* Posts by Roland6

10619 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Apr 2010

Workload written by student made millions, ran on unsupported hardware, with zero maintenance

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Cheap

Re low code (and no code)

“ Low-code or no-code are methods of designing and developing apps using intuitive drag and drop tools that reduce or eliminate the need for traditional developers who write code.”

[ https://www.sap.com/uk/products/technology-platform/low-code/what-is-low-code-no-code.html - source chosen because of the various comments made about ERP systems and SAP specifically. ]

Wasn’t part of the sales pitch for VisiCalc, 1-2-3, Multiplan etc and more recently Access, Excel, Word macros/VBA etc. their no-code and/or low-code abilities…

Additionally, you say the entire home computer and IBM PC market was based on little or engagement with traditional IT, hence even tools like Turbo Pascal fall into the low-code category…

Whenever I’ve encountered low-code/no-code as part of an IT project, it’s quite common in workflow systems and Business-rule driven applications in general, I have tended to functionally box it and insist the relevant business team/department assign the role of business rule maintainer (whatever title you wish to give it) to member(s) of their team. So for example IT becomes responsible for platform software, user department for their processes etc.

Roland6 Silver badge
Pint

Re: As a student?

> “It was supposed to be one of those "Just get us through the demo, dammit!" hacks.”

This specifically and the comments on this article amuse me, having just read the comments about Excel on the article https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/12/excel_anesthetist_recruitment_blunder/

Roland6 Silver badge

Agree a receipt printer is probably the best solution, can be run off batteries and being small don’t take up much desktop/wall space and whilst they can have multiple uses are unlikely to be used for other purposes, so fire list gets queue blocked because that rarely used printer in reception is currently printing someone’s Magnus opus report.

Brit competition regulator will make or break Vodafone and Three union

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: 100% No

There was an ElReg article recently on Vodafone with market analysts rating Vodafone stock as “stagnant” because it was operating in a regulated and competitive market and so there was not much room to fleece customers and produce the ever increasing profits they say investors are wanting. Another effect of this was to increase the costs of borrowing needed for a rapid rollout of 5G.

It would seem “investors” have forgotten what utility stocks are for; they are dull and don’t give high rates of return but they give a steady income.

Roland6 Silver badge

My understanding they share mast sites, but independently decide whether to actually deploy cells at any specific site. Although to achieve the national coverage targets I expect the number mast sites that don’t have a full complement of MNO cells to be diminishing.

Excel recruitment time bomb makes top trainee doctors 'unappointable'

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: This is not an IT failing

> Management at a higher level

What?

Management would have set out the requirement, it was the people who enacted the requirement who failed firstly to demand data in a standard format (ie. Send out a template spreadsheet to all), then secondly failed rectify the mistake when they received data back in multiple formats.

Locking down Excel would not prevent the mistake as then the data would most probably have been communicated in loosely structured text emails, giving even more room for transcription errors.

Roland6 Silver badge

Depends on what point in their career. I know several senior registrars who scrapped through their medical degrees, but once qualified moved into specialisations where they excelled…

For example, one had no bedside manner and would tell people straight out their life expectancy from some condition, they however, excelled at pathology and did significant research into cot deaths.

Roland6 Silver badge

“ANRO decided to honor these 16 additional offers too"

I read this sentence (in the original article) and expected the next line to be along the lines of: Oriel communicated the acceptance to an additional 24 candidates…

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: "all GP practices have changed to appointment booking solely via an online portal"

An online portal is an improvement over a telephone service, when you are deaf...

Whilst services such as Relay UK do exist, many are unaware and refuse to talk (via Relay UK or a BSL interpreter until they have spoken directly to the deaf person and got their spoken consent …

Hacktivist attacks erupt in Middle East following Hamas assault on Israel

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Unwanted fall out from Israel/Hamas conflict - Preperation for Genocide

> The comparison to the US is frankly baffling

Only whilst the US isn’t at war…

Remember the primary purpose of the right to keep and bear arms wasn’t for personal usage but for the maintenance of a militia.

In the context of then recent events in America, the militia’s were effectively state sanctioned “resistance fighters” in waiting.

My point wasn’t to elevate Hamas, but to counter your viewpoint which seems to based on an antiquated notion of war; having reservists and militia members living/hiding with their weapons in civilian guise is normal, particularly in the war of the flea…

> the predictable Israeli response

That is a big part of the problem, groups on both sides are so predictable because they have entrenched viewpoints that they refuse to budge from, even though common sense and history tells us that their objectives are unobtainable (unless you totally annihilate one or other party).

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Unwanted fall out from Israel/Hamas conflict - Preperation for Genocide

>you never ask why hamas, the "brave" "freedom fighters" keep their rocket launch sites and weapon/ammo stores in civilian areas, do you?”

Suggest you take a closer look at Gaza and ask yourself what would Israel do if it saw the establishment of a set of barracks and weapons dumps…

Interestingly, the US constitution gives the people the right to keep and bear arms, which could be construed to mean the U.S. is just one huge military base, with a civilian camouflage….

So Hamas could simply be following the example set…

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Unwanted fall out from Israel/Hamas conflict

>” the state of Israel being pushed into the sea”

If it brings the Israeli leadership to its senses….

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Unwanted fall out from Israel/Hamas conflict - Preperation for Genocide

Pre-crime prevention?

Given this is Israel, we can be sure many of the people at the festival will be called up to serve in the Israeli military…

Hell no, we won’t pay, says Microsoft as Uncle Sam sends $29B bill for back taxes

Roland6 Silver badge

“We have conflict, confidentiality and ethical concerns,”

[source: propublica article linked to in the article. ]

Love the double standards, so Microsoft use KPMG because they had “significant experience assisting Fortune 50 companies” without such concerns, yet as soon as the IRS start using the same companies…

Microsoft gives unexpected tutorial on how to install Linux

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Windows isn’t needed for all home use any more

>” Assuming he’s typical of many young adults in the education system”

So it’s running M365 and Teams okay?

curl vulnerabilities ironed out with patches after week-long tease

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Static Code Analysis

However, the tools are only as good as the test cases:

” "It could have been detected with a better set of tests.”

Which suggests insufficient attention was paid to the definition of tests.

SAP customers on brink of ERPocalypse as 2025 support cliff looms for ECC

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: “ and instead try to make the leap to S/4HANA”

But with Brexit and CoViD I expect many businesses have had 3+ years of lacklustre trading and increased costs, so they can be excused for sweating their assets for longer.

In the past I suspect SAP would have simply extended support. However, now they want the cloud subscriptions which customers have to pay regardless of the health of their business creating the revenues needed to pay for the cloud subscriptions…

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: “ …they just want to sell their products and services."

>” CAPEX to OPEX is a significant prize”

For those who are selling subscription services, not so much for businesses making the investment and purchasing services.

>” the opportunity to Simplify”

Nice sound bite, but much depends on what is actually meant by “simplify” and thus who’s version of “simplify” is being implemented.

Roland6 Silver badge

“ and instead try to make the leap to S/4HANA”

Based on previous experience, I suspect SAP don’t have the tools to support a direct migration from EHP5 to S/4HANA, they assumed customers would upgrade via EHP6, as this means more service revenues for SAP and its partners…

I bet the competition have tool sets that will support migration off SAP on their ERP platforms…

Roland6 Silver badge

“ …they just want to sell their products and services."

“ He said most ECC customers were not convinced by SAP's arguments that to innovate and transform their business, they need to be on S/4HANA, preferably in the cloud.”

A statement I suggest you could replace SAP and S/4HANA with practically any cloud vendor and their subscription cloud offering Eg. Microsoft and 365, and for it to be true.

I do think many oil IT have forgotten, their customers businesses are about selling their products and services, spending money and time on migrating to the latest IT fashion, is a long way down the list of priorities.

Lenovo to offer Android PCs, starting with an all-in-one that can pack a Core i9

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: The linked product page doesn't mention Android

The link is to the existing product, which will be enhanced by an android offer.

This gives a little more detail: https://www.esper.io/blog/lenovo-esper-foundation-family

Looks like there might be an announcement of actual product i the coming months.

Lenovo PC boss: 4 in 5 of our devices will be repairable by 2025

Roland6 Silver badge

Not seeing so many in recent vendor offerings.

Gone are the days where say HP laptops (2017 vintage for example) had a pair of slide catches revealing the user swappable components: HDD/SSD, WiFi card, RAM, DVD drive, keyboard (attachment screws), battery…

Although even then, there were some constraints dictated by what the device was shipped with.

I have laptops which were shipped with an NVME HDD with an empty space for a sata HDD but no connectors or caddy to permit usage of the space..

Mind you just taken delivery of a new Dell business laptop, glad I went for the 16GB RAM, 1 TB SSD version its all soldered in and so no future upgrade possible, even though the Dell spec sheets give maximums much larger than installed. So instead of standardising on one laptop platform and adding stuff to suit particular user needs, I have to order in anticipation of future user needs, a much more wasteful approach…

When is a PC an AI PC? Nobody seems to know or wants to tell

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: A simple definition

Even simpler definition:

A PC capable of running Windows 12,.

Wino 1 l will most probably which require an AI chip to support the AI functionality MS are building into Windows.

You've just spent $400 on a baby monitor. Now you need a subscription

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: You've just spent $400 on a baby monitor

I suspect it is this use case that is being tapped into.

A baby monitor only has limited use, typically new parents who are still learning.

However, over the years ithey have come baby sitter and carer monitors, so something that many only used for a few months now becomes something that gets used over several years.

Improving defense of US space assets isn't rocket science. Oh wait

Roland6 Silver badge

Increasingly, it seems we waking up to just how vulnerable we are - looks like Putin timed his excursion into Ukraine right.

Looks like the window of opportunity/vulnerability is going to be closing around 2040; fingers crossed that no one decides to take advantage of it…

Human knocks down woman in hit-and-run. Then driverless Cruise car parks on top of her

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: My first thought ...

If Cruise have any sense they will be (publicly) ensuring the accident victim is getting the best medical care at their expense, and publish the successful recovery, okay without admitting liability at this time).

How Cruise handle this case will make a massive difference to the way future cases are resolved and the publics acceptance of such vehicles in public space.

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: It's a good question

Depends on their view and whether they were looking, so they might have glimpsed the pedestrian before or as the other car hit them and done the instinctive inference and slammed the brakes on.

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Two related stories (from with the past 3 months)

> at which point she was pulled under the engine compartment

The majority of SUVs have this design fault. Going back a few decades it was a feature of car design to have a lower front and sloped bonnet so that animals and people would be thrown on to the bonnet rather than dragged under the car…

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Interesting that the police

This raises an important question: do these cars have an obvious off and take manual control switch, like UK buses which have an external fuel cutoff and engine kill switch.

I suspect without some form of standardisation there is no reliable way for a third-party (police etc) to do anything with the autonomous car, unlike cars with human drivers…

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: My first thought ...

I presume there is also a lack of mobile phone footage uploaded by Joe Public?

Microsoft introduces AI meddling to your files with Copilot in OneDrive

Roland6 Silver badge

>” Oh now come on, just how many nights have you laid awake, unable to sleep, haunted by the thought of “I don’t know how to find my files?” l

Now we know these weren’t nightmares, they were premonitions of recovering from an AI filing clerk…

The alternative to stopping climate change is untested carbon capture tech

Roland6 Silver badge

Yes it would be interesting to see a carbon capture plant up and running; for the UK it would need to process the equivalent of one supertanker of oil per day just for the UK to stand still on carbon emissions, additional plants would be necessary to address the hundred years or so of backlog…

This also gives some idea of the scale of the output: a supertanker of carbon every couple of days or more likely the output will be more bulky and so a couple of supertankers per day.

Roland6 Silver badge
Joke

Re: Carbon sinks

> I favour compressing it into pellets that are denser than water

Need to be careful, compress it too much and you make diamonds…

Roland6 Silver badge

130 Mt CO2 Pa Does look very low.

“ The average carbon dioxide coefficient of distillate fuel oil is 426.10 kg CO2 per 42-gallon barrel (EPA 2022).”

So 130 Mt is roughly 305 barrels per year.

It is estimated the world consumes more than 88 million barrels of oil per day…

[ https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/oil-consumption-by-country ]

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Carbon sinks

>” I wonder how much charcoal the fires leave behind.”

Very little, remember charcoal is formed by heating wood to over 400C in an oxygen starved environment.

What also needs to be taken into account, is the amount (and source) of energy needed to covert x tons of wood in y tons of charcoal.

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Carbon sinks

>” Empress trees are fast growing, and are reputed to capture up to 10x the carbon of other species.”

Useful but not really helpful information.

The problem is trees grow…

Locally we’ve just had a run in with housing developers and planning. They are wanting to fell a avenue of mature trees, they have offered to plant new trees: one sapling per mature tree… we pointed out the maths indicates they actually need to plant circa 1700 saplings per mature tree for the new planing to capture the same amount of carbon as the existing trees (obviously over time the saplings can be thinned).

So all those “we plant trees to offset carbon emissions” are highly suspect.

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: This is bonkers

>” The costs for climate policies are crippling to our economy and therefore our wellbeing, and for what?”

Never ending growth can only happen in books and the imagination, by all measures we are beyond what our planet can provide and sustain our lifestyle and a 9+ billion population. So the question isn’t if but when will our economy and society crash…

Some experts, ignoring climate change and going on consumption and population growth, suggest circa 2040 when the wheels fall off the current world economic order… [Aside I’ve been looking for more on this, but back of the envelope calculations based on a 1970 report which projected Earth could support 3 billion people consuming 3 Earth’s of resources for circa 200 years indicate 50 years down the road, for 9 billion its 20~30 years… ]

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: This is bonkers

So for an encore are you now going to prove that black is white?

The IPCC assessment criteria are a joke!

The criteria are more about backing a do nothing approach, once (and there is a big if on whether the criteria really will show this) the criteria are satisfied there is no simple mitigation, it’s hold on for the ride time…

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Kudos

>” the infamous 'Hockey Stick'”

I seem to remember the well funded US based denier group that then took the data and did their own corrected work also came up with a hockey stick…

Roland6 Silver badge

>” evidence of very large populations”

“Large” based on our understanding of the technology and state of advancement back then, minuscule by todays standards.

>” Only if you completely ignore the 'Greening of the Earth’ “

Valid to ignore, because of timescales and human activity. Timescales because the greening happened over geological timescales not human ie. We need it to go full throttle in the next decade or so, secondly humans have shown they are really good at deforestation etc. ie. Cutting back the “greening” and burning it…

>” and none of the supposed 'experts' can demonstrate”

And none of the nutters (or “supposed experts you refer to) can point to a previous advanced society of 9+ billion humans surviving the size of climate we are f potentially facing, BSL we are stepping into the unknown, knowing that the many of the models are based on chaos theory; hence the butterfly wings saying.

Supreme Court doesn't want to hear union's beef about STEM grad work visas

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: We instead need a national apprenticeship, open to all, not just foreign students

Be interested in knowing how many OPT employees/apprentices are retained, or whether they are also treated less favourably and tend to be replaced with a new crop of OPT apprentices.

Interestingly, long-term it would tend to bias the pool of STEM workers towards foreign workers.

Perhaps what Washtech needs are some Russian or Chinese OPT participants working for the DoD or other such establishments and hence the “spying” boogeyman can be invoked, and if they return to their home country, well it’s hardly surprising if they use their skills and knowledge gained in the US against the US…

Ex-Microsoft maverick takes us on a trip through vintage Task Manager code

Roland6 Silver badge

"… the approach I did take was valid for the day because it kept it both robust and small”

This approach is also valid today, for essential unilities.such as task manager/resource manage.

I’m uncertain what "Today I would use a lot more of the C++ language itself and the STL library” would actually bring other than an increase in size of executable and greater dependency on other components and thus less robust.

Lost your luggage? That's nothing – we just lost your whole flight!

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: This one command you must not enter

> recommended that the production console background was a different colour to others.

This is worth doing when you have a few WS where Admin is identical and have to nest desktops to do updates; the one with the maroon background is running the hyper visor…

Yes you can also paste the system name to the wallpaper, but a colour change helps to prompt to check such details.

Outlook's clingy 'reopen last session' prompt gets the boot

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Is it just me...

Also don’t really get why this is such an issue, get similar functionality with Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Word, Excel, etc.

About the only potential irritation is if you have closed Outlook explicitly and cleanly, it pops up. However, perhaps it does need to be more like the other recovery options, so it allows normal entry in to Outlook and then give the option to recover.

ASUS's Zenbook S 13 is light, fast, and immediately impressive

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Apple power plugs

Personally, for an ultra portable I am more concerned about the longevity of the USB-c power port on the Zenbook, I would want to replace that with a MagSafe connector.

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Hinge & Bezel

It’s been a feature of Dell vostro laptops for at least the last two years. In this case it also elevates the key board to give it more of a slope.

EFF urges Chrome users to get out of the Privacy Sandbox

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: MRDA?

Re "We believe the safe use of data can improve user experiences,"

Don’t you love the non sequitur, that people can agree with yet Google’s interpretation and implementation of this in its sandbox is totally at odds with the reasons for using a sandbox.

Raspberry Pi 5 revealed, and it should satisfy your need for speed

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Lost the plot

>” Oh, yes, I remember netbooks.”

The concept was good, implementation, crippled by both Microsoft and Intel left much to be desired.

What delivered the decisive blow to the netbook was the iPad.

Given modern hardware, it should be possible to have a decent performing netbook that can run full fat Linux or Windows, that is more than equal to the iPad at an iPad price.

More and more LLMs in biz products, but who'll take responsibility for their output?

Roland6 Silver badge

He was being honest and direct.

Judges will only get involved if some individual decides to risk everything and a no win no fee lawyer (with deep pockets) takes the case…

Meta spends $181M to get out of lease at vacant London offices

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Ironic...

>” While converting upper floors into nice flats for fair rent to retired gentlefolk”

Housing for the “over 50s” is nice renumerative con. It counts as social housing and so can be built in places where other styles of housing would not get planning, plus it cares a nice price premium, in part because there are a large number of single 50+ people who have money, who like the idea of independent living within a sheltered accomodation complex. Obviously having these people with time and disposable income within a city should benefit local shops, cafes etc.