearing the sonic boom.

Tech support chap showed boss how to use a browser for a year – he still didn't get it

Re: "learnt many things about how not to run a company"

Probably those with CEng!

Kill Oracle's 'JavaScript' trademark, Deno asks USPTO

I've still got a soft spot for applets as I started programming Java in my first year at university, when the language had only been out a year.

BASIC co-creator Thomas Kurtz hits END at 96

Re: Thank you

ZX81, then VIC-20 & C64, then BBC B - all when I was at school doing O Level Computer Studies.

After graduating a lot later, for the first 5 or 6 years I was programming VBScript (ASP) or Visual Basic 6.

RIP Prof. Kurtz and thank you.

EU stings Meta for nearly a billion bucks over competition-trampling Facebook Marketplace

Re: I read the article...

Aren't you Albert Spangler?

SuperHTML is here to rescue you from syntax errors, and it's FOSS

Dreamweaver, Frontpage and all that ilk produced appalling HTML which I'd have to clean up when the files had been passed to me as the web developer, from the graphic designer.

I definitely don't want to go back to those days!

I still prefer to hand crank HTML if I'm honest - EditPlus is still my favourite text editor.

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

Re: Or maybe..

When I was working in local government IT, most of the IT related FOI requests were companies trying to find out what software was used and when the contracts were up. Mostly a complete waste of officer time as we generally had to use one of the various government tendering portals when the systems were replaced.

Either that or journalists mass emailing every council on the country asking some banal question on the hope that something spicey would be sent back.

Where the computer industry went wrong – the early hits

Re: Magic TImes

I started down that route with the ZX-81 but then went to the dark side with the VIC-20 followed by the C64.

I was always completely envious of the BBC B though!

Astronomers back call for review of bonkers rule that means satellite swarms fly without environment checks

Re: Now just a cotton-picking minute, there

Keeps the Fae away

Twitter must pay over half a million to unfairly dismissed Irish exec

Many of the UK public sector comms teams are seriously considering doing this, they're normally on other platforms anyway but there is a lot of discussion at the moment about shutting down their Twitter/X accounts.

Microsoft accused of tracking kids with education software

Re: open source

The amount of people I worked with at a previous employer whose job specifications had the "Fluent in MS Office" and weren't even vaguely competent...

Screwdrivers: is there anything they can't do badly? Maybe not

Re: "Screw"drivers?

My JIS sit alone in my motorcycle toolbox, well away from all the other screwdrivers which are in other toolboxes.

I told Halle Berry where to go during a programming gig in LA

When I worked for a local authority, on the few trips away on training courses I did, they invariably cheap skated on the overnight accommodation. On one four day course in London, the first night was a Travelodge 5 minutes walk from the training centre, the other two nights were in a really grotty hotel an hour and two different tube lines from the venue. I think they saved about £50 by doing that.

That wasn't the only time that happened to me, but funnily enough, when management went away, they always got good hotels.

Oracle Fusion rollout costs 15 times council's estimates in SAP rip-'n-replace

Re: In my simplistic thinking...

Every council is "unique" and has their own way of doing things, and there is absolutely no way they'd be willing to adapt into a process that fits all!

Re: In my simplistic thinking...

The district council I used to work for used Lagan as its first CRM, had some great trips to Belfast for training. The pint admittedly should be a Guinness because I definitely drank a few while I was there.

The chip that changed my world – and yours

I started with a ZX-81 in my early teens, not for very long, probably less than a year before I jumped to a Commodore VIC-20 but without the ZX-81, it's unlikely I would have got into the IT world so thank you.

City council megaproject mulls ditching Oracle after budget balloons to £131M

Re: What would it cost ...

They somehow manage to do the same things all in a slightly different way and would (and do) demand a bespoke customised version of whichever system it is.

Bank's datacenter died after travelling back in time to 1970

Did Colin play bass for Bad News?

Korean peninsula space race sees South and North launch tit for tat spy sats

Re: US aircraft carriers at Norfolk naval base!

“The forest of Skund was indeed enchanted, which was nothing unusual on the Disc, and was also the only forest in the whole universe to be called -- in the local language -- Your Finger You Fool, which was the literal meaning of the word Skund.

The reason for this is regrettably all too common. When the first explorers from the warm lands around the Circle Sea travelled into the chilly hinterland they filled in the blank spaces on their maps by grabbing the nearest native, pointing at some distant landmark, speaking very clearly in a loud voice, and writing down whatever the bemused man told them. Thus were immortalised in generations of atlases such geographical oddities as Just A Mountain, I Don't Know, What? and, of course, Your Finger You Fool.

Rainclouds clustered around the bald heights of Mt. Oolskunrahod ('Who is this Fool who does Not Know what a Mountain is') and the Luggage settled itself more comfortably under a dripping tree, which tried unsuccessfully to strike up a conversation.”

― Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic

Boris Johnson's mad hydrogen for homes bubble bursts

Re: Electricity for heat pumps

Devon may not be represented by old Etonians but 6 of the 9 currently sitting MPs are Conservative.

Getting to the bottom of BMW's pay-as-you-toast subscription failure

Re: Moving House

I bought a Georgia Satellites live album on Amazon as MP3. Thankfully I downloaded the MP3s because after a couple of years the album has disappeared from Amazon Music.

First of Tesla's 'bulletproof' Cybertrucks clunks off production line

Re: VW Beetle

Having both a 1980's Mini and a 2001 MINI, while the Mini is smaller than the MINI and definitely fits into being a really compact car, the original MINI (the reboot) is tiny in comparison to modern cars - and modern MINIs for that matter.

Mark Zuckerberg would kick Elon Musk's ass, experts say

Re: "Threads"

My school was one of them. Yes, I still try to block it out!

Euro Parliament green lights its AI safety, privacy law

Re: Seems sensible

I used to live in one :(

Nearly 1 in 5 academics admit close encounters of the anomalous kind

Re: Cool

The same goes for the photo's of wild big cats in the UK, they always seem to be blurry pictures of a domestic cat!

Support chap put PC into 'drying mode' and users believed it was real

When working for a local authority, I accidently knocked on the door of the external auditor's office when trying to locate an office I hadn't been to before.

In revenge, to be honest I think I was the first friendly face he'd seen for a while, I got a twenty minute sales pitch on why I should consider taking up IT auditing!

Thanks for fixing the computer lab. Now tell us why we shouldn’t expel you?

Re: Remember

Be prepared for lots of visits from the Onion Fairy - at least I got visits when I read it!

The Stonehenge of PC design, Xerox Alto, appeared 50 years ago this month

Thanks for the reminder about Borland Delphi, we used it in the first year of the Software Engineering degree (along with Java) which seems a lifetime ago now.

China's spy balloon barrage earns six of its companies a spot on US entity list

Re: 99 Red Balloons

I don't know but Alphaville are big in Japan!

RIP Fred 'Mythical Man-Month' Brooks: IBM guru of software project management

I read Software Engineering Management at university and Mythical Man-Month was one of the core project management books so I've read it many times. It was novel in that it was a good read unlike many text books which helped of course.

Just to make myself feel old, my edition was the 20th anniversary edition and that was 26 years ago!

I will raise a glass tonight.

RIP Fred.

Someone has to say it: Voice assistants are not doing it for big tech

Re: Sorry - Useless for most people

By 2030 more than 2 billion people will require assistive technology to perform activities of daily living, so not necessarily that small a market.

Firefox 106 will let you type directly into browser PDFs

I have to use Adobe Acrobat to make PDFs digitally accessible. I don't think there's really an alternative for that.

Amazon's Roomba acquisition gets caught on FTC's rug

if the robot hasn't got stuck under something!

Excel's comedy of errors needs a new script, not new scripting

Re: Clueless users

You just need your Unique Property Reference Number (UPRN).

I don't know if the Post Office would get the letter to you though.

White House to tech world: Promise you'll write secure code – or Feds won't use it

Re: The first blow has been struck...

We already have a professional body in the UK, the British Computer Society.

AI detects 20,000 hidden taxable swimming pools in France, netting €10m

Re: If it steers boots on the ground to double check

District councils will use both purchased aerial photography and the Google satellite photo's to check for unauthorised development.

Report slams UK plan to become 'science superpower' by 2030

Re: Pariahs

Dont forget EurIng too, for those engineers out there :)

I paid for it, that makes it mine. Doesn’t it? No – and it never did

Re: Physical media

I've had Amazon pull music from my Amazon collection that they added at when I purchased the CD from them.

Thankfully I still have the CD.

DMCA can't be used to sidestep First Amendment, court rules

It's not Hipster slang and they didn't coin it.

It was coined in 1947 with regards some outlaw motorcycle clubs that can be distinguished by a "1%" patch worn on the colors. This is said to refer to a comment by the American Motorcyclist Association (AMA) that 99% of motorcyclists were law-abiding citizens, implying the last one percent were outlaws.

End of the road for biz living off free G Suite legacy edition

Don't you have to pay to use LibreOffice commercially? I know the licence fee is small (£25?) but technically it's not free either.

As a non-commercial user of LibreOffice, I really like.

Open-source leaders' reputations as jerks is undeserved

Re: Offensive and poorlt thought through

Totally agree, as they say, if you've met one autistic person, you've met one autistic person.

Each individual with ASD is an individual and will have different traits to all others on the spectrum.

Yes, there may be traits which are the same but stereotyping is stereotyping and does anyone who's non-neurotypical a disservice.

In IT, no good deed ever goes unpunished

Re: I've met this is in all sorts of projects. Mostly not IT related.

My Manager regularly used to use the ice cube trick to boost the meagre heating in the 1970's concrete monstrosity of a building with single glazed windows that we used to inhabit.

Thank goodness he did.

Predictive Dirty Dozen: What will and won't happen in 2022 (unless it doesn’t/does)

Becky Baldwin is an excellent bass player \m/O\m/

£42k for a top-class software engineer? It's no wonder uni research teams can't recruit

Re: It's all about the banding

Sadly that doesn't happen in local government.

All specialists working in local government are not well paid regardless of field, not just IT.

UK schools slap a hold on facial scanning of children amid fierce criticism

Re: Won’t somebody think of the children!?

I've seen local job roles for IT in schools that require IT Manager/Network Manager levels of experience and knowledge with a salary of under £13k.

I'm amazed that they get any staff at all.