Posts by rafff

Yes, I wrote a very expensive bug. In my defense I was only seven years old at the time

Sounds familiar

" mostly involved helping the librarian to dust shelves and replace books. She did those jobs so well, ,"

... that now she is the ruler of the Queen's Navee.

British IT worker sentenced to seven months after trashing company network

Re: What about a new job?

"court for a garnishing order"

"Garnashee" - garnish is what you put on your food

Deutsche Bahn train hits 405 km/h without falling to bits

Re: Our fast trains are not very fast

Sorry. Not HS2, it was the APT. Late 1960s. I was getting my acronyms in a twist.

Our fast trains are not very fast

How fast it is economic to have a train run depends on the distance you expect it to travel. Britain is small compared to France or Germany; Switzerland is even smaller, and distinctly knobbly.

The design of the HS2 was predicated on the longest possible domestic run being from London to Glasgow or Edinburgh. Once you are in Scotland speeds are necessarily lower. What killed the HS2 was that BR expected to run it through the Channel Tunnel, but no-one told RTZ, who were building(?) the tunnel. The shock waves of a 400kmph train entering and running though a tunnel would shatter the passengers' ear drums; once the train had to slow down to around 120kmph the whole thing became uneconomic.

BTW I was present when the mismatch of expectations came to light. It was at a Sunday afternoon tea, not a formal review meeting.

Your browser has ad tech's fingerprints all over it, but there's a clean-up squad in town

Re: Shoo-in?

"Any realtion to the archaic "shoon", for shoes?"

I believe the origin is in horse racing where the race has been fixed. Damon Runyan uses the expression that way .

What if Microsoft just turned you off? Security pro counts the cost of dependency

you can go and see a working decimal computer at Bletchley Park.

Once upon a time I worked on an ICT 1400 computer. This had a 48-bit word divided into 4-bit "digits"". It was possible to operate each digit in a different radix thereby automating £sd or ton/cwt/lb/oz calculations.

Fresh UK postcode tool points out best mobile network in your area

" drawn from user experiences, plus predictive data from the UK's mobile operators themselves."

For about 10 years I worked on this "predictive" mapping, starting from when it was just Cellnet (remember them?) until it was the whole world.

The important point to note is that his data is *computed*, not surveyed. Depending on the radio planning tool in use, and what the signal level the operator calls "good" coverage (anything from -90dB to -120dB) the output is at least partially fiction.

In Switzerland they used to use (25 years ago, dunno about today) a radio planning tool that did not take account of terrain. Go figure.

French city of Lyon ditching Microsoft for open source office and collab tools

Re: Snowball's Chance in Hell?

"Hell isn't as hot as it used to be, "

Since, according to the Book of Revelation Hell has lakes of molten brimstone, we know that the temperature of Hell is below the boiling point of sulphur (but above its melting point).

Techie went home rather than fix mistake that caused a massive meltdown

Re: I'm ancient enough

"And when it comes down to it, switching between Fahrenheit and Celsius (which was called centigrade in those aforementioned BBC weather reports) is a trivial mental trick if you don't need to-a-fraction-of-a-degree accuracy."

For the range of temperatures used in domestic ovens F = 2*C is good enough. The difference between fan and non-fan ovens is greater than the conversion error.

Automatic UK-to-US English converter produced amazing mistakes by the vanload

Re: The first English to Russian translating machine

"The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak" => "The Vodka is good, but the meat is poor"

"Out of sight out of mind" => "invisible idiot"

Neither of these is real; they were made up by a journalist poking fun at early efforts at machine translation. Machine translation still does not really work; machine *assisted* translation is useful, and is used by professionals.

Re: Absolutely Clbuttic.

But that's as US->US translation. It should really be "clburrotic"

User demanded a ‘wireless’ computer and was outraged when its battery died

Re: Did you think it had a nuclear battery ...

"especially if you could make it go bang remotely."

The IDF already did that about a year ago.

Schneier tries to rip the rose-colored AI glasses from the eyes of Congress

Cassandra

She wasn't listened to, either. It is the curse of those who speak the truth.

Even a humble keyboard is now political in Taiwan

Re: Smuggling

"Wouldn't it be funny if the drug smuggling routes are used to smuggle stuff pass tariffs?"

Don't forget that that the Boston Tea Party was caused by the **abolition** of tariffs on tea, thereby putting the tea smugglers out of business. And possession of a keyboard is not an indictable offence, unlike possession of a kilo of heroin.

Linux kernel to drop 486 and early 586 support

Re: Hubble Telescope.......

"In 2018 these nutters got modern (Gentoo) Linux running on a 486. It took 11 minutes to boot to CLI."

At some point I had a batch of diskless 386/25 machines. I managed, eventually, to get them to network boot to a GUI. I don't now remember dates or the Linux flavour; possibly Gentoo, and it would have been at least 25 years ago.

Obviously I did not build the kernel on a 386/25; I had IIRC a 486DX2 dual processor for that. Working out which part of their filesystems could be common and what had to be private to each processor was entertaining.

BTW my shrink says that I am now fully recovered.

PIRG's 'Electronic Waste Graveyard' lists 100+ gadgets dumped after support vanished

Re: Amazon Halo Rise

"The bigger reality is that the average consumer doesn't have the time nor money to pursue these sorts of things. Just to consult with a blood sucking lawyer for an hour can be a week's pay. "

If the retailer does not respond satisfactorily, just copy your correspondence[*] to Trading Standards; they wield a big stick. Alternatively, Small Claims Court: costs time but no lawyers.

[*] You did do everything in writing, didn't you?

Brit universities told to keep up the world-class research with less cash

Re: @VicMortimer

" you will hit is all those who have an expensive property, bought 50 years ago or perhaps inherited, but very little income, who will then have to sell it to pay the tax on its value."

And then become homeless because they cannot afford to buy another property with the money left over after tax. And they certainly can't rent, what with having to pay increasing rent on a fixed income.

EU: These are scary times – let's backdoor encryption!

Next on the agenda ...

PI shall equal 3.

No Dedekind cuts here, please.

Tech trainer taught a course on software he'd never used and didn't own

Re: been on many courses where the trainer has no answers

"quoting Laminitus as the reason"

In my experience laminitis is a problem of horses. Strange teacher you had!

There are 10,000 reasons to doubt Oracle Cloud's security breach denial

Re: Fun stuff for Bob and Jenny to do at the office.

"If you are never going to need it, you may as well be paying to archive and curate dust"

Every company has lots of data they are never going to use, but are required by law to keep - sometimes indefinitely.

(Of course, they can wind up the company; that eliminates the data retention obligation.)

AI agents swarm Microsoft Security Copilot

Vasu Jakkal, corporate vice president of security

A Jakkal running security? You couldn't make it up.

The post-quantum cryptography apocalypse will be televised in 10 years, says UK's NCSC

Re: Bollocks

"And there is probably a lot of data that doesn't really need to be encrypted at all."

The trouble with encrypting just the important stuff is that you are firing a signal rocket to tell any attacker just where to focus his energies.

You cannot hide the needle if there is no haystack to hide it in.

GCC 15 is close: COBOL and Itanium are in, but ALGOL is out

Re: OMG - COBOL

COBOL and RPG are both very good at what they do, but neither is intended for writing compilers or OSs. RPG, in particular, does a job that is hell to program in C/C++/Java; the skeleton that you have to wrap around the actual guts of the report generator is many times the size of the actual job.

FORTH, on the other hand, is a mathematician's delight but a programmer's nightmare.

Re: ALGOL-68 is out

Re Burroughs "Algol 60"

I once had a job writing a translator from Burroughs Algol to PL/1. As I remember it (it was a long time ago) the Algol dialect was somewhat weird, with instructions for extracting bits from the OS' memory, and a very strange IO system.

Developer sabotaged ex-employer with kill switch activated when he was let go

"curt text message asking why I have not responded to their email."

Just add them to your block list - assuming the TXT does not come from a "private number"

Governments can't seem to stop asking for secret backdoors

"Blair and his acolytes seemed all to share the delusion that once you legislated against a thing then that problem was instantly completely solved "

Not just Blair. All governments seem to think that every problem can be addressed by legislation, and they fail to look at the underlying sources of the problem. In practice, what they largely do is to0 create new crimes and new criminals - or a workaround that evades the intent, but not the letter of the law. The use of encryption on one's own machine is an example of such evasion..

A classic example was that supermarkets used to change the price labels on their goods. After a campaign in the press this was outlawed. Shops responded by not putting prices on the goods, only on the shelf, and these could be and are changed regularly. The legislation merely hastened the adoption of barcode readers.

HP deliberately adds 15 minutes waiting time for telephone support calls

Re: Do people still print things?

I download and print a lot of sheet music, mainly stuff that you can't buy in a shop. Either because it is out of print (sometimes by several centuries) or because I have typeset it myself.

Time to make C the COBOL of this century

Re: C is the new COBOL

"what is the improved waiting in the wings replacement for COBOL"

I have no love for Cobol (I worked with it for too long), but I do not know of any modern language that does what Cobol does - and does well.

Yes, I know it's verbose, clunky, has over 1k reserved words, has no real standard ....

Hundreds of Dutch medical records bought for pocket change at flea market

As the company no longer exists no action can be brought against them

It depends on the jurisdiction. IANAL but as I understand it in the UK a limited company protects the directors and shareholders from financial liability, but not liability for dodgy behaviour. In France I believe it is the other way around. In NL, I dunno.

Lawyers face judge's wrath after AI cites made-up cases in fiery hoverboard lawsuit

Re: what are you paying for

"to whom should they say they use AI? The clients? The court? The other side?"

Surely the "other side" should have checked the rerences and flagged them up as fake, and raised merry hell?

Legacy systems running UK's collector are taxing – in more ways than one

COBOL and FORTRAN are supported on ...

But which dialects of Fortran or Cobol? One estimate put the number of possible *standard* Cobol dialects at over 100000, even without implementor defined features.

Then you have to take into account changes in the way that the language interacts with its environment: character encoding, buffering, disk file format, system calls, in Cobol f'rinstance how does one mark a deleted record ...

Migration aint easy - even if one does not have to do it in a rubber dinghy

DOGE geek with Treasury payment system access now quits amid racist tweet claims

Foreign humanitarian aid ... is a drop in the bucket

Don't go confusing us with facts; they have no place in a political flame war.

Early mornings, late evenings, weekends. Useless users always demand support

Re: Solutions exist

"why would you install works stuff to your own equipment!?!?"

Regardless of the current discussion about out of hours calls, you should always keep clear water between your work equipment and accounts, and your personal stuff. If you don't, you open yourself up to accusations of unauthorised access and other naughty things.

So, no dual SIM phones; always two separate devices. Ensure everything is air-gapped.

Me, paranoid? You should see my collection of T-shirts.

Privacy Commissioner warns the ‘John Smiths’ of the world can acquire ‘digital doppelgangers’

Re: Tough Problem

Idiom

My father had an assistant in his shop who, until the day she retired, was always referred to as "the girl".

And it is always a "girls' night out", regardless of age, marital status etc.

Astronomers red-faced after mistaking Musk's Tesla Roadster for asteroid

Tesla roadster launched on SpaceX's first Falcon Heavy mission.

Around here we have breakers' yards for unusable motor vehicles

British Museum says ex-contractor 'shut down' IT systems, wreaked havoc

Re: lax procedures

"So how did they get access to the computer area"

I suspect that there was no security, no badge needed; at most a combination lock, and he knew the combination.

Enquiring minds ...

BOFH: How to innosplain your way through an audit

Re: Compiling a list of assets

"something called an Ada compiler. Can I see It please?"

We once got a compiler (forget which language) from the Ozzie Atomic Energy Authority and had to sign a disclaimer that we would not sue them for radiation damage arising from its use.

GM parks claims that driver location data was given to insurers, pushing up premiums

you can post a very large bond (£1 million?) to be used in the event of an accident.

Organisations with large fleets of vehicles do this e.g. GPO - when they existed, and probably bus companies.

Scammers exploit UK's digital landline switch to swipe cash

Up to the minute?

Yesterday I was visiting a friend who still uses a rotary dial Strowger phone.

Tech support warrior left cosplay battle and Trekked to the office

Re: What's the weirdest outfit you've worn to a tech support job?

" Note that splitting is perfectly legal here in California. "

And in Britain the Highway Code recommends it. At least it used to; I haven't read a copy in many years.

One third of adults can't delete device data

Another pedant alert

"connect your phone to it's systems"

"To ITS systems" FFS. "It's" = "it is", I learned that in primary school.

The US government wants developers to stop using C and C++

Re: Stop with the useless A better than B crap

"reading the entire data to be worked on"

So how long does it take to process a non-terminating (potentially infinite) data feed?

Cruise shutdown blastzone increases – Microsoft takes $800M charge

Re: Big city not working

"SF doesn't wish to provide public toilet facilities ...."

So how is that different from London? My borough has removed all the pubic toilets, and most of those that used to be in the Tube stations are now closed.

British Army zaps drones out of the sky with laser trucks

Re: "sometime in the early 2030s"

The IDF are already bringing their version into service. But then they move somewhat faster than the British establishment.

Indian police demand Starlink identify alleged drug smugglers

Re: What? No GPS?

"messages sent over Starlink, and not over a local provider "

There is no local provider more than a few miles offshore. The range of a cell on shore is quite short.

T-Mobile US CSO: Spies jumped from one telco to another in a way 'I've not seen in my career'

"Simon told us"

That should be "Simon said", Shirley?

Tech support chap showed boss how to use a browser for a year – he still didn't get it

Re: Thermostats

Very few people, even techies, understand the difference between steady/constant heat/power and steady temperature.

Re: "learnt many things about how not to run a company"

"Would you go to an Accountant who was not chartered?

Would you go to a Pharmacist who was not chartered?

Would you go to an Architect who was not chartered?"

Would you be governed by MPs who know nothing of how to run a country?

BOFH: The devil's in the contract details

Re: Coffee vs tea

"US style fast food outlets started pushing the coffee and looked at you funny if you asked for tea"

My experience is that they cannot actually make tea as they do not have any means of boiling water. The hottest they have is about 95C, not nearly hot enough for tea. When I tried to argue the toss at a local Starbucks, the answer I got was that they have to follow rules set by head office, and those rules do not permit them to have boiling water. Go figure.

A local hotel is prepared to put a jug of water in the microwave*, so at least their teas has some flavour.

* I can feel from here the shudders of certain folks at the thought of making tea in a microwave.

AI Jesus is ready to dispense advice from a booth in historic Swiss church

"AI can also give incomprehensible, and in some cases even stupid and idiotic answers"

Just like a human, then.