Posts by JT_3K

Yes, I wrote a very expensive bug. In my defense I was only seven years old at the time

Re: Great "Who, Me?"

Been meaning to buy a slide rule to teach my 9yo and hopefully buy her the same loophole I had at the end of the 90s about "no calculators in exams". I've ordered *that* one. Thanks for the model check.

Re: fastest backups in the west

Can...can we not just have one? Please? I don't feel I'm being greedy? Surely we can just have the one? Maybe two so we can cross each way?

Surely someone can break-even running one and treat it as a CSR/marketing piece?

Former and current Microsofties react to the latest round of layoffs

Re: MS is the new IBM

I've been saying for ages that AI smacks of the dotcom boom and bust. That said, if we didn't learn the lessons with the advent of trains in the first half of c19th, we've got no hope.

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

Re: Reminders.txt

[MS AI]: Yes, I've checked and it's "3". Is there anything else I can help you with today?

British govt agents step in as Harrods becomes third mega retailer under cyberattack

Re: M&S Store shopping - no stock at the best of times

Noting I'm not vegan, having been at the coal-face for a (relatively) short lived meat-alternative firm, I can offer the other side of this coin.

The original purpose was a meat-alternative that was both environmentally friendly and didn't need to be endured. We ran a proof-of-concept that was initially global, and would have been regionalised in growth. Note that we: grew a crop locally in Canada; locally harvested and trucked to a near-ish big city; reprocessed the crop; air-freighted it to the European mainland; ground shipped it to a facility in that country; processed it in to various meals; ground shipped it to a storage facility in that country; ground-freighted it to a UK storage facility; sea-freighted it to New York; ground shipped it to test market in Seattle; and sold it there. With all that, it was still demonstrably lower carbon footprint than rearing an animal locally in Seattle and selling it through "normal" approach.

Shame about the company and internal issues. Some of the products you genuinely would struggle to tell the difference. (Some were a dumpster fire mind).

Fujitsu promised to sit out UK deals ... then Northern Ireland called with £125M

Herein lies the issue. Is there any fundamental difference between Land Registry in NI, Scot, Wales or England? One assumes not, and if there is, that these hurdles should be cleared and processes aligned so there is not. We all know this (as every other government software procurement) is going to overrun, be subject to re-scoping and scope creep, take bathtubs of additional monies and ultimately be in place for at least twice (if not 3x) as long as planned with a lucrative support contract.

Why is the government funding individual platforms?

Trump blinks: 'Substantially' lower China tariffs promised

Does anyone else feel like they're watching the antithesis to "the West Wing" in real time?

UK council selling the farm (and the fire station) to fund ballooning Oracle project

Re: Lemmings

It's fair, and I accept the two thumbs down above.

I'd hazard those commenters haven't suffered the front line of several years in NHS-adjacent IT as I have, where the sheer volume of change-blockers are insane. Yes, the people on the front line do an amazing job, but the refusal of mid-level leaders to push the change required to make 16 hospitals have the same phone system that behaves in the same way was a living nightmare. Furthermore, refusal of the top management at site to even engage, let alone push the mid-levels to force some basic changes was a nightmare.

IT can lead the horse to water, make sure the water is clean and accessible and fractionally the cost/maintenance of the old water, reason with the horse as to why it needs to drink and explain the importance to the zoo-keeper. But the horse used to drink in the other corner, the keeper doesn't care the other corner is needed for something else or that all enclosures need to be the same. The zoo manager doesn't want the noise/challenge. The horse simply sits obstinately and refuses with their entire arsenal because change is scary. Before you know it, each horse has an aqueduct to its original corner at huge expense, requiring every other enclosure change to pay attention to each fiefdom.

Re: Lemmings

We *can* learn from these issues but won't. It's been the same (IMHO) for at least the 20yrs I've seen it.

It means that non-IT people, often execs and senior managers, need to understand, buy in to, and drive through vision and change. Egos in fiefdoms need to be toned down because "Steve" might be the big fish in a hospital, but needs to toe a line with all the "Steves" in the whole country. It's much easier to beat your chest like a gorilla and use that to tell the teams below you that you're going to bat for them, than it is to do the painful things like process evaluation and changing working profiles.

Besides, "Steve" doesn't want to change the working profile because the standard metric doesn't play to the strengths of his output - they probably don't show him in as good a light as the way he reports at the moment. There's less wiggle room, less ambiguity and as such he'll be shining a spotlight on how he actually achieves directly compared with every other Steve in the country. It doesn't matter though, Steve only has to bluster and filibuster for six years before he retires and it's not his problem any more, or perhaps two more years before he expects to be promoted and it's someone else to deal with it. Inaction is safe, it's known, whereas change is risky and hard work, and people get fired for change.

Ultimately at the top of the tree, it's politicians. They would have to stop playing political football and dicking about with "reorganising" (looking at you "PCTs and SHAs" or "GP Led Commissioning"), and start doing the less sexy "headline" bits with more grumpy retorts. But again, if they keep their head down, it's only six months before the NHS lead becomes the Energy Secretary, and then 13 months before they're the Education Secretary, and 3 months before they're punted to Home Secretary...

Re: Lemmings

See every comment I've made on here about the NHS and their software woes. Your query can all be summed up in one run-on sentence:

"...but these forms need to come off in duplicate with the second one printing on *green* paper, because Janet comes in on Wednesday mornings and uses them to manually plan [UNRELATED PROCESS THAT 94% OF COUNCILS AUTOMATED IN 1992] so *we* need the [UNRELATED-TO-THIS-PROCESS ID NUMBER] as a line item on her green printout, but not on the main one..."

Additionally, note that they're scared because $NEIGHBOURING COUNCIL$ also has a "Janet" doing this and they tried to change her job in 2003 but the union whipped up such a fuss it made the national press. At least Janet retires in 2028, $NEIGHBOURING$ "Janet" doesn't retire until 2040 and due to job-share regulation, is training Sylwia who won't retire until 2074...

China's DeepSeek just emitted a free challenger to OpenAI's o1 – here's how to use it on your PC

Re: Nvidia stock price is sinking this morning

For some time I've felt this had all the familiar sights and smells of the late 90s dot-com bubble. Are we finally seeing the start of the ultimate collapse of the whole "lETs ShOeHOrN aI In to EveRYthInG" marketing ploy?

Brit competition watchdog takes aim at Google, Apple's mobile ecosystems

Ugh. Look, the CMA is fine and probably right to investigate. But "Android's openness has helped to expand choice, reduce prices, and democratize access to smartphones and apps" is a bit of a misnomer. Some people love the flexibility, opportunities for multiple app-store options and revel in the mass of hardware options. For me, I choose the Apple store primarily because it *doesn't* do that. There's one App Store which is (fairly well) screened. There's one set of phone options and it's fairly clear how that stacks up. Do I pay a premium? Hell yes. Do I however go home from a tech job knowing that I don't need to "do the tech" for me, my wife or child and pay the premium specifically so I don't? Yes.

Not saying there aren't issues to be tackled here. Not saying I'm "an Apple fan". Just saying I actively choose their world because it allows me to be a little more mindless in the way I operate. Forcing them to split App Stores reminds me of the EU's Cookies or Browser Choice debacles so let's not have another of them please.

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

Re: Discrimination never died it just morphed into new things.

Agreed. That's the *literal point* of these scrapped laws. People are psychologically disposed to prefer things that align with their own world view, including their own biases - whether consciously or unconsciously. I can't even.

Brits must prove their age on adult sites by July, says watchdog

Re: Age verification

Arguably this is the way. I draw some parallels to when I was a lad in the early 90s however. Removal of my ability to watch a number of popular TV shows of the time because of parental concerns of violence and poor role-modelling (and a lack of interest in football) arguably snowballed from being left out of playground games to a rift between myself and other classmates, and ultimately a harder childhood later down the line. A good (school) year of being unable to take part in games centred around cartoons which are now fondly remembered as cult-classics ultimately left me some distance removed and this didn't resolve as the same children progressed to high school.

In a similar way, whilst protecting children from "the horrors of the internet" is important, without access to the cultural content of the era, they'll struggle to properly fit with their classmates. No, I don't trust many social media platforms and worry about the long-term impact of increasingly short-form content on pre-teens. I'm also aware that occasional curated content can be great to share with a child, and that as they reach secondary school, their friends will gain access.

It's also important also to teach that age the important ability to use the internet, to research, comprehend and apply, and embed the criticality of good internet hygiene as a formative idea. My child has a tablet with a whitelist. In a few years, that'll change to a blacklist and a dedicated SSID with a gateway device. At some point I'll have to take off the brakes and give full access. I'd rather do that in a controlled and graceful manner than flicking an on-off switch when they hit some arbitrary legal age.

As someone has already pointed out, before the heady days of the internet, material such as the Anarchist's Cookbook and naked people were circulated in print, floppy disk or in the case of the latter, playing card form and disks even be bought from a local market. Kids will find a way and I'd rather to some extent that it was safer and less illegal than some of the early compute antics that, allegedly, could have been done in my era. Yes, an image of a naked person is one thing, but the dark corners of the web get much darker than that and if you're looking in those areas, you'll get exposed to both.

UK floats ransomware payout ban for public sector

Re: There should be a law against it...

Realistically that's a pipe dream until the platforms/applications are heterogenous across functions. The NHS or every council comes to mind. To do that, strong management needs to force contiguous working practices across every function (so every bin lorry/MRI/council tax/etc is managed the same in every area) and every platform can be the same, then secured more tightly as a single effort will secure the 382 councils or 9,085 GP Surgeries further. Until we get anywhere near that, politicians are just shouting in to the wind.

Of course, it's much easier to dick about *recategorising* schools, the NHS elements, councils, police departments, etc than to actually force through the sort of basic alignment that would fix them. The cynic in me assumes it's intended to ensure the statistics and their collection leave enough wiggle room that you can make them say what they want.

With 10 months of support remaining, Windows 10 still dominates

Conspiracy Alery

I predict Windows 12 will basically do the same thing Windows 10 did. When they made Windows 8 such a steaming pile, I remember the relief of Windows 10 being viable and less trash, something I could actually roll out. It's like "New Coke" all over again.

Contrary to some, traceroute is very real – I should know, I helped make it work

Re: One of my favotire tools

You missed an important part. The ability to chain commands with '&&'.

'ipconfig /release && ipconfig /renew'

A godsend when working remotely.

Asda decided on a 'no go' for 'mass rollout' of store IT conversion

Re: Why

Because time and time again, arrogant dinosaurs at the top think they've bought a bit of software that already "does the thing" and that it can be installed as one installs Adobe Reader. Despite protestations, it's easier not to have the difficult discussions about important people being given actual time and being incentivised to do project work when actually it's much easier to leave them prioritising current business efforts without backfilling them. There's no understanding that an ERP is a blank slate upon which you build your new processes, and that it will have the impact of highlighting shortfalls in your management/processes such as pointing a magnifying glass at an ant on a sunny day. Then when it starts to go sideways, cognitive dissonance makes a great umbrella that "the IT project" isn't working and they turn turtle: refusing to push through the difficult; not having the challenging discussions; shouting and blaming; and not fixing the resourcing issues.

In actuality, precious few see the criticality of resource, tight deadlines and the "lost productive time" engagement of the *really good* people in every team to make sure their processes are built properly and joined up between teams. Few *lead* and force through, making a big deal of those that won't prioritise it sufficiently. By the time they realise, it's passed the failure point of no return and they ultimately spend more time playing CYA, potentially with some career learnings, more likely off to somewhere else.

The amount of directorial teams that seem deaf when the CxO tries to drive this from the back are staggering.

Re: Who is running the project?

That'll be because the council probably decided ERP was "an IT project, because it's just a piece of software", and that they didn't have to take part in it themselves.

Cops developing Ghostbusters-esque weapon to take out e-bike thugs

Re: Because you don't want to accidentally brick a Tesla

Perhaps we can arrange for you to be hit, as I was, by a delivery clown on an e-scooter rocketing through the pedestrianised area of Leeds one evening. You can thus experience the silent affair of impact, then coming to your senses around 10ft from your original location with a bruise that stretches from your ankle to your shoulder on one side and approx. 50% of that on the opposite and having smashed a company laptop. If lucky, we can also arrange for the delivery clown to be as aggressive and confrontational as I received. As a bonus we can tack on the "police wholly uninterested" piece, despite it being well covered by both council and shopping centre CCTV.

For reference, if I'm a 6ft "portly" gentleman travelling on an obvious straight path and can be thrown that far in the middle of rush hour with that impact, I fear it'd have killed a child or old person.

It's not like the Netherlands where they have bike lanes everywhere that could be legislated - either it's in pedestrian areas that the riders are woefully ill-equipped to behave or on the roads where both drivers and riders are woefully ill equipped to behave.

Astroscale orbital janitor gets within 15 meters of space junk

Re: It's the little things...

Cheers

Re: It's the little things...

I've often wondered how often this actually happens as it's evident, yet I never hear of it. I know it's a (mild?) risk on a spacewalk too. Any stats/logs/stories?

British Army zaps drones out of the sky with laser trucks

Re: Cost per shot

Stupid question (genuine one too) here but what happens when they miss? I assume with a conventional weapon we have an ultimate loss of propulsion and gravitational forces bring the projectile back to earth - hopefully without collateral damage.

A laser suffers some bending due to Earth's gravitational pull on a big scale but nowhere near enough to "bring it down". Thus it heads out through the atmosphere getting weaker and dispersing as it goes. Does it have enough force to damage a satellite if it comes in to contact as it goes? I'm assuming the chances of doing so are slim, but how slim?

Broadcom says VMware is a better money-making machine than it hoped

Re: And how long...

I mean it's not like it's difficult to swap your hypervisor cross-org. If people didn't like these price increases they'd have bought something else. They certainly wouldn't be plotting a 12-18mth horizon in which they leveraged themselves off the platforms that had been chugging along for years by using these price increases to light a fire under a board and make it a priority activity in the short term meaning this action might collectively tank VMWare income from late 2025 and see it collapse wholesale from late 2026? No, definitely not. This is a sound business decision I'm sure.

Russia gives life sentence to Hydra dark web kingpin after seizing a ton of drugs

What are they going to do with that half-ton of coke?

Outlook is poor for those still on Windows Mail, Calendar, People apps by end of year

Or namely because it can't "do" shared mailboxes.

I mean, it's not like that's an organisational basic staple that any mug who's used/maintained email in any organisation for any length of time could have told you was a pre-req, rite?

Win a slice of XP cheese if you tell us where Microsoft should put Copilot next

Time to kill two birds with one stone.

Microsoft to purchase all Spotify CarThing rights, defunct devices and warehouse stock and relaunch Zune as a car brand based on that hardware. Possibly rebranding Spotify as a "whitelabel", possibly not. Prodigious sale of personal movement data used to fund the resurrection, along with a "loss-leader" hearts and minds mentality about getting people to interact more closely with Copilot and a marketing campaign about it being a "Copilot in your car".

Ransom gang claims attack on NHS Alder Hey Children's Hospital

I reserve that word for special use cases. In this case it's justified.

Children's. Hospital.

Remember that "data" in hospital breaches often includes pictures of vulnerable people in their most challenged moments that are needed for medical reasons but otherwise shouldn't be shared. Cancer hospitals and pictures of mastectomy come to mind.

Children's. Hospital.

Nope.

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

Re: Thermostats

Arguably, the point of a heavy cast iron pan (such as a Le Creuset) is for the high Specific Heat Capacity of the pan to minimise the impact of the food being added to the high temp. As such, running the thing to "furiously boiling" is putting more heat in the pan, meaning that adding cold food to boiling water is less likely to stop the water boiling as the pan can keep providing the heat. That said, with thin-wall low weight pans, there's little point.

Re: I had one user...

"'PC LOAD LETTER'? What the hell does that mean?"

M4 MacBook Pro shows Apple is still glued to the idea of unfixable laptops

Re: It's in the Apple DNA!

The Mac Pro was no picnic. I inherited one when I started at a new role in ~2011. They'd spent £5.5k on it around 9mths ago and the graphics card was so poor I tried a rip & replace which it refused because the new one didn't have the Apple-specific firmware on it (despite being "supported" and able to be purchased). What really upset me was that it was equivalent to a £2k off-the-shelf PC (a £1.75k homebuild) in spec and when "drag-raced" against a £2k PC for it's sole Adobe Suite rendering job was no faster.

I'll have an iPhone because I prefer the "I'm not doing anything technical after 5pm" mindset, but everything else Apple can get in the sea.

A year after Broadcom took control of VMware, it's in the box seat

Re: What Rivals?

Ah yes, HP's offering from the article.

It's a great comment in the original piece about people having long memories. I for one got burned in HPE's Itanium "we're not supporting it suckers...well, maybe we're not that hasty....ok mr judge, we '''''''''''''will'''''''''''' support these boxes, promise". mess. It'll be a cold day in hell before I pivot that way.

See also: Google Graveyard.

EU buyers still shunning pure electric vehicles, prefer hybrids

Re: Plug in hybrids

NCAP is welcome to borrow my G12 7-Series for a week or two. The one that seems to think a stretch of the M62 outside Hull is 5mph and often has similar issues elsewhere. Around 3-4x per year it decides I'm going to have a collision with an parked or oncoming car which I can deal with, but 1x per year it proceeds to stand on the brakes to avoid it and needing the driver behind to take evasive action. It often seems to happen with pavement-mounted pedestrians too. It it wasn't such a lovely car in every other respect, it'd be gone.

My wife's Golf has a similar repeatable collision issue on a road near home, even when there are no cars

Whomp-whomp: AI PCs make users less productive

Re: AI uses - writing emails, transcribing meetings, managing files... wtf?

Jokes aside, well. The Polish team I spent time with had a very regional dialect and I managed to follow throughout. I tried it with my Bulgarian team who both had a very different dialect and it had them too.

Re: AI uses - writing emails, transcribing meetings, managing files... wtf?

In terms of transcription, I'm unsure whether the Teams service is deemed """"AI"""" but having had to interact with other regions has been outstanding. I've been able to (with local HR) recruit IT positions in other countries where it's allowed the candidates in a stressful situation to not have to add the burden of a 2nd language. I've followed the technical and visual ques with HR providing a localised view on their "feel and fit". The candidates are going to be based in that region and speaking in that language anyway, just need some English to interact with the UK team when not under pressure.

I'm not jumping on the "AI hype train" but the live transcription (if a little crappy at times) gets the job done really well.

$50M semiconductor fraudster pleads guilty to Russian chip-exporting scheme

Re: Remember...

Remember: never break two laws at the same time.

AI hiring bias? Men with Anglo-Saxon names score lower in tech interviews

Unless things have changed, my 3yr BSc had a 100pg dissertation req'd as part of a larger self-directed project. I still have a copy somewhere...

Re: You can't add arbitrary data to remove bias.

I'm always reminded of the joke "What's the difference between a 16'' pizza and a jazz musician? A 16'' pizza can feed a family of four". It's a bit crass but a reminder that, further to the comment about training, it's much easier to undertake that training and focus on becoming exceptional rather than just good, when the need to fund yourself (i.e. no generational wealth or family support) isn't an issue.

(FWIW I interviewed Jordan in Coventry back in '05 and he was bloody lovely. They were impressive live too.)

Windows 95 setup was three programs in a trench coat, Microsoft vet reveals

Re: Downhill?

In '06 I had a uni mate who did his dissertation on a honeypot: an unpatched W2k "SP0" box that he hooked directly to the internet. IIRC it lasted 6 minutes before it was completely owned. He threw it up again with similar results.

Re: "the excitement of installing Windows 95 for the first time"

I don't know. A year or so ago I embarked to re-create the PC that ran a friend's Facebook Marketplace sourced wheel-alignment ramp. Going back to it all felt quite magical I can assure. Similar when I threw together a DOSBOX to run some older games a while back. Worth a revist.

European Cloud Competition Observatory created to keep an eye on software licensing

I remember going to Bulgaria to see some of my team. They joked over a beer at some point that most "problems" can be sorted out in Bulgaria for ~50 LEV (£22/$27). You want a cigarette but your hotel room is non-smoking and you don't want to go downstairs? Fine of 50 LEV. Parked where you shouldn't? Fine of 50 LEV. At some point this became the cost of doing these things, rather than a punitive damage for having done so.

At what point does Microsoft believe that the $10-30m is significantly less than the monies earned from doing nothing and wait to pay it again - like Ford and the Pinto?

Sweden's 'Doomsday Prep for Dummies' guide hits mailboxes today

Can anyone else here the jingle for "Protect and Survive"?

Ambitious overclocker cools Raspberry Pi 5 with liquid nitrogen

Re: I remember the Celeron 300A I had

Roll out the 486 chip with the heavy-lead pencil, the lightbulb hooked to the telephone connector and remember you'll need to install the sound card **before** trying to load the CD-ROM driver.

AI PCs flood the market. Their makers hope someone wants them

Re: Generative AI is only a bullshit generator.

Was my first thought too. Microsoft still trying to railroad me to speak to their enterprise Copilot programme. They're not going to use this to leverage a platform refresh or nail home a costly extra license from me. I get the sense internally at these places it's all a bit Emperor's New Clothes.

Microsoft admits Outlook crashes, says impact 'mitigated'

Re: Hardly a surprise

I have users that use multiple mailboxes and run Outlook in Cached Mode so will be holding on to that as long as I can.

Got an idea for dealing with space waste? NASA wants to hear from you

I mean, the whole thing's made of cheese anyway. Unlimited food.

Recall the Recall recall? Microsoft thinks it can make that Windows feature palatable

For years I've seen the "nOW Is tEh WiNTeR oF LinUX, sHeEpLe" posts after every major Microsoft offering, major system change or hiccup. For years I've scoffed and rebuked the idea.

This is different. This is the first time I see Microsoft OS being something I'd be wholly unwilling to deploy in a corporate environment. I've dealt with the other idiocy, removed Game Bar and Candy Crush from desktop instances, slogged through ME, Vista, 8.0 and the disastrous patronising launch event for the latter. I've swallowed outages, missing configs and the ever-moving settings that no longer marry their own guidance & help.

If Recall gets pushed through, this is where I draw the line. Microsoft should note, it's not just OS. I pull the OS and back out of Office, obviously. That pulls my OneDrive too, and I need no SharePoint integration so 365 drops. Without 365 I'm not beholden to Teams so my Teams Phone moves to 8x8 or similar. No Office/OS means no Defender and I pull MS Project and Visio because why not. If I've got no Microsoft Stack, and having witnessed how much Dynamics hates anything other than Edge, that ERP project I'm starting in 12-18mths excludes Dynamics F&O, and I start to look at how I can get off Dynamics Sales. If I'm not running those, I'm not beholden to that SQL instance in Azure, so that goes, as does the rest of that estate as I don't need Entra now.

This gets costly for them, really, really quickly.

Admins using Windows Server Update Services up in arms as Microsoft deprecates feature

WSUS I kind of get. It's Wordpad I don't?

How many times I've been on a server and needed to open some archaic or well hidden documentation in the install folder of some software and Wordpad delivered. I can't see it being complex to maintain - I seem to recall in my limited coding experience that writing something similar was an entry level exercise. I don't want to install some 3rd party application and have to take my server on to the internet to pick it up. For those "stood in a datacentre at 3am" moments, it was a very integral part of an OS.

Re: MS seems to have lost it... big time

Difficult, I mean, I loved Win 95.

Never forget however that it was a complete mess of a launch. Microsoft shipped "Win95A" to all integrators and OEMs, espousing the new world of USB...before weeks later realising they'd not included the USB elements of the OS in Win95A. IIRC it was recalled en-masse just days before launch and everything sent to landfill as Microsoft scrambled to provide Win95B, and the integrators scrambled to reload all the machines sat in warehouses and distributors globally. This was especially important as the internet wasn't ubiquitous at that point so patching wasn't viable.

If I recall correctly, that was the same launch event at which the OS was projected on the full wall behind Gates who was looking at the audience and talking (?about reliability?) as it bluescreened.

I still love Win 95 but the launch was rough.