Posts by Version 1.0

What's next?

A sex robot? Are males going to be replaced by robots buying their semen on Amazon?

That's a downside I guess but it means I can spend more time at the pub and Jeff Bezos will be richer, there's a golden lining in every Cloud application. But if AI is that good, I think we should allow AI in the polls too - I'd vote for AI to replace both parties in the next election and handle the exBrit negotiations (can't say Brexit anymore) with the EU, NATO, UN, and WTO. AI would mean that everyone can spend the summer in St. Lucia instead of sitting at the negotiating table.

Take control?

We're about to leave the EU to take control of immigration, our own laws, trade deals and other various items moving across our borders - perhaps we should take control of the Internet too and heavily restrict the transmission of information into and out of the UK.

Ten years ago I would have completely disagreed with this idea but watching the spread of the Wuhan virus everywhere and Fake News via the Internet appearing in my mailbox and on-line adverts everyday - I've changed my mind.

There's another "fix"

Years ago I had a customer whose computer refused to boot,she called up (they were about 1000 miles away) and we talked about a few possibilities for getting it up again. A day later she had it up and running, called and said that the problem was the hard disk and I walked her through the backup and replacement procedure. After it was all done I asked her how had she managed to get the system up and running again?

She told me that she'd listened to the system starting up and realized that the disk was not spinning, so she had undone the screws on the top cover of the disk, removed the cover and rebooted the system. Then she put her finger on the disk and gave it a little push to get it going! The system booted and she kept it running while the backups were made!

Still no email

I use LibreOffice, Microsoft Office and WordPerfect at work, if you are writing a new document and care about the formatting then WordPerfect still beats them all. But at work everyone uses Microsoft Office because we need an email client on each desk so a lot of time I have to try and figure out why the Microsoft Office document formatting is weird and fix it for them.

Secure Proccessors for sale - $100 each

I still have a stick of Z80's in the cupboard and a few 8080's, I'm sure that, given the flaws in modern processors that are being unveiled every month, these chips have a lot more value now.

Cache problems appear all the time these days, maybe we need to develop a processor that puts security above features. But seriously, does anyone actually consider security when they design and sell anything these days?

You buy the source code.

A company I worked for in the early 80's got a nice order from the US Government, they ordered the system we were selling and required (and paid for) the source code for the operating system, our system, and a FORTRAN compiler too - the compiler source code alone added about $60k to the order.

This is normal

It's not just Microsoft, patches and updates from every software vendor often create or uncover problems that have to be dealt with later. "If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization" - Weinberg’s Law, written over 40 years ago.

Network Security

Yea, we've heard of it, I'm writing an app that will update itself every 15 seconds to guarantee security. Oh wait, it's been hacked too but I'm getting paid for every advert it shows when it's downloaded so it's not a problem for me. Don't laugh, this is the world we live in.

Everyone's missing the point

Running around shouting "hacker this, hacker that"

But the hospital allows any computer to log in from outside? They fire the administrator and don't reset the passwords? Anyone can download all the cardiac records to any external IP address and nobody noticed until they looked at his computer?

Now they seem to think that because they arrested the "hacker" the problem is solved?

App update time

It's just a bug, the plane app will update after takeoff.

Are they writing the 737 OS in Java?

Maybe Boeing management will start blaming an external malware attack from another manufacturer?

Ops sorry, the INT to FLOAT conversion dropped a byte.

State Of The Art

This is just normal everyday life - I watch our mail-server incoming scanner every day and I've seen an uptick in malware arriving recently with about 50% sailing through the AV software only to be caught by my filters. We're seeing more and more large scale infections in local government IT too which is not a surprise given that so many email attachments sail through the anti-virus checks. A lot of the infected emails are well targeted, I suspect that the malware community, or some government somewhere, is using AI to generate them.

Back in the days, a hospital lab I worked with had a computer room off to the side filled with with PDPs floor to ceiling. One night a rat attempted to crawl though a fan ... CHOMP! and then dead silence with dead rat ... eventually for some reason the temperature in the PDP climbed high enough that the fire suppression system turned on (the days before Freon systems) and the entire room looked like Christmas!

They cleaned it all up with an industrial vacuum cleaner, even had to vacuum out the RK05s but, once the rat was removed, the fan restarted and everything was rebooted ... easy in those days, you just toggled the boot sequence in on the front panel - took about 20 seconds.

Google Practice?

Why don't they all just sign into Google? The government's busy selling all the information so it's no big loss of privacy and, regardless of how you feel about Google, at least they know how to build databases that are secure and easy to access.

How did we get here?

We moved our technical production to China along with the designers, we quit designing and building tech kit ourselves, unless we get back to designing and building our own gear we've got very little choice. Should we get spied on by the Chinese or by the Americans? You really think that No Such Agency is not doing the same thing?