* Posts by trevorde

845 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Jun 2015

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VR headsets to shift 30 million units a year by 2027, vastly behind wearables

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Virtual Reality Apathy

Worked on a product many years ago which supported various stereoscopic goggles. I took a support call from one vendor of these goggles that they no longer worked with our product. I forwarded it on to our graphics guy, who quickly found and fixed the issue. He said the functionality had been broken for about 4 years (!).

How is this problem mine, techie asked, while cleaning underground computer

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Fire hazard

Went to a timber mill where the manager was complaining about the SCADA PC being a little unreliable. It was an ancient 286, back when Pentiums were commonplace, so it was probably getting to the end of its life. Opened it up and it was chock full of sawdust! How it didn't catch fire was beyond me. Spent 10 mins with a vacuum cleaner, wiped all the dust and it ran perfectly. I suspect it will still be running at the heat death of the universe.

Now IBM sued for age discrim by its own HR veterans

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Alternate headline

Now IBM sued for age discrim by its own HR dinobabies

Venture capital firm makes 'unsolicited' bid for MariaDB buyout

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It's really Oracle, isn't it?

These days you can teach old tech a bunch of new tricks

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Regrets? I've had a few...

Was given a 21 inch, high res (1600x1200) CRT monitor from work, many years ago. I ended up giving it away after a year once LCD flat screens became affordable. Now it's probably worth more than the LCD which replaced it.

Local governments aren't businesses – so why are they force-fed business software?

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Inevitable

All companies get to a certain size and then decide: "Of the thousands of CRM systems on the market, our business is so unique that *none* of them are suitable. However, this one from [insert CRM/ERP vendor here], does most of what we need. In fact, they have assured us that, with some minor customisation, it will do *exactly* what we want."

Software companies are even worse because they say: "We have all these highly paid developers, just sitting there, doing nothing. Why don't we get them to do it? It's just 'software'. How hard can it be?"

Unless your core business is being a CRM vendor, you're better off changing your business to suit one of the many CRM systems. It'll be cheaper, quicker and less hassle.

Elon Musk has beef with Bill Gates because he shorted Tesla stock, says biographer

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Missed opportunity

Pity Xitter is now private as it would've been brilliant to short

IBM Cloud to 'uplift' prices by up to 29 percent

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IBM doublespeak

uplift = price rise

Resource Action = redundancies

workforce rebalancing = mass redundancies

rightskilling = redundancies for those doing the work

redeployment = relocating people until they resign

early professional hire = cheap, clueless graduate

nearshoring = cheaper for IBM but in a timezone close to customer

offshoring = even cheaper for IBM but in a timezone far from customer

dinobaby = anyone over 35

Microsoft billing 3 cents a minute to revisit tedious Teams meetings via API

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Meeting Tax

Worked at a company where my manager was in back to back meetings 8hrs a day, 5 days a week. I suggested the idea of a 'meetings tax':

* 10% of your salary is allocated as a 'meetings allowance'

* any meetings you attend are charged at £100/hr from your allowance

* first 15 mins of a meeting are free, after that it is chargeable

* you can leave a meeting at any time

* all meetings are optional

* if you absolutely require someone at a meeting, you have to pay for them

* at the end of the year, you get to keep anything in your 'meetings allowance' as a bonus

The idea is to incentivize:

* short, focused meetings

* emails not meetings

* only going to meetings if you can contribute or get value

* only call meetings if absolutely necessary

He thought I was joking. I wasn't.

Arm wrestles assembly language guru's domains away citing trademark issues

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Pre-IPO theatre

A company's actions are very limited during a pre-IPO phase, so Softbank suddenly enforcing trademarks is to show investors they are 'serious' about protecting their IP. Bullying an individual is a quick, easy win for them and gets them investor kudos.

Let's give these quadruped robot dogs next-gen XM7 rifles, says US Army

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I'm worried about a soldier throwing a hand grenade and the dog fetching it!

We're about to hit peak device count, says HTC veep, as AR takes over

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Alternate headline

VR/AR/XR/Metaverse is the future! Again.

FreeBSD can now boot in 25 milliseconds

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Meanwhile on Windows

Updating ... 10% complete ... Do not turn off your computer ... Windows will restart automatically after installing updates ...

Windows screensaver left broadcast techie all at sea

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Possessed screensaver

They rolled out PCs a while ago at my brother's work. Some of the older typists had never seen a computer before, let alone used Windows. After a few beers on a Friday night, one of the blokes changed a few of the screensavers to scroll text across the screen: "KILL THEM ALL!" Really freaked out some of the women on the Monday!

Musk's latest X-periments: No more headlines, old posts vanish, block gets banned

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Meanwhile at X HQ

[Yacc] No more headlines? WTF? Old posts vanish? WTAF? Block gets banned? WTAAF? Elon? ... Elon! ... [desperately] ELON!!

Token prison sentence for first convicted NFT insider trader

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Perfect explanation of NFTs

https://sebastianherold.com/ive-found-it-the-perfect-explanation-of-nfts-3a8242ca7f80

IBM says GenAI can convert that old COBOL code to Java for you

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Meanwhile at Oracle...

[Larry Ellison to engineer] Did you say 850 *billion* lines of COBOL to be converted to Java?

[engineer] Err, that's right. All the banks, public utilities and mission critical apps are using it.

[LE] ... and they want to convert it *all* to Java?

[eng] Err, that's right...

[LE] I'M MINTED!

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Alternate headline

AI takes COBOL code no-one understands and converts it to Java code no-one understands

IBM shows off its sense of humor in not-so-funny letter leak

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IBM Humour

Resource Actions will continue until morale improves

CEO Zooms through the bad news on Q2 earnings call

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Needs subtitles

MS Teams has subtitles and it's hilariously bad. Zoom needs to implement this. It's a great way to make boring meetings more interesting.

What DARPA wants, DARPA gets: A non-hacky way to fix bugs in legacy binaries

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Pure sorcery

Worked for a company which had a product which did exactly this. It extracted the image from a car's ECU and listed all the variables and functions. This was then imported into Matlab where you could then replace the functions with your own or define a function to replace a variable. You could then press the magic button and it would reflash the ECU.

I looked under the covers and it was an unholy mix of Matlab, gnu disassemblers, assemblers and string replacement. They told me it was written by the bloke who developed the bit-torrent protocol. Three hundred years ago he would have been burnt at the stake for witchcraft.

Resilience is overrated when it's not advertised

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The horror...

Worked on a system where we had redundant failover servers, both quite well specced. Only problem was our software was so flaky we had to have a separate watchdog timer to reboot the system when our software stopped heartbeating. This happened a lot. The most reliable part of the system was the 'database' which was a set of text files, kept on a shared network drive (no sniggering at the back, please).

Lawsuit: We've got the stats to prove Twitter ax fell unfairly on older, female engineers

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No win, no fee!

Lawyers win the case but Musk refuses to pay. It's a lose/lose scenario.

X tries to win back advertisers with brand safety promises

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What happened next

Musk refuses to pay Integral Ad Sciences

We'd pay good money to see... oh dear, Elon Musk 'needs an MRI scan'

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Musk paying for something?

Yeah, right! He's not paying rent on his headquarters, so what makes anyone think he'll pay for someone's legal fees?

Japanese supermarket watches you shop so AI can suggest more stuff to buy

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More stuff I can't find

Every time I go shopping, my wife always ensures that there's at least one item on the list which I can't find eg extract of Himalayan yak's foot. I don't need some AI suggesting more things I can't find.

AWS is running a 96-core, 192-thread, custom Xeon server

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Luxury!

Running a virtual desktop at work. The 2 CPUs of the 7 year old Xeon I have been allocated struggles to run, well, everything :-(

First US nuclear power plant built this century goes online

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Meh!

Difficult to be impressed when everyone knows the UK is the world leader in deploying nuclear reactors:

https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/01/aspiration_to_deploy_new_uk/

And hospitals.

Twitter sues Brit non-profit, claims hate-speech reports scared off advertisers

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What happened next

Musk refuses to pay lawyers

Twitter's giant throbbing X erected 'without a permit'

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No one wants to see your neighbour having X, especially when it is Elon Musk

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The joy of X

Until the power goes off

BT hires chartered management accountant and telco veteran as next CEO

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Better choice

Dido Harding

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's pop artifact stash now heads to a museum

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Conspicuously absent

NFTs, thank goodness

The choice: Pay BT megabucks, or do something a bit illegal. OK, that’s no choice

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Bad language

Worked on a product which was localised into something like 14 (!) languages. The reality was that it was comprehensively tested on US/UK English, minimally on French + German, and untested on the others. We had a release where one Korean string was missing. The result was an instant crash when accessing a menu when running in Korean. Cue an emergency hotfix for Korean users only.

On the record: Apple bags patent for iDevice to play LPs

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Hope this is compatible

https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/10/jony_ive_linn_turntable/

Or there is an adapter for only $5k USD

Musk's X tries to win advertisers back with discounts

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Half price 5h!7 is still 5h!7

Digital revolution at HMRC left 99,000 UK taxpayers on hold over five-day fiasco

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Only one company can save us now...

Crapita! (with Dido Harding as CEO)

One problem with America's chip ambitions: Not quite enough staff

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Better career choices

* Instagram influencer

* Tik Tok sensation

* pr0n star

* CEO of Twitter

OK, maybe not that last one

Clients turn to Indian IT outsourcers for AI faster than industry can train staff

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Meanwhile at IBM

[CEO] Hire more 'early career professionals' with AI! RA all blockchain and Metaverse people. And dinobabies.

TETRA radio comms used by emergency heroes easily cracked, say experts

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ESN to the rescue!

Oh,wait...

Oracle's revised Java licensing terms 2-5x more expensive for most orgs

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"Oracle's license audit saved me money"

said no one ever!

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Clear licensing terms

"different iterations of Java have different license requirements"

That's cleared things up. NOT!

Twitter name and blue bird logo to be 'blowtorched' off company branding

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What Elon did next

Refuse to pay rebranding agency

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Not what I was expecting

Yacc's tweet: "Lights. Camera. X!"

Disappointed does not even begin to describe it

Tesla to license Full Self-Driving stack to other automakers, says Musk

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Preventative license

Car makers take licenses for all sorts of technologies on a 'just in case' basis. It doesn't mean they will use the tech but they have the option if it ever takes off.

Always on the Horizon, UK must wait for megabucks EU science deal

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Post-Brexit British style science

* reading tea leaves

* divining chicken entrails

* Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg as Minister for Science

Twitter ad revenue has halved since Elon Musk took over

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Tweet from Musk

Yacc has fallen off the glass cliff

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Musk sues Meta

Refuses to pay lawyers

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

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CyberTruck delayed due to 'minor design issues'

https://www.motortrend.com/news/tesla-cybertruck-issues-delayed-development-leaked-report-2023/

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/a-leaked-tesla-report-shows-the-cybertruck-had-basic-design-flaws

https://cleantechnica.com/2023/06/09/does-the-tesla-cybertruck-has-serious-problems/

'There has never been a realistic plan' for UK's £11B Emergency Services Network

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ESN is based on an international standard which layers functionality over an existing 4G network. It only uses 4G as a data carrier & does not use much/any carrier specific functionality.

From a personal perspective, having worked on integrating ESN into a previous company's product, the main reason for the delay was the quality, or lack thereof, of the Motorola ESN implementation (Kodiak). It was supplied as SAAS ie something 'in the cloud', and was the most flaky, unreliable and inconsistent product I have *ever* used in 30 years of professional development. We were also provided (Android) handset software for testing/integration which was a bit more reliable but still beta quality.

Motorola's Kodiak is one implementation of ESN but there are others by Ericsson et al. Unfortunately, each implementation has its own quirks (think html rendering) such that changing implementations would require a huge amount of testing and bug fixing. Motorola walking away from the project effectively means everyone has to restart.

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