What's a chess pit? I just wanted to check mate.
Posts by Random Commenter
11 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Apr 2021
UK government's bank data sharing plan slammed as 'financial snoopers' charter'
Microsoft warns it may ‘throttle’ its generative AI services for ‘excessive’ users
Rigorous dev courageously lied about exec's NSFW printouts – and survived long enough to quit with dignity
Japan's ubiquitous convenience stores now serving up privacy breaches
Wednesday 10th May 2023 22:15 GMT
Re: Something something pun about Horizon
Yes, I think the case you refer to was when a woman was told there was no way she was the parent of her own child. I think they wanted to take her child away but it later turned out that she had her "sister's" ovaries. First time I'd ever heard of this condition.
Theranos founder Holmes ordered to jail after appeal snub
Errors logged as 'nut loose on the keyboard' were – ahem – not a hardware problem
Sunday 26th March 2023 16:14 GMT
Re: Yes
I was once on a (waterfall, ahem) project where some management bod decided that system test would be completed when we had reached 500 passing test cases.
This number became a fixation, despite protestations. We achieved this dubious milestone, proclaimed success...
...and unsurprisingly, we found tons of bugs during UAT. No heads rolled for this one...
The nodes have it in the Great DB debate: Reg readers pick graph
Wednesday 22nd March 2023 22:46 GMT
Re: Excel ...
Excel (and MS Access) offer just enough power for non-devs to create something that appears to be useful, but then turns into a business-critical application.
One investment company I worked for used a spreadsheet to record share trades that were placed manually. This was done because an exec had 'flexed' policy to allow only one of his customers to place trades after the daily 11.30 deadline.
But the time it was placed also affected the price, so this created a whole downstream industry of reconciliation activities, which could only scale by throwing more people into this thankless task.
The excel sheet had a fixed range in place, but nobody remembered, so people merrily added more rows until someone noticed that nothing new was coming through.
They pasted directly into the sheet, but pasted pound signs were treated as text not numbers.
They had a numpty macro that generated direct bank transfer agreements from this garbage. Very large numbers. Often wrong.
When things went south on occasion, a senior manager would need to spend the best part of a week unpicking the fallout.
And all because someone who found part of their job tedious thought to ease their pain by creating a spreadsheet
IDC gets even more pessimistic about PC sales
Tuesday 7th March 2023 17:23 GMT
Re: November 2025
Quite likely this will be my route too. I've been using MS since Dos and thought Win7 their best effort. Win 10 annoys me in many ways, but I'm not even slightly tempted by Win11.
I love gaming however, so concerned that I'd lose out and kill half my library. I know Steam supports Linux, but not all my games are on Steam. Perhaps dual boot to start...
Virtual reality telemetry means you can virtually kiss goodbye to privacy
Bill Gates' green investments to shift from tackling climate change to mitigating impacts
Wednesday 26th October 2022 21:57 GMT 
Inconvenient?
"With no further human influence, natural processes would begin to slowly remove the excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and global temperatures would gradually decline."
Unpopular view, but the temperature record of the Earth in the pre-human period has fluctuated wildly between extremes with no burning of fuel.
I dispute the casual assertion that with no human involvement the trend would be downwards. There are other factors.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
