Posts by Dan 55 15447 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jun 2009
Nose wheel falls off Boeing 757 airliner waiting for takeoff
According to a preliminary FAA notice, none of the 184 passengers or six crew members aboard were hurt in the incident.
The report said the aircraft was lining up and waiting for takeoff when the “nose wheel came off and rolled down the hill”.
If it's Boeing, you ain't arriving.
So not a profession, then, because no responsibility to check their own work. It's very clear how the Horizon software came to be so bad.
If you read the evidence you would see there were no processes in place for unit testing, QA, or CAT. Is that the developers' fault too?
I would hope you'd be asked why you - or your colleagues - were writing such buggy code. The programming community seems to accept it as axiomatic that they will produce terrible code and that the role of a good manager is to give them time to fix their own mistakes. Other industries do not work like that.
So this post tells me you have no experience of a legacy codebase and what that means and also you spend more time looking to blame someone than prioritising the bugfix.
Meanwhile, it seems you haven't familiarised yourself with the Horizon evidence where it was that half the team were unsuitable (management had to replace or allocate work according to their skills) and decisions were taken by management to not address bugs.
Something tells me the projects you are/were involved in aren't going too well?
The developers created the bugs. The IT world really needs to stop blaming managers and clients for its endemic inability to produce secure and effective software.
I don't know about you, but if I went round the software I'm responsible for programming swatting bugs as I saw fit without bringing them to anyone's attention first I would be asked what the hell I was doing. After 25 years we can be sure managers in Fujitsu and the PO have had these problems brought to their attention and they saw fit to ignore them. A reminder that the cash account module required mere weeks for a rewrite and here we are 25 years later (feel free to follow links to the transcript and the original report written two decades ago).
If the development team had many poor developers and management decided to keep them on, that's a management problem. If there was no process for dealing with bugs, that's a management problem. Management can't simply not take an interest in the suitability of their own workers for their projects or their own processes then blame developers for the inevitable failure.
I see a theme here. End users and developers get the blame, management and board are somehow above it all and are free of any wrongdoing.
Cult-like faith in the notion that harsh sentences will deter further miscreants, an effect that has pretty much zero proof of existance.
Any sentences at all would be a start - that would make people think twice. At the moment the worst decisions imaginable receive gongs.
One said Ms Vennells was being rewarded for taking a tough approach to the scandal in an effort to keep costs down for the Post Office, including refusing to acknowledge wrongdoing towards postmasters.
“This was her reward for bending her conscience and holding the line,” the source told the newspaper.
25 years later, it's still happening.
Not one damn manager in Fujitsu or the PO saw fit to prioritise getting these bugs fixed in a quarter of a century.
There's a problem all right, but it's not with the developers.
No, they want you to buy their hardware where they make the real profit and where they lock you in. Then they want you to pay them a 30% fee on all your software/music/avocado-toast/black pullovers.
Imagine if you could try the OS or the Logic Pro free trial, find out it's not as good as it's made out to be, and leave whenever you wanted. No good at all (for Apple).
Meta can simply cite the "Pay or Okay" model which has sprung up on European news websites and which national regulators have permitted.
They would argue that the user is already using "Okay" for cookies, that consent came from okaying their initial use however many years it was ago, and all they need to do is go to the cookie options page to toggle from "Okay" to "Pay" (or something similar, I don't have either Facebook or Instagram).
Cell2Jack is marketed as connecting your landline to a mobile phone but it really just turns it into a Bluetooth headset so it could connect to Teams on your laptop too (unless Teams objects to it for unfathomable reasons as it is known to do for certain headsets)... however I doubt your 1905 phone has an RJ11 connector so you're going to have to get your hands dirty there.
That was the Timex Sinclair and MSX 8x1 attribute mode as used in Sphera.
As European publishers ported Spectrum software to the MSX there hardly anything to port to the SAM which used it, supposing they wanted to publish games for the SAM in the first place.
In some ways the timing was just right because no sooner do they get them built after the component shortage and shipped than the shipping's screwed up again.
There's a lot of things included, some of their own, some incorporated from other homebrew projects - improved BASIC, faster CPU an editor with syntax highlighting, improved CP/M over the +3's, Timex screen modes, full-colour screen mode, hardware scrolling and sprites, Megadrive joypads, a snapshot button, 2M memory, two DOSes (one based on the +3's and one based on exDOS), UNIX-like commands from exDOS, FAT-formatted SD cards, the keyboard and shell... and other stuff that I still need to find out about.
I can see why they want to get a critical mass of interest in the platform, be it Next, N-Go, or XBerry Pi, to keep the Spectrum going. I manage to find an hour here and an hour there to mess around with it but like most of us I don't have the time to sink into it now that I had 40 years ago. Even so it's more fun than an hour with Windows, Mac, or Linux so that has to be worth something.
As the first version had a blue box and the second had a has a box, the third version has to have a magenta box. Maybe it could have a built-in power switch too to incentivise repeat backings? :)
As someone who had one, it ended up being a bit of a disappointment.
You needed a newer ROM to fix bugs and also Master DOS and Master BASIC to finish off the built-in DOS and BASIC. Also the Z80B had to work against memory contention as the whole of the memory was contended so the 6MHz on paper barely ended up faster than a Spectrum, but if you used the full-colour or hi-res screen modes it still had to move 24K around as there was no help from the ASIC as there was no hardware scrolling, sprites, etc... Even games like Prince of Persia or Robot Monsters lagged despite having fixed backgrounds.
That said the BASIC ended up being very good, it had the whole 256K or 512K of memory available for it to work with (the Next still doesn't do that), maths and graphics routines were redone to be faster (the Next leans on raising the CPU speed to 24Mhz), and the graphics origin and scaling worked as expected over different screen modes like the BBC's (the Next's changes depending on screen mode which is unnecessarily surprising to the programmer and means you can't change screen mode without re-writing the graphics).
I should have perhaps finished the 8-bit era with rose-tinted memories of the Spectrum +2 and +D before moving on to the Amiga instead of being drawn to the Coupé first by siren calls of compatibility and ST/Amiga-like games as hyped up in the mags, because it must have been about 50% compatible with Spectrum software if that and the games really just weren't comparable to the 16-bit machines.
Oh, I welcome it.
Perhaps then the software profession will stop making software out of balsa wood.
Perhaps then bugs will have to be fixed instead of being left unfixed for 25 years.
Imagine the law is changed so there is no presumption that computer systems work correctly unless proven otherwise. This has ramifications for the client, the consultancy, and the project.
The project might start implementing best practices, deadlines might be actually take into account reality, developers will have to professionalise, and it will be possible to push back against constant feature creep with immovable deadlines.
"people of ignorance in the court of public opinion" - since when does anyone have the right to write or force software to be used which ruins lives?
UK officials tried to block Fujitsu from government contracts in 2010s or archive link.
The Government tried in 2010-2015 but Government lawyers advised it was not possible to exclude based on past performance, although to my untrained eye paragraph 8g seems to fit that case like a glove.
Then after 2015, i.e. under the reign of Cameron II and beyond, there is no record of government efforts to not award contracts to Fujitsu, oddly enough.
Best printer 2023: just buy this Brother laser printer everyone has, it’s fine
The Brother whatever-it-is will print return labels for online shopping, never run out of toner, and generally be a printer instead of the physical instantiation of a business model.
I have an HP, my idea was to use it until it breaks and then get a Brother, but the bloody thing never breaks. I assume that's because I never updated the firmware and never connected it to the Internet so it hasn't received instructions from HPHQ to stop working when it detects a third party ink cartridge.
I first met Lotus Notes in 2004 and whether or not it would win a beauty contest never entered my mind.
I first met Lotus Notes 4 and it had a face like a smacked arse but what was worse was the UI didn't follow standard conventions, it was as if it was deliberately designed to be different but that just made it more difficult to use.
All they had to do was make a first-class email client.
http://lotusnotessucks.4t.com/ was the website for cataloguing Notes' UI fails.
As so many users only used Notes as an e-mail client, they should have split it into two clients, the best e-mail client they could manage which shamelessly ripped off Outlook's look and the usual client without e-mail.
I think Investronica tried to design something which they thought would please Sinclair who was known to believe his computers were suitable for business, but wouldn't be too expensive as really they were just the IT department from a Spanish department store, so they came up with the number pad.
Also there was the Inves Spectrum+ which was designed in that year when Spain had a tax on computers with less than 64K RAM which weren't localised into Spanish. This had the 48K ROM from the Spanish Spectrum 128K, different RAM with no memory contention, and a TAHC10 from TI (I knew I got TI from somewhere) instead of the normal ULA. Unfortunately because of these changes some games didn't work.
Then in the Timex branch of the family tree there was the Timex FDD which was an external disk drive similar in design to the Commodore 1541, i.e. almost another computer only it was three separate boxes (power supply, disk controller, 3" disk drive) released in 1985, a year after Microdrives came out.
It was all there, it just needed putting together but Sinclair didn't seem bothered about the product that was paying all their wages. It didn't even need to be Clive taking an interest, just the company but they were all running round the office with their hair on fire.
In the end Amstrad gave you everything you wanted two years later in the +3 except the video modes and the ROM cartridge slot, which I think wouldn't have been successful as the Interface 2 wasn't a success.
As Douglas Adams said, "But what I (and I think everybody else who bought the machine in the early days) fell in love with was not the machine itself, which was ridiculously slow and underpowered, but a romantic idea of the machine. And that romantic idea had to sustain me through the realities of actually working on the 128K Mac."
Sinclair claimed it was videotape:
Infinite loop: the Sinclair ZX Microdrive story
It was confirmed that each 43 x 30 x 5mm Microdrive cartridge contained not a disk but a loop of tape, 2mm wide and claimed by Sinclair to be made of same same material as high-quality videotape and not what you’d find in an ordinary audio cassette.
Towards the end of the article it mentions how unsold Spectrum microdrives were repurposed and manually calibrated for the QL case... very Sinclair.
LoadResource() / ReleaseResource()
Watching a classic Mac user waxing lyrical about how hardware and software architecture was all so much better than IBM PCs is sort of like watching two bald men fight over a comb.
Shame Commodore only knew how to market the 8-bits. Apart from the TEDs of course.
Brain failure when transcribing, as much as I'd have liked it to be a reverse takeover with Sinclair pulling Sugar's strings behind the scenes.
Perhaps the Spectrum ROM belongs to Comcast now. What a horrible thought.
My Dad got one in Dixons' fire sale when Amstrad was sold to Sinclair. I think the Psion office software tipped the balance otherwise he would have bought an Amstrad PCW.
The BASIC was nice and I managed to mess around in BASIC creating windows, but I couldn't find the rumoured multitasking anywhere. As it's Sinclair I guess he cut development short before the release and the programmer had to finish off the job themselves in 68K assembly language. :)
As for the microdrives... well, they taught me the importance of keeping backups.
The complaint I hear about racial bias is just desperate searching for a reason -- any reason -- for it not to be employed (or employed with so many constraints that it becomes useless).
I assume you're not part of the affected ethnic groups then?
Racial Discrimination in Face Recognition Technology
This was the top result, but there are load of other studies.
But the 128 development was driven more by Investronica than Sinclair and it didn't know about the existence of the SCLD.
It's crazy that Sinclair took so little interest in the one product that was paying all their wages that he left it to US and Spanish distributors to lay out their own individual upgrade path, both incompatible with each other.
When computers came with manuals just as cool as Cloud City. Nice to see the Next carries on the tradition.
I rather think that's his to determine.
If I recall correctly the intent was to concentrate on low cost machines for education... the massive take up in industry is great, but is funding that original requirement.
Us hobbyists are another group which is great, but not the original requirement.
The users determine the legacy, not the developers.
Sinclair tried to sell every computer as some kind of business machine but they obviously weren't really, they were mostly used for games and by hobbyists. Then he got to the QL which he really tried to design for business and it flopped.
It started out aimed at education but if it turns out it's mainly used for emulation and media centres so that will be its legacy. But mostly it's used by embedded developers, by industry, and in thin clients and when there was a component shortage then there was no Pi for anyone else.
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