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
Posts by trevorde
1149 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Jun 2015
Trump announces $175B for Golden Dome defense shield over America
Dilettante dev wrote rubbish, left no logs, and had no idea why his app wasn't working
Saturday 17th May 2025 13:08 GMT 
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
US Transpo Sec wants air traffic control rebuild in 3 years, asks Congress for blank check
Users advised to review Oracle Java use as Big Red's year end approaches
As US scientists flee Trump, MP urges Britain to do more to nab them
Amazon touts Vulcan – its first robot with a sense of 'touch'
The 12 KB that Windows just can't seem to quit
Thursday 8th May 2025 13:59 GMT
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
Trump wants to fire quarter of NASA budget into black hole – and not in a good way
Soviet probe from 1972 set to return to Earth ... in May 2025
Oregon State University's Open Source Lab is running on fumes
Zuck ghosts metaverse as Meta chases AI goldrush
X marks the drop for European users
How Amazon red-teamed Alexa+ to keep your kids from ordering 50 pizzas
Thursday 1st May 2025 20:21 GMT
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
Decades-old bug in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas finally shows itself
As ChatGPT scores B- in engineering, professors scramble to update courses
Thursday 24th April 2025 09:21 GMT
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
Dems fret over DOGE feeding sensitive data into random AI
IBM orders US sales to locate near customers or offices
LLMs can't stop making up software dependencies and sabotaging everything
Sunday 13th April 2025 19:24 GMT
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
Trump tariffs thwart TikTok takeover as China digs in heels
Mozilla is rolling Thundermail, a Gmail, Office 365 rival
To avoid disaster-recovery disasters, learn from Reg readers' experiences
Wednesday 2nd April 2025 06:40 GMT
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?
It looks like IBM is cutting jobs again, with Classic Cloud hit hard
30-year-old NHS supply chain system hit by 35 major alerts in 11 months
AWS unboxes quantum cat qubit kit called Ocelot
One stupid keystroke exposed sysadmin to inappropriate information he could not unsee
How mega city council's failure to act on Oracle rollout crashed its financial controls
Thursday 27th February 2025 17:04 GMT
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
Are you cooler than ex-Apple design guru Sir Jony Ive?
IBM Consulting workers told management wants to 'more closely align pay, performance'
Linux royalty backs adoption of Rust for kernel code, says its rise is inevitable
Elon Musk calls for International Space Station to be deorbited by 2027
Want to play billionaire for a day? This app lets you rent your own armed goon squad
Wednesday 19th February 2025 20:48 GMT
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
Wednesday 19th February 2025 17:24 GMT
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
Huawei to bring massively expensive trifold smartphone to world market
Techie pointed out meetings are pointless, and was punished for it
Tuesday 18th February 2025 15:59 GMT
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
Wednesday 12th February 2025 13:40 GMT
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
Biting the hand that feeds IT
