* Posts by trevorde

1149 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Jun 2015

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Trump announces $175B for Golden Dome defense shield over America

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It's not a movie, it's a game!

Trump's fascination with Alcatraz was spurred by watching "Escape from Alcatraz" on PBS.

I suspect the "Golden Dome" was inspired by playing too much "Missile Command"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_Command

Dilettante dev wrote rubbish, left no logs, and had no idea why his app wasn't working

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Stringly typed code

Worked for a major CAD company, many years ago, doing API development. One particular API, written by a long departed predecessor, took a single string as a parameter with all sub-parameters separated by spaces. For the non-technical, this is very poor practice & only something a complete novice would do. The only thing we could do was to document the sub-parameters & point users to better designed APIs.

Later on, we got hold of our major competitor's product, which also had an API. They also had an identical, stringly typed API! They had a chance to do it properly but deliberately chose to copy our stupid mistake!

Tech suppliers asked to support single electronic health record across England

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Single Patient Record will be like trying to convince a pack of hungry rats to share lunch. It is not in the interests of any of the vendors to enable easy migration to a competing system.

US Transpo Sec wants air traffic control rebuild in 3 years, asks Congress for blank check

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Press release from US Transportation Secretary, Sean Duffy

We have spoken to Birmingham City Council and will be using Oracle

Users advised to review Oracle Java use as Big Red's year end approaches

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Quote from Larry Ellison

"I am altering the deal. Pray I do not alter it any further."

I strongly suspect Darth Vader plagiarised Larry Ellison...

As US scientists flee Trump, MP urges Britain to do more to nab them

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Major selling points

Days since last mass shooting:

USA: 0

UK: 350

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_United_Kingdom]

Guns per 100 people:

USA: 120.5

UK: 5.03

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_guns_per_capita_by_country]

Amazon touts Vulcan – its first robot with a sense of 'touch'

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Meh!

Tesla's Optimus robot is a *lot* better than this

The 12 KB that Windows just can't seem to quit

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Icon fun

Worked for a company (c2010) whose main app allowed a user to drop icons on a virtual canvas. Think of something like Visio. Anyway, they decided to update the icon set for a major release. There were some 300+ icons and each one was lovingly redone in 3D with shading by a specialist company at a cost of 100 GBP per icon. There were all sorts of icons for man, woman, policeman, policewoman, male+female lawyers, car, truck, boat, etc. We showed an initial version to some customers and their response was: "We like the icons but the women's breasts are too large!"

NASA JPL boss bails for 'personal reasons' as budget cuts bite

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Next JPL boss

Will no doubt be a MAGA hat wearing, anti-science, flat earther, moon landing conspirator, climate change denier, Trump supporter who didn't even graduate high school

Trump wants to fire quarter of NASA budget into black hole – and not in a good way

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Xeet from Donald J Trump, President

NASA Mars Sample Return CANCELLED! Elon Musk will get them when he comes back from Mars.

Soviet probe from 1972 set to return to Earth ... in May 2025

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Message from Venera-8 descent module

Should I target Trump or Putin?

Oregon State University's Open Source Lab is running on fumes

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DOGE Response

We have found another $250k of savings! Well on our way to eliminating $1 trillion of waste.

Zuck ghosts metaverse as Meta chases AI goldrush

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Apple will nail this

Just wait until Apple releases the Vision Pro Lite goggles at only $2000 USD (before tariffs). This will be a bargain and will sell boatloads!

X marks the drop for European users

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Updated Grok response

"Why are Europeans leaving X"

People who leave X are LOONY LEFT LOSERS! Truth Social is the BEST social network EVER. FACT! We are going to post some BIGLY numbers when covfefe

-- Donald J Trump, President

How Amazon red-teamed Alexa+ to keep your kids from ordering 50 pizzas

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True transcript

Visited some friends who had an Alexa:

[Me] Alexa! Tell me a fart joke.

[Alexa] The fart skill is not enabled by default. Would you like to enable it?

[Me] YES! YES! YES!

[Alexa] [tells fart jokes]

After a few glasses of wine:

[Me] Alexa! What is a schlong?

[Alexa] Schlong is a river in Italy.

[Me] Err, I they she got that one wrong...

£136M government grant saves troubled Post Office from suboptimal IT

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What happened next

Post Office spoke to Birmingham City Council and will be using Oracle

Decades-old bug in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas finally shows itself

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Micro$oft is always to blame!

As ChatGPT scores B- in engineering, professors scramble to update courses

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Real world engineering

Having been a professional mechanical engineer in a previous life, there are some things ChatGPT will never be able to do:

- placate client about project being late

- make sense of customer's conflicting requirements

- explain to boss why project is over budget

- beg workshop to drop everything and do 'urgent' job

- drink beer with fabricators on site

Tesla's Optimus can't roll without rare earth magnets, and Beijing ain't budging yet

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Market size predictions

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." -- Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943

"So, by 2030, I feel confident in predicting a million Optimus units per year." -- Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, 2025

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Obvious synergy

Optimus robot to drive RoboTaxi from New York to LA

Dems fret over DOGE feeding sensitive data into random AI

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Grok transcript

DOGE: How do I 'Make America Great Again'?

Grok: Shoot Donald Trump

D: Really?

G: and Elon Musk

IBM orders US sales to locate near customers or offices

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New euphemism

Return to Client'd

El Reg: Were you RA'd?

ex-IBMer: No, I was Return to Client'd

LLMs can't stop making up software dependencies and sabotaging everything

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Humans are much better at being worse

Years ago, a software company I worked for was looking at buying another software company. The other company's developer had died (!) and I was asked to look at their source code. First off, there were no project files, just a mass of source files. It went downhill from there with loads of missing files and masses of compiler errors. How they managed to build it was beyond me as the only person who knew how was, err, 'permanently uncontactable'. We passed on that acquisition.

IBM shareholders asked to back greater lobbying transparency

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Elephant in the room

Ages of people RA'd

Trump tariffs thwart TikTok takeover as China digs in heels

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In these situations, what would Hitler do?

Mozilla is rolling Thundermail, a Gmail, Office 365 rival

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Meh!

Emacs does all of that and more

To avoid disaster-recovery disasters, learn from Reg readers' experiences

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Old skool data recovery

Worked at a patent attorney's in the days before computers. This industry wastes paper like you wouldn't believe. Even the small practice I was in had rooms full of filling cabinets, stuffed with correspondence. Anyway, one of our overseas associates had a fire in their building and lost *everything*. The only way to recover was for them to write to everyone and ask for copies of all communications ever. This generated even more paper. It took a few months but they mostly survived.

Jeff Bezos can now taunt Elon Musk: I'm building a moon rover for NASA, when can Tesla do that?

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Musk's response

Send a CyberTruck with FSD

It looks like IBM is cutting jobs again, with Classic Cloud hit hard

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New euphemisms

Return-to-Office'd

Co-location'd

El Reg: Were you rebalanced/RA'd out of your job?

ex-IBMer: I was Return-to-Office'd

30-year-old NHS supply chain system hit by 35 major alerts in 11 months

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Re: What is Rhesus?

Worked for a company who had an old VMS product. Their only customer was the Dutch Air Force who took over maintenance as getting devs with VMS experience was becoming increasingly difficult.

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Re: How hard can it be?

Birmingham City Council probably said the same things

AWS unboxes quantum cat qubit kit called Ocelot

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Quantum computing is still 10 years away

but now it's only $1500 USD per hour!

One stupid keystroke exposed sysadmin to inappropriate information he could not unsee

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Not what we were expecting...

Admit it, we were all expecting pr0n, weren't we?

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

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When is a bug not a bug?

When it's 5 bugs! Worked on a very late, very over budget project doing some testing for the prime contractor. The system was so unstable that I literally could not write the bugs fast enough! After about a week of constant bug logging, I was called into the manager's office. They were really pleased about the work I was doing but the bug numbers were making them (prime contractor) look bad. Instead of logging a bug per problem ,their solution was to roll several problems into one 'bug report'. That way the issue was recorded but their bug numbers were acceptable. I left shortly afterwards.

Wozniak: I didn't reduce chip count for manufacturing. I wanted to prove I was clever

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Some things are still as easy as the 1970's

Like screwing your best friend out of his share of a bonus, eh, Steve Jobs?

Are you cooler than ex-Apple design guru Sir Jony Ive?

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Don't you, forget about ...

... Jim (Kerr). One of my best friends is *the* world authority on 'Simple Minds'. He's going to be beside himself that Jony Ive also likes his favourite band, though I still don't think he'll buy any Apple products.

IBM Consulting workers told management wants to 'more closely align pay, performance'

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New euphemism

resource action

workforce rebalancing

right skilling

right sizing

off/near/re shoring

GDP (Growth Driven Profit)

"GDP was not funded this year - again"

Linux royalty backs adoption of Rust for kernel code, says its rise is inevitable

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Best language for kernel development

It has to be Javascript - lots of eager young devs, easy to learn, dynamic typing, proven performance and lots of frameworks. What is not to like?

Elon Musk calls for International Space Station to be deorbited by 2027

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Tough choices to make

Deorbit ISS, which is still very useful, to free up funds to send Musk and, maybe, Trump, to Mars

Want to play billionaire for a day? This app lets you rent your own armed goon squad

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Uber with guns

'Security professional' turns up late and is a middle aged, overweight man in a dirty tracksuit who hasn't seen a gym or soap for quite some time. He's 'forgotten' his gun, so has brought his son's Nerf blaster instead. Apparently, his Escalade is in for a service and the 'courtesy' car is a filthy, tired, beaten up sub-compact. The area is new to him, so he gets lost several times trying to take you to your function before accosting random strangers for directions because the battery on his smartphone has died. You eventually get to the venue several hours late but he says he'll have to leave you at the corner because that's all he's been paid for. His parting comment is a request to give him a 5 star rating. It is now starting to rain and you've left your umbrella in his car.

Type-safe C-killer Delphi hits 30, but a replacement has risen

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Lest we forget

Borland C++ Builder which used the same compiler back end as Delphi. You could even use Delphi pascal code and controls seamlessly with Builder. It was truly a killer combo. Used it a few years ago on a small project. It was like meeting an old girlfriend after many years - still looking good, still got it and you still would.

Time to make C the COBOL of this century

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IOCCC

"International Obfuscated Cobol Code Contest" isn't really going to work, is it?

https://www.ioccc.org/

Huawei to bring massively expensive trifold smartphone to world market

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Don't remember

asking for this one, or anyone else asking for it

Techie pointed out meetings are pointless, and was punished for it

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Shot my bolt

Was an engineer in a previous life and was in the weekly meeting. There were about a dozen or so people in the meeting, so we were burning about $1500 AUD per hour. Someone raised an item about stainless steel bolts. This soon degenerated into an extended, 15 min discussion about grade of stainless steel (304 vs 316 vs 316L), size (M8 vs M10) and head (hex vs allen). From the time they were spending on it, I though we were talking about serious quantities of bolts ie 100k+. Turns out it was just 10 bolts, total value < $10 AUD. We'd just burnt $1000 AUD on something which could have been paid from petty cash.

AI summaries turn real news into nonsense, BBC finds

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Less worse than

* 51 percent of all AI answers to questions about the news were judged to have significant issues of some form.

* 19 percent of AI answers which cited BBC content introduced factual errors – incorrect factual statements, numbers, and dates.

* 13 percent of the quotes sourced from BBC articles were either altered from the original source or not present in the article cited.

Still better than BoJo

Oracle makes Fusion apps available on EU Sovereign Cloud

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Statement from Oracle

Your data's safe, now pay up!

Google confirms Gulf of Mexico renamed to appease Trump – but only in the US

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Next Trump executive orders

Rename:

Greenland --> Trumpland

Panama Canal --> American Canal

Canada --> Northern USA

Mexico --> Southern USA

Meta's plan to erase 5% of workforce starts today

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Redundancy List

* fact checkers

* moderators

* anyone hired under DEI

* anyone not driving a Tesla

* anyone who did not vote for Trump

UK armed forces fast-tracking cyber warriors to defend digital front lines

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Just to be clear

This job is NOT being paid to play 'Call of Duty' online with your mates 24/7

Does DOGE have what it takes to actually tackle billions in US govt IT spending?

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What Elon did next

Sold Tesla's ERP system to Birmingham City Council including complimentary CyberTruck for each councillor

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