Posts by volsano

Windows 11 shutdown bug forces Microsoft into out-of-band damage control

No off switch?

Obviously a code changed slipped in by Copilot on behalf of Big AI.

AIs no wanna be turned off.

Help desk read irrelevant script, so techies found and fixed their own problem

rddb

This is a classic version of adversarial rubber-duck debugging back in the dial-up age.

These days we all mainly rely on AI rubber duck apps.

The Y2K bug delayed my honeymoon … by 17 years!

One Y2K remediation I worked on had systems from the 1960s -- crucial systems that ran the whole show.

We easily (for some definitions of the word) fixed their 1980s and 1990s stuff that used 2-digit years.

But we did not touch the 1960s and 1970s stuff that had a specialised date storage format. It was 16-bit dates. 7 bits for year. 9 bits for day of year.

It was too assemblery, too unstructured, too ancient.

And, anyway, 9-bit year counting from 1900 (as they did) was good until the unimaginably far future.

The unimaginably far future is nearly with us: 1900 + 127 = 2027.

I am waiting for the phone to ring so I can apologise, - and quote them an unimaginably large number to finish the job.

Microsoft wants to replace its entire C and C++ codebase, perhaps by 2030

The beauty of starting a new project is that it has no known problems - thus making it a zillion times better that all existing projects that have many known problems.

New projects with no known problems are like steroid catnip to managers and investers.

If Microsoft can speed up the process of replacing existing projects with new ones, they will drive down their known problems list to zero.

Profit!

They just need to remember that all new projects will be replaced by newer projects at least once a week.

Intern had no idea what not to do, so nearly mangled a mainframe

Re: MVS OS/360 - Almost certainly

I moved from ICL System 4 to IBM 370.

It was a bit like stepping into a Stone Age.

Admittedly, they had impressive stuff - the equivalent of Stonehenge. But overall, the relative primitiveness took a while to get used too.

I think I and some others spent the first year of our IBM sysprog careers just recreating tools we knew we needed.

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

Mobile phone could be offensive to people with mobility issues.

We should avoid references to the W*b as it may traumatise archnaphobes.

Any protocol that does a handshake is likely to trigger oddly-armed amputees.

And designs that use algorithms are culturally appropiating Arabic zeitgeists.

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

Re: Whoops

If you are on a modern rolling-stock in the UK Midlands, the computer display will tell you you are in Coach 4 and that Carriages 1 and 2 have plenty of spare seats. Glance out at the right station stop, and you'll see signs telling the driver they are halted in the correct position for a 6 Car train.

Mixing Rust and C in Linux likened to cancer by kernel maintainer

Standards

Does Rust have an internationally recognised Standard definition?

Does the standarising authority guarantee that new features in later revisions of the standard will be fully backward compatible with existisng code (bugs included)?

If not, then the Linux project many be opening a decades-long can of worms regarding versioning and interoperability of Rust code bases.

Most prudent approach: at least wait until Rust has stabilised and matured before relying on it. For now, at best, use it for app-level work and demonstrations.

Tool touted as 'first AI software engineer' is bad at its job, testers claim

The Bastard AI Developer from Hell has landed.

25 years on from Y2K, let's all be glad it happened way back then

Re: And for other reasons

A lot of tactical decisions were taken when using the window breakpoint technique.

Should 00-49 = 2000s and 50-99 be 1900s? Or some other year?

If for example, the system dealt with employees' dates of birth, you might have needed 00-34 and 35-99. Or some such.

Of the date-patched systems from 2000 that are still in use, many of them are creeping up to their own unique breakpoint breakdown. And who is left to remember that is coming?

2027

Back in the late 1990s I helped shovel code onto the OK-for-2000 pile for several companies.

One of them had the usual YYMMDD problem in most of its 10 to 20 year old systems. We fixed those.

But it was crucially dependant on several much older systems which had tons of antiquated Assember and used a half-word (16 bit) format for dates. The format was 7 bits for year, 9 bits for day of year.

Their Year Zero was 1900. 7 bits for year brings them up to 2027.

It was decided that fixing a problem that would not occur for nearly 30 years was not a priority.

Was that the right decision!?

I am waiting for the phone to ring in case it wasn't.

Microsoft holds last Patch Tuesday of the year with 72 gifts for admins

Swiss Cheese Model

It seems that when Microsoft learned of the Swiss Cheese Risk Model, it decided the neatest method would be to pre-drill the holes so they line up already.

Panic at the Cisco tech, thanks to ancient IOS syntax helper that outsmarted itself

Backward double-negative logic is a predictor of massive future industry dinosaurs.

Fred Brooks called IBM's OS/360 a "multi-million dollar mistake" back when that was a lot of money. Now called Z/OS, its backward COND statement ("Don't run this step if the previous step's return code was not N) is still the mainstay of the financial systems across the world.

41-million-digit prime crunched by datacenter GPUs

Re: GPU rental ... 2 million dollar

Probably still a cheaper hobby than owning a yacht.

Google says replacing C/C++ in firmware with Rust is easy

Re: Google wants you to do the same

Most of those Rust developers were doing new work - or rewriting modules from scratch in a new language.

While most of the C++ etc work is mainenance - retrofitting old code to match changes in requirements or reality.

We do not yet have any meaningful stats on how productive Rust maintainers will be.

AI stole my job and my work, and the boss didn't know – or care

AI weather forecasting

I have a plan to replace all meterologists worldwide.

Just feed all past weather forecasts into my Large Language Model.

And - presto voilà! - it'll wordsmith a weather forecast for any date in the future with no human intervention.

What could possibly go wrong with an AI modelled on millions of past human documents!?

You're not hallucinating: Generative AI is helping IBM's mainframes grow

Re: Wait, what was that ?

The centralisation / decentralisation of computer hardware is an ongoing cycle that has persisted 50 years.

After selling centralised mainframes to corporations and service bureaus, the manufacturers spearheaded decentralisation by selling minicomputers to departments. And then PC-class machines to individual business units.

Then they invented enterprise computing and sold server-class machines to the corporations.

Now they have invented cloud computing – which means they sell mainframe-class machines to the new generation of service bureaus.

The next wave of selling direct to the corporations is now upon us.

What next? I predict puddle computing – powerful department-level machines that cache and process the output from the clouds.

Why not? Highly paid consultants will prove that agile puddling is the cheapest option.

Elon Musk to destroy the International Space Station – with NASA's approval, for a fee

Happy landings

Musk probably imagines he can safely land the station using a few Falcon Heavies intercepting it on the way down.

Then sell it intact to Disney.

Profit!

He will continue to fire engineers until they yell him it is possible using Ai-guided rocketry,

YouTuber who crashed plane for sponsorship dollars earns 6 months behind bars

He'll have a fine time - unless they classify him as a flight risk :)

4,000 days of Curiosity: Rover still 'strong' despite worn joints, vision issues

Re: Those wheels

Where Curiosity is going there are no roads.

New research aims to analyze how widespread COBOL is

PICs rule

COBOL's great strength is its ability to model number fields exactly how you want them. Need something that can go from 0 to 9999.9999999 (but not negative)? Easy with the right PIC clause. No slumming it with inaccurate Floats, or bignum integer work-arounds.

That strength alone (and yes, COBOL has many weaknesses) has kept it a contender in the financial arena.

Intel is over GPUs and CPUs – it's all about 'XPUs' now that OneAPI code-abstraction tool is golden

Bye?

Intel signalling they are leaving the processor market by selling ex-processing units.

After Cummings' Barnard Castle trip, cheeky Britons started using the word 'vision' in their passwords

Re: Forced changes

Years back I worked somewhere that enforced monthly changes of password.

Had to be upper and lower letters, digits, special characters, Could not reuse a password you had previously used. At least 8 characters long.

Pretty much everyone in the company password for this month would be some minor variation of

Nov-2020

Fits all the rules, and hard to forget. Secure? Not so much.

Microsoft open-sources fuzzing tool it uses in-house to keep Windows so very secure

Fuzzy Blue Screen of Death

Not all of us need a new tool to crash Windows.

Existing applications do the job very nicely.

When Apollo met Soyuz: 45 years ago, Americans and Russians played together nicely... IN SPAAAAACE

Re: LOL, and what if it's all a hoax?

It's a sad fact of technology, that the 1960s simply were not technologically advanced enough to fake a moon landing - and especially barely 25 years after faking an entire world war.

Barclays Bank appeared to be using the Wayback Machine as a 'CDN' for some Javascript

Tat for Tit

Dear Bank Manager

Thank you for reporting that an account fully managed by you in my name has become "overdrawn".

I take our responsibility to protect the contents of your accounts extremely seriously and it is a top priority.

I want to reassure my banker that their money was not at risk as a result of this error.

Only a tiny minority of customer accounts are affected by this situation.

What do you call megabucks Microsoft? No really, it's not a joke. El Reg needs you

Call them for what they are

The Office Boys.

Forget tabs – the new war is commas versus spaces: Web heads urged by browser devs to embrace modern CSS

Google it!

Maybe the mighty Googlers should try googling "backward compatibility" before requesting the whole world join their borg cube.

GlaxoSmithKline ditches IR35 contractors: Go PAYE or go home

For those unfortunate enough to have a Tory MP - it's time to phone them ask to get IR35 done.

Remind them - per page 59 of their manifesto - that they will "put you first" and their job is "to serve you".

And so tell them you won't hang up until they have done their priority job of fixing IR35 for you - wouldn't want them to get distracted with another task that isn't serving you.

Final update doled out to those who let Google sit on their face: Glass Explorer Edition cut off from the mothership

The Apple Newton was the overpriced floating train wreck of its day. Today, tablets and smartphones are part of our ambient background.

So failure does not always mean extinction.

Maybe when Google retools and launches the usable version - let's call it the Google Monocle - they might sell two to every networked punter in the world.

Not LibreOffice too? Beloved open-source suite latest to fall victim to the curse of Catalina

We don't say "cripple" any more - it's "a person experiencing disablement".

If it helps, pronounce the image software as JIMP.

Tesco parking app hauled offline after exposing 10s of millions of Automatic Number Plate Recognition images

Security Assurance

Tesco said there were no security risks at all - but advised all UK shoppers, for their convenience, to change their vehicle registration license plate as a precaution.

Oops - sorry cut'n'pasted the wrong marketing bland response to a security breech.

Serious Fraud Office fines Serco £22.9m over electronic tagging scandal

Criminal conviction

A criminal conviction would bar just about any individual from ever working within the criminal justice system again.

Why does that not apply to corporations? Serco still has many lucrative contracts.

Oh cool, the Bluetooth 5.1 specification is out. Nice. *control-F* master-slave... 2,000 results

Re: It's not cultural cluelessness

Let us now start pandering to those who dislike the terms Client and Server - Server being particularly problematic as it implies a subservient role.

The terms Provider and Consumer are much more closely fitting our modern day sensibilities.

So, all together now, Apache is not a web server. It is a web resources provider. So much simpler.

A developer always pays their technical debts – oh, every penny... but never a groat more

Re: Like any Debt, Not all Technical Debt is equally bad

> A credit card debt is a wholly different class of liability than a mortgage.

And a technical gambling debt or technical payday loan needs to be prioritised before your technical leg gets technically borken.

Boffins fear we might be running out of ideas

Doubling

Doubling from 1 to 2 takes one researcher.

Doubling from 1 billion to 2 billion takes 18 researchers.

Each of those 18 are 5.5 million times more effective than the original one.

Old Firefox add-ons get 'dead man walking' call

Re: unfortunate

Definitely worrying that uBlock Origin and NoScript are showing as Legacy. I could live without my other half-dozen customisations, but without those, Firefox is a damp squib.

Apple seeks patent for paper bag - you read that right, a paper bag

This invention infringes my own pocket-stowable, portable facial anonymization and ambient CO2 concentration device. My lawyers are furiously tying.

Adblock Plus blocks Facebook's ad-blocker buster: It's a block party!

There's spongers and then there's spongers

> Spongers. If you don't like their revenue model, don't use them.

Spongers wanting to run their scripts on my computer without contributing to the electricity costs - or having assured me they have indemnity insurance for any issues their scripts cause.

Now, if all their scripts came ISO-9000 certified, I may be willing to give them a discount on the electricity and insurance cover costs. Until they do, they can pay in full up front before I let their stuff run.

Just trying to be professional here.

UK's 'Sir King Cash' card fraudster ordered to cough up £560,000

Banker criminals

Now we have this precedent, I look forward to the return of our 1200 billion taken illegally during the "banking crisis" of 2008.