* Posts by Martin Gregorie

1341 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007

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UK finance minister promises NHS £3.4B IT investment to unlock £35B savings

Martin Gregorie

Same old chicanery

Late last year, in a weak moment I signed up for allowing my data to be used for NHS research projects because it seemed like A Good Thing To Do. This was after ferreting round the available online information because I wanted to know about the currently running research projects and see what new problems & diseases the combined data of us all could fix. All looked good, though I was a little surprised that there were apparently no current research projects running and there was no information at all about the Federated Database - but at least Palantir seemed not to be involved.

Then two days later I saw a note saying that the new all singing, all dancing NHS Federated Database was just the Palantir-provided COVID tracking database with a new coat of paint.

So, remembering all the dodgy things that outfit has done, i.e. the BREXIT shenanigans, it was the work of a moment to cancel my link to the NHS Federated Whatsit, though I do wonder if they kept their word about not using my data: the NHS blurb said that they would only use data about signed-up citizens and would delete data about anybody leaving the project.

AI to fix UK Civil Service's bureaucratic bungling, deputy PM bets

Martin Gregorie

Re: AI to fix UK Civil Service's bureaucratic, bungling deputy PM bets

As far as I can see the UK Civil Service has only two guiding principles:

1) Show other (Commonwealth) governments how NOT to do something, such as introducing decimal currency or converting the country to MKS measurements

2) Never, ever learn anything from successful new ideas introduced by other civil services.

A path out of bloat: A Linux built for VMs

Martin Gregorie

More comparisons needed...

It would be interesting if somebody more qualified to comment than I could compare the Unix/Plan9 design philosophy with some of the better designed mainframe architectures than the System/360, such as the ICL 2900/3900 series and the later Burroughs systems.

I only know stuff about how the 1900 was organised plus a bit about the Ferranti-Packard 6000, from which the ICL1900 series was developed, IBM's AS400 and,of course the ICL 2900 series.

The 1900 was interesting because, in the middle range machines anyway, the accumulators, PC, CCR, etc were all virtualized and packaged into the first 32 words of the program. The only hardware registers contained DATUM and LIMIT of the running process, task switches were fast (just push the current DATUM and LIMIT onto the list and replace with the new task's DATUM and LIMIT. No task could address words outside its DATUM and LIMIT. Programs were easily moved within memory or to/from disk because they were by definition a single contiguous block of memory. The exact same mechanism was used to execute the GEORGE 3 OS and as an ex 1903/4 GEORGE 3 admin I can say that it all worked pretty well.

As a big plus, George 3 was the first OS I saw with a hierarchic filing system - in 1970!

FWIW I designed and wrote systems and or was sysadmin on 1900s for 6 years, 3 years on 2900s, and around 5 years on AS/400s.

I wish I knew more about the 2900/3900 machines (the 2903/4 was a 2900 disk controller in a fancy box with a screen and keyboard running a 1900 emulator and bog-standard 1900 system software), but apart from that all I know was that the 2900 ran every process in its own VM and that the underlying microcode (running on a 2MHz 6809 chip in the 2960) allowed you to run COBOL in a byte-oriented VM and (presumably) Algol 60 or Fortran in a word-oriented VM and, there was a choice of running applications in VMs containing either George 3 or VME/B.

I have a feeling that the ICL 2900/3900 and IBM AS/400 and operating systems were fairly similar, being written at more or less the same time and with one (to me anyway) a similar fault@: neither have hierarchic filing systems.

Space nukes: The unbelievably bad idea that's exactly that ... unbelievable

Martin Gregorie

I saw Starfish Prime

I remember seeing Starfish Prime's aftermath from New Zealand.

Not its initial flash of course, but one of its artifacts was a huge, garish yellow stripe with scarlet edges extending from the northern horizon fairly much directly over Hawkes Bay in New Zealand. I couldn't see how much further south it extended because I was looking out of a north-facing window in a boarding school dormitory. Several of us saw it, but none of us had any idea what it might be, except that we were pretty certain it wasn't an aurora. I only found out what it probably was after Starfish Prime was declassified some decades later.

A check just now with Google Earth shows that a line running due south from Johnson Atoll passes about 1000km east of Hawkes Bay which pretty much corresponds with my memories: the bomb exploded at 400km above Johnson Atoll, so a track running due south from there would still appear well up in the sky from where I was.

I've never heard of any other reports of this being seen from NZ, but as the nuke was triggered at 23:00, this would not be surprising seeing that the explosion was classified. That means that it would not be pre-announced in NZ and anyway 11PM was after most people's bedtimes in early '60s NZ.

Drowning in code: The ever-growing problem of ever-growing codebases

Martin Gregorie

Spot on.

The OP has pretty much got it in one. It would appear that pretty much anyone who can read and write legible text in their native language that explains clearly and correctly how to do everyday tasks and/or simple calculations can be taught to write computer programs that compile without errors. Many of these folks can also learn how to write code that not only clean compiles but also does what they intended it to do provided that the task is fairly straight forward, such as account-keeping for a household or small business.

The same people would also get satisfactory results if they use 3GL systems (or possibly spreadsheets) to carry out similar tasks to automate household or small business accounting tasks.

However, anything much beyond this, such as designing and implementing apparently similar systems for handling bigger financial structures (banks, stock exchanges or government departments) or for different tasks such as engineering design, science projects or running any business large enough to require a formally structured management board, will probably be doomed to failure simply because these tasks require mathematical, logical and/or managerial skills which many people simply do not possess or are unwilling to learn.

Almost all our problems arise when people who do not possess these skills or are unwilling to learn them are put, or manage to talk themselves into, positions which require these skills.

FWIW I've just read "The Rocket and the Reich", to find out more about the A-4 and von Braun. Its quite good about those, but I hadn't realized that it also has a lot to say about just how badly the 3rd Reich was managed and, by implication, what an abysmal manager Hitler was. It also has quite a bit to say about just how much time his immediate subordinates and their hangers-on wasted on playing dominance games among themselves. I've never before seen such a clear description of the general chaos this created: just as well for the rest of the world, I suppose!

Search chatbots? Pah, this startup's trying on Yahoo's old outfit of web directories

Martin Gregorie

Re: "Google maintains its results are still better than other search engines"

I haven't used Google for over a decade: basically ever since Duck Duck Go launched.

Microsoft seeks patent for tech to put words into your mouth

Martin Gregorie

But, does it lip sync?

I'd have thought that either replacing a video's original speech track with one in another language and/or replacing it with a different speech in the same language would both show a rather obvious lip sync mismatch, but there's no indication of whether the AI model is capable of recreating lip movements to match the revised audio.

It would be nice to know whether if it has that capability.

When red flags are just office decoration: Edinburgh Uni's Oracle IT disaster

Martin Gregorie

Re: So easy

Agreed. In my experience people with similar management skills and techniques tend to occur in clusters, so it looks very much as if both good and bad management habits are learned from their colleagues to a greater extent that we often realise.

So, I've had generally good experiences with:

* Managers in Australia and NZ.

* Everybody involved in running a small New York-based toy manufacturer where I spent a year building a custom sales system.

* Within IT, most of the managers I worked for back in the 70s and 80s in ICL and, especially Data Kill project managers, were pretty good.

* Logica's management, as a group, were uniformly good apart from a few MBAs that managed to sneak in.

* On the other hand, with the exception of their team leaders, almost all the higher UK Civil Service management grades I've run on projects into have been abysmal, often being more interested in preparing their retirement sinecures or playing one-upmanship games with their contemporaries than actually doing their job.

Affordable, self-healing power grids are closer than you think

Martin Gregorie

Re: Scotland and wind

So setting up a "gasometer" or two next to an existing combined cycle gas turbine /steam plant and putting low pressure H2

Take the terms "gasometer" and "H2" as metaphorical and replace them with "storage tank" and "Battery of reversible redox flow cells" and you may have something there. By using, say aqueous redox flow cells you've got the advantages of using potentially very large capacity energy stores that are:

* made of relatively cheap materials, hence fairly inexpensive energy storage

* potentially very large storage capacity

* can store energy sourced from any type of generator, turbine of solar panel

* potentially low pollution from leaks depending on the redox compound.

'Exemplar' digital hospitals trust hit by multiple tech-related traumas

Martin Gregorie

Lets first assume that the new system had been designed explicitly to be suitable for the medical data processing it is being used for, and that some hospital staff somewhere in the world had found it fast and easy to use.

However, since the system, as bought, installed and configured, seems to be unfit for purpose, one has to wonder whether the team who bought, configured and installed the system have any familiarity with the medical workplace and, specifically with the tasks the new system is meant to support?

IF NOT, WHY NOT?

I've seen more than one complex system implementation go badly wrong simply because none of the team understood the task it was supposed to support. However, I've also seen one or two others that succeeded, at least in part, because their implementing team included at least one member with experience in that specialty.

The pen is mightier than the keyboard for turbocharging your noggin

Martin Gregorie

Re: Why aren't you taking notes?

Equally if about to write some code I find writing some notes on what I plan to do

Doesn't everybody do this? When writing code, regardless of whether I'm writing in C, Java, COBOL, assembler, awk, or a bash script, I prefix each logical code block with a comment describing what its intended to do. And these comments remain there after the program has gone live to help whoever has to modify it in the future.

UK Civil Aviation Authority ponders vertiports for flying taxis

Martin Gregorie

Re:Going point to point

This is likely to present an identical problem once again: we've had a few cases since 2000: The problem is best described as hordes of strangers in my gliding club's circuit, just bimbling through our overhead without keeping looking out for our local traffic - and gliding clubs are busy on good days with anything up to 400 launches in a day.

First the problem was GA traffic overflying us while keeping outside the M.25 during the Olympics.

Then it was small helis blasting through our overhead at little more than 1200 ft, i.e below the advisory minimum height

Finally it was GA traffic with moving map systems and evidently misreading them.

The first and last two were more or less just nuisances, but the middle one (below advisory height in our overhead) is an actively dangerous place to be over any gliding club with a winch - and almost all UK gliding clubs have winches and use them whenever the weather's any good.. The issue is that if you enter our airspace below 2000 ft you're likely to interfere with both winch launches and gliders joining the landing circuit: my club has a 1Km grass runway which we usually fly from and, because of this, we are marked on maps as having a minimum safe crossing height of 3000 ft.

We usuallly launch from this one because its aligned with the prevailing wind. In normal conditjons we'll be flying landing circuits below 800ft BUT on a good day using it we'll be launching to typically. 1400-1800 ft and possibly higher: with a strong breeze and good wind gradient I've had an SZD Junior up to 2750 ft at the top of the winch.

Another time I got a sudden overspeed at 1000ft on the winch, got off quick rather than pulling the wings off, then thought it might be a thermal, so hauled the wheel up and headed down the centre of the strip and found a very nice thermal at 950ft. It was a light drift day, so I was over 2000ft when the thermal and I crossed the launch point, over 3500ft and climbing at 1500 fpm by the time I'd gone a mile downwind and then had to abandon that thermal at 4500ft sharpish because Stanstead Airspace starts over us at 5000ft - and you NEVER go there! I've always wondered how high I could have ridden it if the Stanstead CTR wasn't there!

Post Office threatened to sue Fujitsu over missing audit data

Martin Gregorie

Re: Somewhat elementary?

Here's an interpretation of how HORIZON is built that seems to follow from the contents of "HORIZON: WITN00620100 David McDonnell - Witness Statement_0"

The components are:

1) The prototype terminal that ICL showed to the POST OFFICE in 1999 was just an initial version of the terminals that would be installed in all Post Offices: the Witness Statement reads as though no HORIZON-specific mainframe code had been written at this time.

2) The accounting and stock control subsystems were to be run on one or more ICL 2900 mainframes installed in Fujitsu's data center. I don't think these subsystems had even been specified at that stage (but I may well be wrong about this).

3) Since the user interfaces will be installed in Post Offices all over the country and both accounting and stock control subsystems are running on mainframe(s) in the data center, the wired network need only be straight-forward BT cabling capable of handling serial message streams fast enough to manage the expected data volume. The Witness statement doesn't mention network encryption so I don't think it was used despite HORIZON being a financial network.

4) The above setup is fairly straight-forward to implement as three self-contained processes along with two switching processes: one directs incoming messages to either the accounting or the stock control process and a second that returns acknowledgements and responses to the requesting terminal.

That's job done except, as the Witness Statement says nothing about the messages passing between mainframe and HORIZON terminals being encrypted, we must assume they are NOT. This has consequences:

a) My financial network designer's background says that you NEVER send plain-text financial messages over a network: even ATM networks are expected to be encrypted..

b) Seems likely to me that the 'transaction adjustments' that Fujitsu are known to have made became super-easy once they realized that, with plain-text communications, anybody can plug in an extra terminal, say, in the data center and freely alter any cash or stock balance that they feel like messing around with simply by injecting unauthorised messages into the inbound message stream.

Fujitsu will not bid for UK.gov business until Post Office inquiry closes

Martin Gregorie

Why Fujitsu

I'm finally realizing that I don't know why and how ICL got flogged off to Fujitsu. IIRC it was apparently doing all right, the second generation 2900s were in pretty good shape and kit such as the 1903/4 small office environment' systems stood head and shoulders above IBM's equivalent System/3 kit.

Lastly, having programmed both ICL 2900 and IBM AS/400 systems, I thought both were very similar in capabilities: even their operating systems were equally nice.

Or did I miss something?

Junior techie had leverage, but didn’t appreciate the gravity of the situation

Martin Gregorie

Numpties have always been with us: its just that some are denser than others.

Long ago,in 1975, I was on a Civil Service job that was being rescued by a gang of freelancers and others of us hired from small software houses. This was after the original implementation team, newly trained and inexperienced Civil Servants filling the roles of both analysts and programmers, both teams with zero previous experience, had predictably, screwed up. It was quite a complex job, running on five ICL 1904s distributed round the UK, all running George 3 and programmed in COBOL. They interchanged data by writing it to tape and sending it between data centers in vans.

Not long after I'd joined the project, another new programming hire rocked up. It turned out that he could not understand that a divide by zero error would simply be trapped by the program, which would report the error and stop. Nobody could convince him that divide by zero in one of the running programs wouldn't immediately bring the whole machine to a screaming halt and probably damage the CPU as well.

Needless to say, he didn't last long on the project. We never discovered who hired him either.

The 'nothing-happened' Y2K bug – how the IT industry worked overtime to save world's computers

Martin Gregorie

Re: Forewarned is forearmed?

For anybody on ICL 1900 systems Y2K was obviously a non-issue since dates were held as 'days since 31 Dec 1899' in a 24 bit word, so the 1900 rollover date is somewhere around 24881 AD and this kit has always come with a set of standard subroutines for dealing with dates, including converting the 'days since' figure into dd/mm/yyyy and vice versa.

When I started to use UNIX and its relatives and discovered that they stored dates in seconds since 1 Jan 1970 I thought that they'd made a good decision to store dates as seconds and then screwed it up by storing dates in short integers having as few as 16 bits. Still, at least the *nix crowd woke up and switched to a 32 bit time value comfortably before 2038 rolled around.

Data regulator fines HelloFresh £140K for sending 80M+ spams

Martin Gregorie

Hmmm - is it just a coincidence...

That this article seems to have a tie-in with this week's BOFH scheme?

Former Post Office boss returns CBE to sender over computer system scandal

Martin Gregorie

"Post Office signed off on the software as being acceptable for service" NO THEY DID NOT

There was never a Requirement Specification for the Royal Mail to sign off as being what wanted the system to do and so nothing to use as the basis for an Acceptance Test suite.

Read David_McDonnell_Witness_Statement, full titlle "HORIZON: WITN00620100 David McDonnell - Witness Statement_0.pdf" if you want to know what went on inside Fujitsu's HORIZON project. Its not pretty but it is very unprofessional.

Martin Gregorie

Re: A scandal of epic proportions

Add one more, equally large scandal: shit in our rivers.

Fujitsu wins flood contract extension despite starring in TV drama about its failures

Martin Gregorie

Re: Horizon

This witness statement WITN00620100 David McDonnell - Witness Statement_0.pdf is most interesting: thanks for posting the link. It confirms my guesses about HORIZON's documentation by stating that there was:

* No written Statement of Requirements was issued by the Royal Mail, just verbal acceptance of a prototyped demo system written by Fujitsu

* No signed off HORIZON System Design document.

* No Acceptance Testing Specification was written by the Royal Mail and no acceptance testing was done by the RM before HORIZON went live

Thankfully, I've never been involved in any system development with such poor management or so much interference from external actors.

I'd recommend every professional developer to download, save and read a copy the above Witness statement because it is an absolutely stellar example of how NOT to develop any computer application.

Martin Gregorie

A longish stretch, but...

Having just read "His Majesty's Airship", I'm struck by similarities between 1930's R.101 airship crash and the Horizon fiasco. These are all failures of the respective project managements. In both cases the management failure to see and deal with problems such as inadequate or omitted testing before putting the respective projects into service are quite striking.

At least the R.101 crash eliminated virtually all those responsible for causing the crash (they were on board it at the time) while their Horizon equivalents seem to have got away without any penalties.

UK PM promises faster justice for Post Office Horizon victims

Martin Gregorie

Project management by those ignorant of IT systems?

I'm quite surprised about the way the HORIZON enquiry is proceding. I've listened to the Radio 4 series enquiring into this and to the Private Eye article about it and one thing stands out: the apparent ignorance of HORIZON investigators about the way bespoke sortware is specified, built and checked as fit for purpose before it is put into live operation.

My point is that the terms 'Project Definition' and 'Acceptance Test' don't appear in any account of the rise and fall of HORIZON that I've seen, so I'm left wondering if these documents were ever created. If they were not, then this indicates that both Royal Mail and Fujitsu project management are horridly incompetent: after all, ICL systems had quite decent system definition software available as a standard feature.

I think it follows that both companies should be liable for the costs of replacing HORIZON and of undoing the harms, both financial and reputational, done to all the sub-postmasters who have been affected and HMG (and hence us) should not covering the costs incurred by either the Royal Mail or Fujitsu..

AI won't take your job, might shrink your wages, European Central Bank reckons

Martin Gregorie

Yawn. This was predicted back in the 1952....

... by Kurt Vonnegut in his first novel, "Player Piano". It's well worth a read now, as it describes a fully automated 'utopia' where nobody in the general population works because they're all on welfare and. as a result, there's a static, bored, class-ridden society, but without having or needing the continuous global war and police state of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.

If you haven't read either novel, then get out there and read them. Who knows, you might even learn something and/or recognize the same tendencies showing up now.

Excel recruitment time bomb makes top trainee doctors 'unappointable'

Martin Gregorie

Re: Excel recruitment time bomb makes top trainee doctors 'unappointable'

Sculptor are very cagey (as in, no mention I can see) about pricing, which usually means it is way out of range for, say, just doing a scoring system for Free Flight model championships or anything similar.

Very true. Back in the day it was relatively expensive mainly because it was aimed at small IT businesses who wrote bespoke or customisable systems for sole traders or non-IT small businesses. This is the scenario I first used it in. IOW it was not something an individual user was expected to buy. Maybe that's why Sculptor is still supported and available?

FWIW, When Sculptor dropped support for OS9/68K, one of its US suppliers got caught short with a heap of Sculptor copies and flogged them off cheap via the '68 MicroJournal: I'd already discovered Sculptor when I was working for a small UK software house and liked it, so I immediately grabbed a copy for my own use: for several years, until Linux appeared, I was running OS9/68K on a MC68020 box as my house server, and had my copy of Sculptor installed on that. This kit is what I ran the Free Flight scoring system on.

Martin Gregorie

Excel recruitment time bomb makes top trainee doctors 'unappointable'

This type of data collectiion looks very like the sort of thing that would be a good fit for a traditional 4GL package system: the sort of package we used to run on our PCs in the late '70s and early '80s. Examples are DBase, and Sculptor - the latter is still a going concern at https://sculptor.co.uk/ (disclaimer: I have no current connection with them, being merely a happy application developer from the '80s.

This sort of system is a much better fit for the sort of data capture task we're discussing than a spreadsheet because it:

- provides a captioned data entry screen that can also correct misentered data as needed

- has the built-in ability to validate data as its entered

- stores captured data in a predefined (indexed) sequence

- can generate reports and export the data in other formats such as CSV files.

- several of them have can allow several data capture instances to update a common database file.

Most of these 4GL systems make it fairly easy to write and test a simple data capture system (file definition(s), data capture screen, and a report or two) within a normal working day.

The sorts of tasks I've used Sculptor for have included both multi-currency accounting systems and a scoring system for Free Flight model championships where the scoring system ran off a portable petrol generator with the computer and screena and printer in back of a parcel van.

Elon Musk's ambitions for Starship soar high while reality waits on launchpad

Martin Gregorie

Mars taxation

Spot on.

I used to fly free flight models (F1A gliders and F1J power models to be precise) in competitions where assorted Soviet model flyers used to turn up (and were expected, complete with their KGB keeper) through the '70s and 80s, though by the '90s and into the Gorbachev era the 'minders' had vanished, so I got to know some of them quite well. They were all cynics to a man and the stories that came out as the vodka started to flow were amazing. One of their common sayings was:

"The State pretends to pay us and we pretend to work".

The contrast between the quality of Soviet manufactured goods and that of the free flight models they'd designed and built had to be seen to be believed: all this took place when the FAI Free Flight Competition Rule contained a rule requiring all competitors to have built their own models, so we knew that their beautiful and innovative models were their their own work, including engines and timers.

FAA wants rocket jockeys to clean up after their space launch parties

Martin Gregorie

25 <b>YEARS</b> sounds a bit long

However, the FAA proposes that operators should be allowed up to 25 years in which the upper stage is removed from orbit using the uncontrolled or natural decay method.

Dunno about the rest of you lot, but to me this sounds a bit too much like: "Should be long enough for everybody to forget who put it up there in the first place, so fill your boots, boys".

Scared of flying? Good news! Software glitches keep aircraft on the ground

Martin Gregorie

Re: At least three systems are required

Any system that can't recognise and reject duff data WITH A CLEAR DESCRIPTION OF THE ERROR is poorly designed and should never have passed acceptance testing.

Any system that crashes or fails over to a parallel backup process just because it receives data containing errors was

(a) designed by somebody who does not deserve the title of 'system designer'

(b) should never have passed its design review before coding started.

Martin Gregorie

Re: NATS crashed.

It seems to me that NATS handling of mistakes in flight plans is just plain wrong. Given that a flight plan seems to be a self-contained item that must not clash with any previously submitted flight plan, it follows that mistakes in flight plans should never be treated as system errors but rather, that NATS should reject that flight plan for correction and re-submission by its originator.

In a critical system like this, errors in flight plans should never cause standby or duplicate processes to crash.

What should happen is that, if the flight plan validation process finds an error, the plan being validated is rejected and an error report returned to the originator so the plan can be corrected and re-submitted by its originators. If the flight plan was automatically generated by the originator's software, then its up to them to manually correct and re-submit rejected flight plans while their support team fixes the error(s) in their software and/or database.

CrowView: A clamp-on, portable second laptop display

Martin Gregorie

Was it usable as the display for a RaspberryPi?

This would seem to be an obvious display for use with a RaspberryPI for any task requiring a laptop-size display, so why no report about how well this combo works?

Polishing off a printer with a flourish revealed not to be best practice

Martin Gregorie

Re: Stories from Grandad

When I started work (1968 in an ICL service bureau, when all men wore shirts and ties in the office), it was easy to spot the longer-service engineers: those were the ones wearing bow ties.

The older engineers wore bow ties from habit because wearing the usual style of office tie (those optionally secured with a tie-pin) was inviting an accident if your job was maintaining card-punch data processing equipment such as sorters and tabulators: it was all too easy to get the end of your tie caught in a running sorter or tabulator and then woe betide you if the STOP switch wasn't within reach.

Thames Water to datacenters: Cut water use or we will

Martin Gregorie

Re: Usual rip off

Where I live we've had water meters for long enough for my original one to have worn out and been replaced. That was over a year ago.

The meters have always had a wireless connection (frequency band not known or displayed on the meter), which is good because the meter is in a cupboard in the kitchen, so the radio llnk means no meter readers tromping mud through the house on a wet day or me having to be home for their visit.

However, the other week I did have a visit from a water company rep to audit leaking taps, leaking taps and cistern's etc. I thought this was quite a good idea since it was free and that that he might spot any problems I'd missed. In the event the rep carried ID, was friendly and didn't spot any problems.

Douglas Adams was right: Telephone sanitizers are terrible human beings

Martin Gregorie

Re: Real Sanitizers

Apart from the radio version of the Hitch Hiker';s Guide to the Galaxy, by far the best version was the live-on-stage version in the Rainbow Theater: you knew the Vogons were bad because they jumped off the stage and beat up the audience. Too bad, though, that the interval bar no longer sold Pan-galactic Gargleblasters by the time I got to see the show.

Judge lets art trio take another crack at suing AI devs over copyright

Martin Gregorie

Re: Extension of the Existing Situation

Whether you can legally copy and compile *ANY* source code depends solely on the license that the author(s) applied to it.

If no licensing details are included in the source code, then you can do what you like.

If the code was in a book , e.g. "Software Tools in Pascal" (Kernighan & Plauger) or Sedgewick's "Algorithms", the publisher's copyright notice controls what you can do with the physical book and its content's representation on the page.

In both these books the copyright notice says explicitly that than you can't reproduce any part of the book. However, as all the example code in both books is written in Pascal, I, and doubtless almost all other software authors, have always assumed that translating the Pascal example code into another language, i.e. C, Java, COBOL or even assembler counts as 'fair use'. In both books the 'Preface' text also makes it clear that the authors expect the example code to be copied, possibly translated into a different language, and incorporated into other programs and then compiled and used within other personal or commercial programs. To me this means that the publisher's copyright notice is meant to apply just to the physical book and the text it contains as represented on its pages.

Post Office Horizon Inquiry calls for compensation to be brought forward

Martin Gregorie

Re: False

Each and every company can be held liable for the quality of their work. There is no way to totally absolve themselves based on T+C.

While this is absolutely true, in the absence of something like a relevant ISO financial systems standard, there IS a de facto standard for judging any financial software system: that is the System Specification which the delivered system MUST conform to in both performance and function, and which both the client and the developers must agree and should have signed off on before development starts.

Once the System Spec has been agreed and signed off the developers are contractually bound to produce a high quality system that conforms exactly to the spec, it is also the case that the client should assemble an acceptance test team who will produce an acceptance test suite that will allow them to verify that the delivered system corresponds exactly to the System Spec and contains no defects or anomalies.

I've listened to the Radio 4 programs about the Horizon disaster and have just read Private Eye's account, but nowhere has there been any reference to a signed off System Spec or to any Acceptance Testing process or team. Why? If it was because no Acceptance testing was ever done, that's just inexcusable and shows that both Fujitsu and PO management were, and maybe still are, unbelievably incompetent right up to Board and Ministerial level.

Bosch goes all-in on hydrogen with €2.5B investment by 2026

Martin Gregorie

Re: Is hydrogen ‘green’?

Kim Stanley Robinson, who seems to usually get his science right, hangs a plot point in his Red/Green/Blue Mars trilogy on a claim that a living human becomes inflammable once the atmospheric oxygen content is around 40-45%.

If that's right, and I'm feeling too lazy to check it ATM, then making GREEN hydrogen by electrolysing water and releasing any unwanted oxygen into the atmosphere would become a serious problem if that should double the atmospheric O2 content.

Martin Gregorie

Re: Is hydrogen ‘green’?

That depends; hydrogen comes in three 'colours': GREEN, BLUE and GREY

GREEN: made by using only renewable energy to run electrolysis cells, so the only 'waste' product is oxygen, which can be used for medical or industrial purposes.

BLUE: made by reforming methane and/or coal with the carbon and other waste products captured and stored permanently so that they can never re-enter the biosphere. Think waste repositories as secure and long lasting as you would need for radioactive waste management. Putting the waste products back into exhausted oil wells and coal mines isn't nearly good enough: they need to be as securely buried as they were before we came along and dug up the raw materials that the BLUE hydrogen was extracted from.

GREY: Any process that generates hydrogen and emits the resulting waste products into the earth's biosphere: in other words, Business As Usual until the present.

Some hair-splitters subdivide BLUE into TURQUOISE (methane pyrolysis with solid carbon as the waste product), PINK (think GREEN but with nuclear power driving the electrolysis cells rather than solar or wind energy), while others reserve YELLOW for solar powered electrolysis.

Currently 95% of all commercially available hydrogen is GREY. Numbers for splitting the remaining 5% of hydrogen production between BLUE and GREEN production methods don't seem to be easily available.

Chinese battery maker for the stars of the EV world suddenly wants to be seen powering human rights

Martin Gregorie

Is “egregious” the same as “we don’t know”?

NO.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition. says

adjective

- Conspicuously bad or offensive. synonym: flagrant.

- Surpassing; extraordinary; distinguished (in a bad sense); -- formerly used with words importing a good quality, but now joined with words having a bad sense.

- Exceptional, conspicuous, outstanding, most usually in a negative fashion.

North Korean satellite had no military utility for spying, says South Korea

Martin Gregorie

Re: What was this satellite for?

Maybe the contents of the nose cone was just a chunk of concrete and a radio beacon to make it easier to track?

That would make a nice, cheap test mass: perfect if the item being tested is the launcher rather than the item(s) being launched.

Cynic? MOI?

Artificial General Intelligence remains a distant dream despite LLM boom

Martin Gregorie

Well said.

I was around and working on financial networks and interestingly complex databases in the mid-80s, when "Expert Systems" appeared in the Hype-sphere, were promoted as The Answer to rapidly creating any and all interactive applications, but were soon gone and forgotten. IIRC even the 4GL systems (DBase, Sculptor, etc) that emerged in the late '70s, and were more commonly used on Personal computers than on minicomputers and mainframes, outlasted them.

Missing Titan sub likely destroyed in implosion, no survivors

Martin Gregorie

Re: "craft's carbon fiber hull"

Fair comment: I grew up hearing about the square windows, when the reality was that the crack propagated from a bolt hole, helped on its way by the alloy skin sheeting not being thick enough to prevent it tearing.

If you want some lighter reading after all this doom & destruction, try reading "No Highway" by Neville Shute, a novel about airliner crashes caused by metal fatigue and, intriguingly, published about a year before the Comet airliner's first flight, and still a pretty good read.

If you like that, yo mat also like 'Slide-rule', which covers Nevile Shute's life from pre WW1 to 1938, when he emigrated to Australia and became a full-time author. Beterrn1920 to 1938 he worked for De Havilland, Vickers and Airspeed as both engineer and manager, and was involved with both aircraft and airships.

Martin Gregorie

Re: "craft's carbon fiber hull"

That's not really relevant. The Comet fuselage was an alloy structure that failed from metal fatigue at a stress concentration caused by using sharp corners for windows in the pressurised cabin.

Carbon composites don't fail that way: they tend to fail by being overstressed and/or by impact cracking rather than by fatigue cracks.

Will Flatpak and Snap replace desktop Linux native apps?

Martin Gregorie

One thing you've missed

Is that at least some of us like to keep our backups in a known state. This is easy to do if you run a backup followed immediately by a system update: in my case this means running rsync followed immediately by dnf (I'm running Fedora) and a system restart to make sure that new libraries etc. are now in use. Handling backups this way ensures that, after a disaster such as a disk failure, you *KNOW* that simply restoring the most recent backup will leave you with a runable system in a known state. This is a problem regardless of whether the backup+upgrade sequence is manually sequenced or run by a script.

The problem with flatpak and friends is that there's apparently no way to avoid getting force-fed a an update at a time chosen by the developer. Murphy pretty much guarantees that at some point an application push upgrade WILL coincide with a backup run and that this will result in a backup that, if restored, will contain incompatible software modules and/or configuration files.

AFAIK there is currently no mechanism provided that can prevent developer-originated push backups from running when the recipient system is taking a backup. I've certainly not seen any mention of such a backup integrity protection feature, so it seems unlikely to have been provided.

Another cause of problems would seem to be the case where the push update replaces application configuration files that have been modified to suit local requirements, e.g. sshd security settings. At least dnf, apt etc tell you when this happens and you can edit the revised configuration as required before rebooting the system: do flatpak etc even tell you that a new set of configuration files has replaced your customised ones?

Boss put project on progress bar timeline: three months … four … actually NOW!

Martin Gregorie

Re: Bunch?

A cesspit of arseholes?

Hong Kong tries to outlaw uploads of unofficial and anti-Beijing anthem

Martin Gregorie

Hong Kong police used to be considered very similar to Western cops. What had caused them to switch sides to totalitarian mode so fast, I wonder?

I imagine that the threat of cancellation of one's police pay check would have that effect. In some parts of the world the detective branch also keeps its beady little eyes on the uniformed police branches.

The world of work is broken and it's Microsoft's fault

Martin Gregorie

The world of work is broken and it's often Project Management's fault

The most productive projects I've been on were either before e-mail was a 'thing' or when it was unnecessary because related subsets of team members had clustered their desks, making both e-mail and/or phone calls unnecessary because two or three of the group could just talk quietly without disturbing people in the rest of the office.

The only exception I can remember was one case when a small group of us were in the code & test phase of the project: our desks were clustered, but we used e-mail between ourselves because this way messages could be attended to between writing blocks of code, debugging sessions, etc. Experience had shown us that in this particular case we got more done if answering questions etc could be deferred until the recipient's current task reached a natural breakpoint: e-mail provided the perfect way of collecting this type of query so they could be answered without breaking anybody's concentration.

Project meetings were kept brief and relatively infrequent too.

Academics have 'no confidence' in Edinburgh University's response to its Oracle disaster

Martin Gregorie

Another bit of missing information about this story...

...is just how many of the team that specified and designed the new system had hands-on experience of the one it was meant to replace?

And how many members of that team had previously implemented a financial system of similar scope and complexity?

If the answers are 'none' and 'none', then we know who to blame for the failure: those managing it. But, I bet THAT blame never lands where it deserves to.

UK emergency services take DIY approach amid 12-year wait for comms upgrade

Martin Gregorie

Re: Services in other countries were now able to move ahead ... faster

That's been the case as long as I can remember: the attitude among the Great And Good in the UK always seems to have been "We know what we're doing so we'll ignore what anybody else might know".

Take monetary decimalization:

- The Canadians went decimal first and the results weren't good, but Australia and NZ had observers there and noted the mistakes.

- Australia went next, avoided all the Canadian mistakes, but made a few of their own. NZ had observers there and noted a few new mistakes.

New Zealand went third, and had a largely trouble-free conversion to decimal currency.

UK? Didn't have any observers at any of the previous three monetary decimal conversions, but nonetheless not only repeated all the cock-ups made by the previous three, but invented a truckload more, causing such a mess that any further rationalization has been impossible like, for instance, the largely mishandled and never completed switch to metric weights and measures.

Musk tried to wriggle out of Autopilot grilling by claiming past boasts may be deepfakes

Martin Gregorie

Re: All you need to know about Musk

The lawyers seem the have got there first: this video 'is not available in your country'.

Mars Helicopter completes 50th flight, 45 more than NASA planned

Martin Gregorie

Re: COTS

The Martian atmosphere is rather thin: when Aurora was working on a foldable, rocket powered Marsplane, the prototypes were test flown by taking then up to somewhat over 100,000 ft under a balloon and dropping them: the Martian atmosphere near ground level is very similar in pressure, density and temperature to our atmosphere at 100,000 ft. The Aurora tests, launched from Hawaii, were successful: by the time their marsplane and its balloon had reached around 105 Kfeet it was a good 100 miles downwind of the islands. After flying the test schedule the marsplane was down to just under 100 Kfeet and at least one of them was successfully glided back upwind and landed near its launch point in Hawaii.

What's the maximum altitude a DJI Mini has reached? I know that a DJI Mavic 3 drone has been flown from the summit of Mount Everest and successfully climbed another 400m, so to 33238 feet, but even a U-2 can only reach around 78,000 feet and Perlan 2, a high altitude pressurised glider, has reached 76,000 feet (23km) and has a designed maximum altitude of around 90,000 feet.

Both these aircraft have flown at twice the height that DJI Mavic 3 drone reached above Everest.

You'll have noticed that the Mars Heli was both carefully designed to save weight and has a much bigger rotor diameter than anything of similar weight that's usually flown here. The area of its rotor blades is a lot higher too: increasing both its rotor diameter and its blade area would be needed to fly in such a low density atmosphere as we find on Mars.

I expect that any COTS drone would not be able fly on Mars because its weight would be too high for its rotors, which are designed to fly in the part of our atmosphere that people can live in, to lift off the sands of Mars.

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