Posts by philstubbington

Diversity, equity, and inclusion is not an illusion, but it soon might be

Re: So US corps will do what they always do

Like Dell’s policy to leave your hand gun at reception…. in Bracknell (circa 1999).

UK immigration seeks tech support, development partner for border crossing systems

Re: Paper works well

I occasionally got stuck behind an NZ colleague going into Milan and for some reason it always took so much longer than anyone else.

Sweet 16 and making mistakes: More of the computing industry's biggest fails

No mention of the Atari Transputer Workstation

I got to play around with one of these - I worked for a Xerox sponsored ITEC at the time, no idea how/why we got one but an interesting bit of kit.

Using 1Password on Mac? Patch up if you don’t want your Vaults raided

Re: Quick and easy update.

Same here - all very straightforward. Panic over before it began ;)

Study finds 268% higher failure rates for Agile software projects

Re: Just maybe?

Dangerous talk…. and you’re absolutely right. I’m reminded again of the start of Jerry Weinberg’s Quality Software Management… reflecting how in 1956 “ “IBM was right. Thinking was essential.

But after a while I noticed that IBM and its customers often

honored thinking, but didn’t practice it. Especially in the

software side of the business, which always seemed to take last

place in the hearts of IBM executives.”

Excerpt From

Quality Software: Volume 1.1: How Software Is Built

Gerald M. Weinberg

https://books.apple.com/gb/book/quality-software-volume-1-1-how-software-is-built/id406436865

This material may be protected by copyright.”

Can AI shorten PC replacement cycles? Dell seems to think so

Haven’t owned a Windows PC for years but…

… is Windows not keeping ahead of CPU speed any more? I just to reinstall Windows annually as it was grinding to a halt.

Hands up if you want to volunteer for layoffs, IBM tells staff

Re: voluntary redundancy?

Same happened at Dell years ago. Not quite to that degree but it was oversubscribed.

Dell didn’t use to do redundancies, they called them voluntary separations. You know, like being voluntarily separated from your pay packet…..

Why can't datacenter operators stop thinking about atomic power?

Re: reading like propaganda

Thanks for the thumbs down ;)

" During its 10-year lifespan, the landfill served as the dumping site of 21,800 short tons (19,800 t) of chemicals, mostly composed of products such as "caustics, alkalines, fatty acid and chlorinated hydrocarbons resulting from the manufacturing of dyes, perfumes, and solvents for rubber and synthetic resins"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Canal

Some facts....

https://energy.glex.no/feature-stories/area-and-material-consumption

and

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map

Courtesy of André Wakker, Ph.D. (you can find him on LinkedIn for more information)

Kinder, gentler Oracle says it's changed, and now wants you to succeed

Wasn’t Eiffel an obscure programming language years ago?

Sci-fi author 'writes' 97 AI-generated tales in nine months

GIGO

Having read just the blurb of one of these, they’re very poor quality.

Microsoft tackles SaaSy URL sprawl, dumping its dotcom in favor of cloud.microsoft

Ooh - didn’t know about! Very useful, thank you.

It would be great if they’d do the same for everything partners have too. It’s a real mess!

Microsoft to snatch Visio app away from iOS users this summer

Re: Use Omnigraffle.

Thanks for the recommendation.

A brand new Linux DRM display driver – for a 1992 computer

Re: Good.

Completely agree. Wrote a few articles on Atari ST related stuff back in the day for ST User magazine, C Vu and Personal Computer World.

Also had the chance to play with Atari’s Transputer at one point!

Remember the humanoid Tesla robot? It's ready for September reveal, says Musk

Re: Yeah right

… and then it’ll unzip itself and Robert Downey Jr will have been inside all the time.

Will cloud giants really drive colos off a financial cliff?

The history of tech has often shown your best year ever is followed by your worst - so the statement that business has never been better is worrying.

Singapore's Grab enters maps-as-a-service market

Re: Add just general bizareness

I use a serviced office in Gerrards Cross and my satnav suggests I turn right across a grassy central reservation on the A40. Judging by the tyre marks some people have done it but even though I drive an SUV I’ll stick to the roundabout!

RISC OS: 35-year-old original Arm operating system is alive and well

Re: The 24th June is the anniversary for me

Blimey, that’s a blast from the past! I think I used 1st Word or some other GST software for the first editions of C Vu (the newsletter for the C Users Group).

I have absolutely no practical use for it, just nostalgia as someone who went from BBC Micros to the Atari ST, but the temptation to slap in on my MacBook Air M1 may get the better of me :)

Atos, UK government reach settlement on $1 billion Met Office supercomputer dispute

Re: Weather Forecasting

I interviewed Jack Scott for my school magazine in the late 1970s/early 1980s and first hand his comment was two-fold - remember what it was like yesterday, and it'll be mostly like that, or look out of the window and it'll be mostly like that. According to Jack, covers the vast majority of cases.

EU makes USB-C common charging port for most electronic devices

Re: The BS 546 Brexit connector next

Same here. I only found it recently (with hiviz clothing for example) that I can’t distinguish between yellow and green (I think - I have to rely on other people to tell me). You’ve made me wonder with LEDs now too!

What about USB-D?

Whenever that comes along?

I understand the issue, but USB-C has been around since 2014, and isn’t used by many devices I have. Something new will come along, and USB-C will eventually be obsolete. History repeats itself….

Export bans prompt Russia to use Chinese x86 CPU replacement

Re: Computers in general aren't really corporate trash pile material.

The list of people who do it is public knowledge. Just search for the US DPL (Denied Parties Listing).

Re: Russian? CPUs?

Probably down to cost, size, demand, lack of sufficient supply locally.

Cars in driver-assist mode hit a third of cyclists, all oncoming cars in tests

I’m waiting for predictive text to work still.

OVH: The cloud should be open, reversible, interoperable

Re: Paulin's "Stay open" == make money off of abuse?

I don't think absolute numbers tell you very much. How many people use Microsoft, Google and Amazon versus OVH?

UK watchdogs ask how they can better regulate algorithms

Re: They need to sort this problem quickly now...

Well, that’s either true or false.

Study: How Amazon uses Echo smart speaker conversations to target ads

Just as most people aren’t aware that “free” Wi-Fi enables the shopping mall to track which stores you go into, for how long, in what order, and what areas of the store you visit…..

Apple geniuses in Atlanta beat New York to the punch, file petition to unionize

Aren’t these both locations where “employment-at-will” exists? Not sure how unionisation sits with that.

British motorists will be allowed to watch TV in self-driving vehicles

In a sentence that otherwise has limited meaning. Real world AI compared to what? You could argue even AI in computer games is real world because it’s interacting with (some) human players.

Microsoft plans to drop SMB1 binaries from Windows 11

Re: WinHelp

You’ve not discovered https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/ then?

Microsoft have a huge amount of freely available documentation and learning materials online.

Google's plan to win the cloud war hinges on its security aspirations

They wouldn’t have been able to sign up to Microsoft services without agreeing to it. I suspect someone didn’t read the agreement.

That’s within your organisations own tenant, or in another tenant that your organisation has consented to a controlled level of access. Either way, it’s with consent.

Not to mention Microsoft's 3,500 security staff and counting.

Scraping public data from the web still OK: US court

Re: site stupidity.

It’s not that narrow. I can record you using my GoPro camera on a bike, or dual dash cam in a car legally in the UK without your consent (on a private vehicle). I can then use that to inform the police if you do something dangerous and/or illegal.

Semiconductor average lead time breaks half-year barrier

It’s been a long time since I worked for a distributor, but I seem to remember lead times were pretty long in the mid-1990s too. Obviously the entire lifecycle from design onwards is pretty long too, for an industry many may perceive as being fast moving!

'Bigger is better' is back for hardware – without any obvious benefits

Re: In bioscience, bigger is sometimes better ...

I guess profilers are still available? I used to find it quite illuminating when I was a programmer in the 80s and 90s quite how much time was spent running bits of code.

Seems like a lost art :(

Happy birthday Windows 3.1, aka 'the one that Visual Basic kept crashing on'

Must have been around the time I had to install QEMM (Quarterdeck Extended Memory Manager) on about 80 PCs so the Novell network client software would fit into the limited memory everyone had.

Ah, those were the days :)

Fujitsu confirms end date for mainframe and Unix systems

Re: Absolutely - just look at Sabre compared to Amadeus and Travelport

… and this just in……

https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/07/what-startups-can-learn-from-amadeus-migration-to-cloud/

London university on hunt for £17m SAP ERP replacement

Re: Cookie cutter business processes == cookie cutter businesses

That’s the difference between an implementation and the continuous improvement that should follow.

A cookie cutter implementation (as much as is possible) gets you up and running as quickly and cheaply as possible, with any inherent improvements in the new platform.

And £7,400 per user!

I’ve not been around SAP for a while, but when they talk about standardised process is he talking about IT or business? Worrying if it’s the latter.

UK's National Savings & Investments bank looks for new IT partner in £172m deal

Re: Lollin' about...

It’s the contract that’s going to take a year to implement, not what’s being delivered from it. Seems like a long time to me - but then it’s public sectorish, so who knows?!

So long Lotus 1-2-3: IBM ceases support after over 30 years of code

Just reminded me that my first ever job in 1988 was taking over a multi site stock control system for British bakeries, written in lotus 123 which I then rewrote in clipper and Dbase before IBM came along and convinced BB to buy an AS/400 as PCs weren’t the future.

Re: Notes

Ah, Notice It Bloats, how we'll miss you too.

Still in use at E&Y in 2010…

Computer shuts down when foreman leaves the room: Ghost in the machine? Or an all-too-human bit of silliness?

Reminds me of a company I worked at years ago where a colleague from Canada thought plugging his shaver in to charge using an adaptor was a good idea. Considering it was an electronic component distributor you might have thought he would know better

Microsoft bins Azure Blockchain without explanation, gives users four months to move

A much hyped solution, in search of a problem…

Like the black cat, in a dark room, that isn’t there.

PC makers warn of battle for air freight capacity, will have to fight for cargo space with... the COVID-19 vaccine

Re: Excuses, excuses

Exactly - especially the “sort of” as nothing is quite that simple, as you probably know already.