Posts by steamnut

UK dumps £2.5 billion into fusion pipe dream that's already cost millions

From the song by Zager and Evans "In the year 2525, if man is still alive".....

UK government overrules local council’s datacenter refusal on Green Belt land

Clearly the original brown envelopes were not fat enough.

Getting Starmer's lot to sort it was the best next option.

That said, where is the 96MW of electricity going to come from?

DoorDash scam used fake drivers, phantom deliveries to bilk $2.59M

Simply a matter of scale...

DoorDash has just agreed to take over our very own Deliveroo for £2.9bn.

With that much cash on-tap why would they worry over a paltry £2.59m?

Europe plots escape hatch from enshittification of search

Laughable

Like a lot of EU ideas this one sounds like a good one right now. Once the various multilingual committees have added their six-pennyworth we will have a totally unworkable scheme that will cost loads of Euros and will, therefore, be silently dropped. Ditto the EU chip scheme which recently lost Intel's interest and no other EU company has stepped into the breach have they?

You cannot just replace Google overnight as they are too far ahead of any other search engine (sorry Bing). When people use the web they want the URL of their answer. Google is now accepted as a verb; no one says "shall I bing for it" do they?

Nip chip smugglers by building trackers into GPUs, US Senator suggests

Nuts, plain nuts! Even is some form if identifier device was embedded how the blazes would you check and enforce it?

EU Chips Act heading for failure, time for Chips Act 2.0

Who knew?

When the whole EU grand chip scheme was announced many commenters here noted that it was likely to be doomed to failure. The budget is relatively small and the ambitions quite delusional. With the great white hope Intel putting a lot of it's expansion on hold, including the EU, this report was never going to be a gold star review.

Microsoft pitches pay-to-patch reboot reduction subscription for Windows Server 2025

Refunds or damages?

So, your server gets updated when U$soft decide - not you. And, when the patches go wrong, what happens? After the hours of U$oft denials before social media storms show the problem to be real we then need the techies to fix it. As the "patches" are automatically applied then the techies will have no idea what happened.

After hours of unplanned downtime causing lost sales, profits and customers, what will the compensation be? Answer; as usual, nothing.

No team with any amount of experience of U$oft "patches" would allow their company to receive patches at any time that suits U$oft. I know we are called control freaks, but it is with good reason as most of us have experience of patches and reboots that we didn't want and didn't allow - but they happened anyway.

Thankfully, most core systems now run under Linux; with a number of Win11-incapable PC's to follow. Enough!

Boeing offloads some software businesses to private equiteer Thoma Bravo

Would you like to fly in a plane where the flight avionics was written by a company owned by an equity consortium keen on a fast return?

Asda's tech separation from Walmart nears £1B as delays mount

D

We all know that divorce is costly. You do wonder how much value is left in Asda now.

Nuclear center must replace roof on 70-year-old lab so it can process radioactive waste

Alternative option.

With SpaceX's regular low-cost launches then, in the long run, we would be better sending the stuff into space; ideally with a trajectory towards the sun.

With costs seemingly rising without an end in sight space is the lowest cost option.

ISS resupply and trash pickup craft postponed indefinitely after Cygnus container crunch

oops.

I don't now about you, but crating up a valuable space ship in such a way that it could not get damaged in transit seems like a task that should be checked, checked and checked again.

Do you DARE? Europe bets once again on RISC-V for supercomputing sovereignty

Bad name choice...

I think the name "Titania " is too close to Titanic and we all know how well that went.

Non-biz Skype kicks the bucket on May 5

Time to move.

I have been using Jitsi for some time now and it works very reliably. Hate teams - nuff sed.

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

Not just councils.

In 1999 I was an external contractor for a major UK Bank (no names, no pack-drill..) as a tester. As well as Y2K testing, which was fairly easy to do and verify, I worked on a new counter application that was going to released just after Jan 1st 2000.

I found some serious problems with it. These were formally reported. But, the pressure to release the application was such that they released it anyway.

When the problem appeared, as I knew it would, a different team was tasked with fixing it. So, the development and release teams looked like they had (almost) met their timescales and budgets. The fix team had an ongoing budget so it didn't matter quite so much. Talk about smoke and mirrors!

The problem with Birmingham and other councils with similar issues, is the budget is covered by the rate payers and is almost limitless in quantity. Unless and until people actually lose their jobs when they screw up, this situation will continue.

Microsoft trims more CPUs from Windows 11 compatibility list

And the Wintel conspiracy continues....

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

Great idea now too pricey

I started my business with a Turbo Pascal application. I used Paradox too. When Delphi came along is was a no brainer and I used it for a lot of applications.

When Embarcadero took over the business the costs, even of upgrades, went sky high so I stopped using it.

Add to that the lack of Linux compatibility and I chose to move to Lazarus.

Already three years late, NHS finance system replacement delayed again

Rinse and repeat.

In these columns we are becoming accustomed to yet another delayed Oracle project. Oracle get paid either way so they don't take a hit on their bottom line. They don't seem to "bat back" at the criticisms either so reputational damage is something they don't worry about.

Whilst the alternatives are few at this scale and the risk of moving to, say SAP, is far from small, how could this situation ever change? Oracle will just get richer by the day.

Councils, NHS and others just have to suck it up it seems.

You know something's wrong when Clippy fills you with nostalgia for simpler times

Reptile?

I looks more like the head of a snake with fangs at the ready in order to paralyse you before consumption.

Intel pitches modular PC designs to make repairs less painful

Re-inventing ?

Intel must be really worried about the PC market to try and "invent" this again.

For a previous "exercise" I still have a couple of Intel Pentium II 2 CPU Processor SL2HD's kicking about. Totally useless of course after we found at the time.

The problem is all-in-one motherboards are cheap to make. A string of surface mount machines and a ready to install motherboard is ready to ship. Once you add daughterboards, connectors and linking cables you add a lot to the cost. If AMD decides against this folly then it would be game-over for Intel until they saw sense again.

The latest language in the GNU Compiler Collection: Algol-68

Testing..

My college computer, which I spent too much time on, was an Elliott 803 with 4K of memory! It ran Algol and I still have the teletype printouts from my project (sad I know). I might just see if they will compile and run - for old times sake.

The most common error I used to get was something like SUBSCROFLO (subscript overflow) which was the result of me declaring an array that was too large for the 4K memory.

Happy days....

AI poetry 'out-humans' humans as readers prefer bots to bards

Spookily good

I am learning Welsh which is a tricky language for sure, and one which has even trickier poetry rules.

I asked ChatGPT for a Welsh poem, printed the results and showed them to my tutor. He said it was a fairly good poem. I then fessed up to it being an AI generated "cerdd" (Welsh for poem) which shocked him.

At this year's Eisteddfod, and at the last minute, it was announced that the Drama Medal (Cyfansoddiadau a Beirniadaethau) for Welsh Fiction was not going to awarded. No reason has ever been given but a number of people are suspicious that the potential winning text was created, or refined, using AI.

Hwyl.

Meta's plan for nuclear datacenter reportedly undone by bees

Protestor idea

My neighbour keeps bees, How about we find some very rare bees and sell hives of them to protestors? They could let the bees out in strategic places and there would bee (sic) no need for the usual protestor shenanigans just a note to the planners about the, previously unknown, colony of rare bees.

Another upside is you could sell the honey to raise funds.

Sounds like a win win.

Reaction Engines' hypersonic hopes stall as funding fizzles out

Cheap

I guess the Americans will now get access to the technology for a song. They acquired the jet engine and hovercraft IP in much the same way.

UK sleep experts say it's time to kill daylight saving for good

cross border data collection nightmare.

I used to look after a server which collected data from different time zones. The whole DST issue was a nightmare. In the end all data was stored with UTC timestamps.

When collecting data the greatest problem is the moment the time changes; what do you do with the extra hour for which there is no data? Or, the reverse,what do you with the data for the hour now gone?

UK ponders USB-C as common charging standard

Actually those 15A plugs and sockets, due to their round pins and sockets, were really capable of handling 15 Amps; whereas the rectangular-pinned 13A system that replaced it is not good at handling 13 Amps.

Even the USB-C standard has it's problems with the poor quality cables on the market.

SpaceX faces $663K FAA fine for Musk's alleged launch impatience

Payback

I wonder how much SpaceX is charging for the change to the next crew mission?

There will now be two spare seats to spare Boeing's and NASA's blushes further. Like all contracts the extra profit is made with "variations". I would bet that the FAA fine is more than covered.

Musk has the upper hand here so the FAA/NASA/Boeing will have to suck it up else those extra astronauts might have to rely on the Russians to bring them home.

Intel frees its Foundry biz – and that's just one of many major shake-ups today

We just knew it.

This has been an obvious move by Intel for weeks.

After all of it's big announcements I wonder what affect it will have on the EU's European Chips Act plans? I bet they are not best pleased...

NASA will fly Boeing Starliner crew home with SpaceX, Calamity Capsule deemed too risky

Why continue?

Boeing got $4.2billion for their Starliner contract against SpaceX's $2.6billion. So far SpaceX is delivering and is making Boeing look like amateurs. Boeing's cost per seat is also 60% higher than SpaceX.

So why are NASA still dealing with Boeing at all? Their next "test" launch looks like 2026 and good luck with that!

NASA are spending public money so a serious audit of the viability of the Boeing space program ought to be carried out.

UK semi industry exposed to supply chain risk, China state ownership

Doomed

Without a very significant investment we are always going to be too "little too late".

We should never have allowed ARM to be bought by Softbank and, let's face it, ARM was the best in the world. Prior to that, only the failed project we called Inmos comes to mind. Inmos was too late with it's DRAM chips to make any profit, but the Transputer should have been a bigger hit than it was. The Transputer concept was ahead of it's time and the use of ADA rather than a C compiler put developers off.

Interesting fact: In February 1961 Britain exported £76,000 of transistors. Yes, back then, we manufactured transistors. Where did it all go wrong? Probable answer - short sighted Politicians. Like the 1966 rip-up of railway tracks and routes after Beaching's report. Today, we would love to have those routes back.

Intel's processor failures: A cautionary tale of business vs engineering

It is foretold...

All empires fail eventually.

The Roman Empire failed, IBM nearly failed, Boeing is close to failing. In the UK, GEC, Marconi, EMI, British Leyland are all gone.

They were all seemingly too big to fail.

The problem is nearly always the same one - the distance from the top to the bottom is too big. Those at the top have no idea what is going on further down. And those at the top rarely have gotten their hands dirty.

The problem has to be laid at the Company Directors' doors. They took their bonuses and share offerings whilst still enjoying good lunches in executive dinning rooms. They thought that more MBA qualified consultants would fix the problems while they rearranged the deckchairs on the Titanic. And, the big joke is that, when their current business fails, they will still offered well paid part time jobs is other companies. Recently, the Post Office enquiry paraded lots of part-timers which always "had no idea" what was going on lower down. Yet they still got paid - and handsomely too.

Over in Germany Bosch, Siemens, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Allianz, VW etc are still going strong. Remember, after WWII, we helped the Germans rebuild the VW business and the Americans Honda for the Japanese.

As others have written, there is no secret sauce here; we need good engineers at all levels of the businesses and, particularly at the top.

Yes, we still need bean counters, but bean counters on have one vision which is money. Engineers dream and, sometimes, there are riches to be had.

NASA pushes back missions to the ISS to buy time for Starliner analysis

Really?

Boeing said it "remains confident in the Starliner spacecraft. Of course it did.

The rapidly running-out-of-patience shareholders cannot handle the reality that Boeing has lost the race with SpaceX and only Boeing's pride, and the marooned astronauts, is stopping them from cancelling the whole project right now.

If there is the slightest doubt about the software, or those thrusters, not working 100% then NASA must call it. Imagine what would happen if there is a major problem. NASA will not risk another Challenger for sure.

SpaceX could mount the rescue mission and I am sure they have already agreed a timescale and price for the job.

Fujitsu picks model-maker Cohere as its partner for the rapid LLM-development dance

Re: A Great Idea

In fact, judging by the witnesses I have heard so far in the inquiry, all the LLM needs to do is type: "I do not recall or I don't remember".

Europe blasts back into the heavy launch biz with first Ariane 6 flight

Sustainable?

With the whole world trying to make things sustainable, surely the Ariane 6 is a total fail. Although there is talk of some reusability, at this time there is none.

They are underplaying the APU "anomaly". The APU is supposed to be a discriminating feature to potential customers. Without the APU a lot of multi-deploy missions will not be possible.

As the APU needs to be tested in the vacuum of space, then at least one more test launch must be done. It this too fails then it will be serious for Ariane. Extra launches are expensive and will delay the program saying "open for business". They will probably mitigate it with more low cost payload offerings but it is still serious.

Apart from SpaceX's rapid turnaround which gives them a potential launch cadence of one every three days, the first stage booster and the fairings are reused for most launches.

With Starship coming soon it is going to be hard for Ariane to compete. Of course, with all of the subsidies they get, making a profit is not a priority.

In reality, the Ariane program has fallen well behind. It is only loyal EU customers and a determination by the EU to have it's own independent launch system, that is going to keep it afloat.

A tale of two missions: Starliner and Starship both achieve milestones

Boeing's software woes.

The docking of Boeing's Starliner nearly failed due to a problem that "appeared to be software-related".

Recently a "serious software glitch" meant that a 737-800 plane taking off from Bristol Airport barely cleared the runway when the auto-throttle disengaged when taking off (scary). Boeing are apparently "aware" of the problem but are seemingly unable to reproduce it.

Maybe Boeing should stop kidding itself that it can write software.

Ariane 6 ready to rocket, bringing heavy-lift capability back to Europe

Too late?

Somehow this Ariane 6 seems like too little and too late.

How are they going to become profitable with just ten launches per year?

We all watched the SpaceX Starship-Super Heavy Starship have a good test flight today and, surely, that is going to take some of the larger payloads?

If the Ariane 6 test launch fails then, surely, they will need to ask themselves if the project is going to succeed at all?

Hubble plays spin the bottle with last few gyros

Another refurb mission?

With SpaceX making launches more often than my local bus service, surely a refurb mission is possible at a lower cost than previously?

If everything else is still working well then a more up to date set of gyros could be swapped in?

Webb and Hubble area team and we need them both.

It would be a lot cheaper than building and launching a new Hubble; assuming that Congress would even vote for it.

NASA, Boeing opt to fly leaky thruster as-is for first crewed Starliner CST-100 mission

Re: Helium

But, there should not be a leak. It was not designed to leak. But Boeing have decided it is not an issue; just like the the 737 MCAS system which nobody knew about until it crashed two planes. Rather them than me on this mission. Let's hope all the door bolts are in place too....

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

Not viable

The amount of energy required at source would be very large as the inverse square law applies and, even at a couple of meters from the motor, it would need a large battery at the very least. Then you have to factor in legal bike and mobility scooters both of which litter our streets.

Banning hoodies and facial coverings unless the weather is sub zero would be easier to apply. Then you will also have a religious issue to get around....

The only solution is more bobbies actually on the streets. As someone else wrote, illegal scooters should be confiscated on site and disposed of.

Hubble Space Telescope hasn't had any visitors for 15 years

It must be done.

Although we know have the James Webb in place it operates in the infra-red not visible spectrum. It is also not repairable due to it's L2 location.

A service mission would be a much lower cost than creating and launching Hubble II. It is a no-brainer that Hubble should be repaired until a major, and not repairable failure, occurs.

Microsoft, OpenAI may be dreaming of $100B 5GW AI 'Stargate' supercomputer

Surely not?

I think that, although there were no specific clues, this must be an April fool story. $100bn - really?

Microsoft confirms memory leak in March Windows Server security update

Like Boeing too big.

Like Boeing, Microsoft is showing the same lack of care in readying it's products for release. Testing is being left to the user base. As no one (usually) dies, they get away with it time after time.

Attacks on UK fiber networks mount: Operators beg govt to step in

simple.

Any interference or destruction of national infrastructure should be a criminal offence with a mandatory prison sentence.

European Commission broke its own data privacy law with Microsoft 365 use

Go look with that!

"The EC has been ordered to suspend all data flows through the use of Microsoft 365 to Microsoft and any of its tentacles..."

City of London ditches Oracle for SAP in search of ERP enlightenment

Really?

Quote: "we have thoroughly reviewed our requirements" - that will be a first!

Maybe they should co0mpare notes with Birmingham Council.

I predict that we will be reading about the unmet deadlines and cost increases in these pages for many years to come.

How artists can poison their pics with deadly Nightshade to deter AI scrapers

I'm sure that this offensive/counter offensive battle will continue for quite a while with both sides using AI as the tool of choice.

There will no real winners here but I think that the material originators will be the ultimate losers.

Like CD and DVD anti-copying schemes that were defeated long ago, there are more people working on breaking the anti-copying schemes than devloping them.

Intel finds a friend in fight against $1.2B EU antitrust fine

Time for brown envelopes to be slid across the desks.

The 'nothing-happened' Y2K bug – how the IT industry worked overtime to save world's computers

A good earner though.

I spent a year working as a contractor for a major UK bank on the Y2K "problem". Yes, nothing happened at 00:01 and, for the next two months nothing happened except I collected a good pay cheque.

Microsoft braces for automatic AI takeover with Copilot at Windows startup

Just asking.

Maybe Microsoft are a little worried that people will use AI to ask the questions like "what is the best and most reliable operating system?" and will filter the outbound questions as a precaution.

New cars bought in the UK must be zero emission by 2035 – it's the law

And then there will be new taxes...

If we all go electric, albeit at a slow pace, then the loss of fuel duty will have to be recovered from somewhere. If the price is added to the charging point bill then folks who recharge at home will be better off. My guess is road pricing will have to be introduced.

At the same time it would be sensible to remove VED (and lose the Swansea head count) and just roll it into one. Then, quite fairly, those that use the roads more will pay more.

However they do it, the Government of the day will not be popular.

Fujitsu wins flood contract extension despite starring in TV drama about its failures

Historical effects.

Fujitsu rebranded our less then wonderful computing company ICL in 2002.

When I was in IBM I was approached to join ICL. Apart from the crap car offered and less than sparkling pay package, I was also informed that I might have to join a union. At that point I declined the offer.

I think Fujitsu was also blamed for a DWP problem over more than £1bn of state pensions not being paid.

Why does our Government still use them at all?