* Posts by trevorde

982 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Jun 2015

Robocar tech biz sues Nvidia, claims stolen code shared in Teams meeting blunder

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Accidentally obfuscated code

Worked for a company where a disgruntled ex-employee tried to sell our source code to a competitor for $1M USD. Competitor immediately brought in the FBI who caught him in a sting operation. All the devs thought it was a great idea because if none of *us* understood the code, then what chance would our competitor have?

Software is listening for the options you want it to offer, and it's about time

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Too many options

Worked on a fiendishly complicated MCAD software product. It had options for *everything* and then some. By the time I left in 2005, there were over 220 options! The kicker was that some options were interrelated ie changing one setting silently changed others.

We did one release where product management were trying to optimise an 'Out Of the Box' configuration for the settings. These optimal settings were tweaked at least 3-4 times per day during the dev cycle which showed that nobody really knew what was going on.

Vote now on who should take the lead in Musk: The Movie

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Only one choice, really

Steven Seagal - so that he kicks Zuck's @55 in the cage fight

X fails to remove hate speech over Israel-Gaza conflict

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Defies belief

That people are still using Xitter

Wanted: Driver for rocket-powered Bloodhound Land Speed Record car

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Throwing my hat into the ring

I've got enough speeding tickets to give me the experience *and* I've done a speed awareness course. Now just got to get some funding my selling a few NFTs of my record attempt and I'm in!

Boffins detect direct evidence of atomic oxygen on Venus's day side

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Bigger question

When are we sending Elon Musk there?

Bored Ape NFT party is a real eyesore, say irritated attendees

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Perfect explanation of NFTs

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

Musk thinks X marks the spot for Grok AI engine based on social network

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Tay v2

AI trained on an unmoderated Xitter. What could possibly go wrong?

https://www.theregister.com/2016/03/24/microsoft_ai_goes_troll/

World leaders ink AI safety pacts while Musk and Sunak engage in awkward bromance

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Edited out

[Elon Musk] Rishi, do you have BoJo's phone number?

[Rishi Sunak] Err, he's no longer the Prime Minister...

[EM] A week is a long time in politics or AI

CompSci academic thought tech support was useless – until he needed it

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Literally (computer) illiterate

Many years and many jobs ago, had the misfortune to support someone in a different time zone during the dawn of laptops. This person had the computer skills of my dead grandmother ie less than nothing. It was a wonder he even managed to get the laptop started. Inevitably, there were problems which had to be resolved via fax (remember those?). I gave him precise instructions about opening a terminal and typing in a command:

start_demo <ENTER>

He responded that nothing happened, even when he managed to type in both angled brackets and used the caps lock button. AAAGGGHHH!!!

X says it's only worth $19B after year of Muskmanagement

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There are some things that money can't buy

Paying over the odds for a business: $44B

Interest payments for loans to buy business: $1B

Complete loss of advertising revenue: $500M

Government fines for not removing hate speech: $250M

Refusing to pay rent on buildings: $150M

Not paying proper severance to employees: $100M

Corporate rebranding: $10M

Wages for new CEO: $6M

Having the most number of followers on Xitter: priceless

Cruise blues: Robotaxi firm pauses all driverless operations

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Meanwhile at Tesla

[Chief Engineer] Hey, Elon! Look what's happened with those bozos at Cruise! ... Elon? ... [desperately] ELON!?

Mars' iron core surrounded by molten rock, seismic studies show

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Bigger question

Who cares? When are we sending Elon Musk there?

Infosys co-founder calls for youth to work 70-hour weeks

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Alternative headline

Billionaire wants employees to work 70 hour weeks to make him richer

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Meanwhile at Xitter

[Elon Musk] [finishes article] 70 hours? Pffft! Anyone working less than 90 hours per week here would get fired!

Intel CEO Gelsinger dismisses 'pretty insignificant' Arm PC challenge

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Obviously hasn't seen

The Raspberry Pi 5! That thing is a beast and this latest iteration is starting to look more and more like a viable non-x86 desktop.

On-by-default video calls come to X, disable to retain your sanity

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Re: We should all thank Musk.

Don't forget:

* Instagram

* Tik Tok

* Snapchat

Amazon workers are in a warehouse of pain, independent report finds

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Jeff Bezos, is that you?

Microsoft creates a new kind of credential: the 'Applied Skill'

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Digital certificate not worth than the paper it's written on

Worked with a lot of devs who had various MS/AWS/Azure certifications. Invariably, they were the worst devs on the team. The best devs were always the ones *without* any of the vendor certifications.

The Raspberry Pi 5 is now available ... if you pre-ordered

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Have we reached peak Raspberry Pi?

That script I wrote three years ago is now doing what? How many times?

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Roll your own ... everything

Worked on a project many years ago where the best tech for our situation was Microsoft Message Queue (MSMQ). Only problem was management didn't want to spring for the license fees. The directive was for us to build it ourselves. It went as well as expected ie flaky, badly written & undocumented. The irony was that MSMQ was included (free) in the next release of Windows.

Also ironic was that everyone their own (badly written & undocumented) string & date classes.

'Recession-resilient' Tesla misses Q3 expectations, slows Mexico expansion

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Missed opportunity

To short Tesla stock

First Brexit, now X-it: Musk 'considering' pulling platform from EU over probe

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Best argument for rejoining EU

So we don't have to suffer Xitter

‘How not to hire a North Korean plant posing as a techie’ guide updated by US and South Korean authorities

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Best code ever!

Was written when I was drunk. Didn't understand it in the morning though.

Amazon unveils new drone design, plans liftoff of aerial delivery in UK, Italy

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New features of Mk30

* deliver to wrong address

* deliver 4hrs after delivery window

* knock on door and leave 3s later

* leave parcel in bin

* leave parcel in plain sight

* drop parcel from great height

* deliver wrong parcel

CIA exposed to potential intelligence interception due to X's URL bug

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Ridiculous!

Which hostile nation is going to pay $8 USD/month for a verified account?

Boris Johnson's mad hydrogen for homes bubble bursts

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Boris Johnson has it covered

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

We'll be rolling out a new nuclear plant every year until 2050 - sorted! Makes you proud to be British.

One door opens, another one closes, and this one kills a mainframe

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Tech support call

Was at work one day & I got a phone call from my wife: ” My laptop is making a strange beeping sound and there's water running out of the corner!". Turns out she'd spilt her glass of water over it. Told her to turn it off and let it dry out. Amazingly, it fired right back up as if nothing had happened & continued on for a few more years after that.

UK government embarks on bargain bin hunt for AI policy wonk

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Only one reason to take the job

Funnel any lucrative contracts to your mates

Workload written by student made millions, ran on unsupported hardware, with zero maintenance

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Proof Of Concept Business

Many years ago, I did some documentation for a program used by a financial services company. One of their employees, long since gone, had got a copy of Borland C++ Builder and cobbled together a 'proof of concept' which then turned into a £13M per year business line. He had a lot of domain knowledge but no software skills.

There are a lot of *really* nasty things you can do in C++, if you know what you are doing. Thankfully, his only major sin was a function which was 4000 lines long. Not particularly complicated, just long. It took me three weeks to work out what was going on & then document it.

In the end, we produced documentation which no one read but ticked the box for the regulator's audit.

Engineers pave the way for building lunar roads with Moon dust

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Inevitably

Road gets dug up after one month to install gas pipes; again next month for water supply; next month for electricity cables; broadband; sewage; pedestrian crossing; street lights; and upgrade to fibre broadband. After 3 months of use, it develops potholes and needs to be dug up again for resurfacing.

New information physics theory is evidence 'we're living in a simulation,' says author

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Definitely a simulation

How else do you explain:

* Bitcoin

* NFTs

* Brexit

* Boris Johnson

* Elon Musk

Qualtrics culls 780 jobs amid 'complex' growth spurt

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Seen this before

Worked for a company who were bought by Silver Lake. We had two quarters where we didn't hit our targets, so it was redundancy time and we said goodbye to 20% of our workforce. Ironically, within 6 months, we were back to the same headcount.

Apple antique aficionados can boot to the future with OpenCore Legacy Patcher

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Why bother?

Just install Windows - more apps, supported longer and better stability. Or Linux.

X Corp is now suing a sublessee for unpaid rent

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Overheard at Xitter

[Xitter lawyer #1] Looks like we gotta sue that sub-lessee for unpaid rent now

[Xitter lawyer #2] I thought we'd been fired...

Musk, Yaccarino contradict each other on status of X's election integrity team

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Previously at Xitter

[Yacc] You're hired!

[Elon] You're fired!

[Election integrity team] WTF?

Doom developer John Carmack thinks artificial general intelligence is doable by 2030

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Alternate headline

Doom developer John Carmack thinks artificial general intelligence is doable in 5-10 years

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 ...