Can BBC’s Simon Spark Spell?
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Category Archives: Ignorance
The Blurred Horizon Post Office Project
Fujitsu looked at the UK National Lottery and saw a cash cow, so bought ICL.
I’m not in the business but know a good deal when I see it. So apparently did Fujitsu.
ICL had a longish history when that deal was done, that goes back to the days of punched cards to program a computer. Good stuff in it’s day.
There had been one previous abortive effort to modernise the Post Offices 19th century rubber stamp business practices, and I can’t comment further on that.
After a short contract with the Midland Bank I attended an interview and was awarded the post of Technical Design Authority (TDA) for the Post office project at ICL Pathway in Feltham.
The existing ‘design’ documents amounted to no more than ‘wordy’ wish lists. The authors, some of whom I met, were familiar with client-server technology and damn-all else. My conclusion, a collection of ICL dinosaurs, that should have been extinct fifteen years before.
The coding team were mostly Visual Basic ‘programmers’, sporting MCP badges. (Microsoft Certified Professional) Experience with them demonstrated that they couldn’t have programmed their way to escape from a paper bag.
There were two teams that were exemplary, that of Configuration Management, and the Security Team.
The pilot scheme was running and there were a large number of problems, I asked Configuration Management for access to their ‘fault’ stack and gave advice on fixes. One idiot in the coding team had specified the name of the Post Office printer, rather than using the default. A replacement printer didn’t work. The fundamental issue was communications with the Post offices The software was proprietary, and I was disallowed from reviewing it. A visit to the manager of this debacle and my statement to him that my title of TDA was a stupid joke, was dismissed. I did not renew my contract.
Previously I cooperated with Epson on the development of the FORTH programming language on their laptop. This was with Japanese engineers.I could not fault their knowledge or co-operation.
It grieves me that it is always Fujitsu’s name that is constantly mentioned. The only mistake they made was buying ICL, and the bunch of no-hopers that worked for it.
Deep in your DNA, you know?
Take a look at this: AI sparks creativity
Apparently ‘We are programmed deep in our DNA to be comforted by the authority and the reliability of big brand names, and that applies more than ever to the names of big writers.’
These are the words of the chief executive officer of Bloomsbury Mr.Nigel Newton.
Well Nigel, in my recollection DNA is a molecule carrying genetic instructions for an organism’s development, functioning, and reproduction. There is more, much more but it has eff all to do with comfort about any authority, including names of big writers. (Are these writers oversized Nigel?)
Go home and play with your teddy bear Nigel.
Google Translate – Beware Of The Holier Than Thou AI
Hi Google.
A recent translation of ‘bag of shit’ into Portuguese was ‘translated’ into ‘pagina horrivel’.
While I might agree that a bag of shit is unpleasant, it isn’t a ‘horrible page’.
If this is an example of what we have to put up with from your adoption of AI – another misrepresentation, you can stick your translation service up your rectum – yes I can be offensive without using anglo-saxon.
What price a game of Cricket?
Qual o preço de um jogo de críquete?
M4011M-1402
Take a school, All Saints in Gateshead UK (Now gone thankfully)
Take a so-called game of Cricket, a stupid teacher batting, and a group of unprotected small boys fielding.
A visit to hospital, x-rays, a broken cheekbone a near loss of an eye.
No-one held to account, no action by parents NAFF ALL.
Imagine uma escola, a All Saints em Gateshead, no Reino Unido (que felizmente já não existe).
Imaginem um suposto jogo de críquete, um professor incompetente a rebater e um grupo de rapazes desprotegidos a defender.
Uma visita ao hospital, radiografias, uma fratura no osso da face, quase perda de um olho.
Ninguém foi responsabilizado, nenhuma ação por parte dos pais. NADA DE REGRESSO.
What are you? ‘Sinistro’ or ‘Destro’
The BBC have posted an interesting article on the merits or demerits of being left-handed.
The main reason for reserving one hand for eating and one for using a pebble to clean yourself after the waste has been expunged, was one of simple good sense. No-one I know enjoys eating shit.
Sadly, even when good facilities for cleaning both hands became available, folks who preferred to use their left hand were stigmatised. My experience as a child, an example of ignorance and stigma by my father. Picking up my knife with my left hand at the dinner table resulted in being struck on the knuckles with whatever he held in his right hand, and I was lambasted as being ‘cack-handed’ – IOW shit-handed. Even later there were similar remarks when I used a screwdriver to remove a screw. ‘They never made anything for left-handed people Joe!’. Probably true, but turning a screw anti-clockwise is easier with the left hand, than it is with the right – at least for me. I drive a screw in with my right hand and remove it with my left.
Later on, I worked with him on open steel work, building the extension to a switch-house at Blyth Power station (another project I’ve out-lived) He was embarrassed when I unloosened a reluctant nut, using a spanner in my left hand – one he couldn’t budge.
The simple truth is he’d created a ‘monster’ someone who made best use of his body, irrespective of the nonsense preached by others.
The BBC article highlights the use of latin in language. Sinistro and Destro are Italian adjectives for left and right. In the UK left-handed folks are ‘sinister’, right-handed folks are ‘dexterous’.
So good sense in early human behaviour has been handed down to us as an insult and a compliment. Complete twaddle.
Intelligence? IQ tests demonstrate how good you are at IQ tests. They serve no other purpose than to categorise folk, and provide yet another label that psyche’s love to stick on people. If I was wearing them all, I would resemble a badly misdirected parcel by the once-Royal Mail.
Me? I thank my father’s ignorance and stupidity for making me virtually ambidextrous. I thank myself for the endless irritating questions I asked him, and for cross-questioning the rubbish told by some teachers at school.
Is the BBC publishing AI Slop on it’s website?
BBC Account of Bridge damaged once again.
Quote from BBC Account: “Network Rail said over-height vehicles crashed into the bridge over the Cambrian railway line despite numerous warning signs, causing more than 1,110 minutes of train delays and the A470 to temporarily close.”
Updated: 1st December 2025
Seems like my observation was correct, but…
What is a road bridge?
It’s a bridge carrying a road over an obstacle.
So Network Rail’s account is complete rubbish, and the BBC blindly copied the rubbish.
My original observation was of the photo shown, It is a RAILWAY BRIDGE, NOT A ROAD BRIDGE.
Slop, slop and more slop.
Below is Network Rails account of the latest incident.
Network Rail Media
The Scraped Crap Leading The Blind
Take a look at this: Crisp packet gun
Yes, there will be more. It ain’t intelligent – it’s a bag of shit. What is intelligent about relying on an image recognition system that can’t distinguish the difference between a gun and a packet of crisps?
The idiots that mandate installion of this crap, should be penalised heavily. Saying ‘Sorry’ should be a million dollar fine.
BBC – Internet failure that didn’t really happen
Once again the BBC’s ‘Timely, trusted tech news‘ is neither timely, nor can be trusted.
Yup. The Y2K ‘failure’ didn’t happen on the scale predicted Thomas Germain, so why even mention it?
The reason it didn’t happen, was because tens of thousands of software engineers such as myself, fixed code, so that it wouldn’t happen – something the BBC article studiously leaves out. That some companies, and indeed some authorities ignored what they had been told accounted for several failures.
Apparently Thomas regards train delays and misprinted jury summons as ‘trivial’ – that is only his point of view.
Wickipedia gives a reasonably accurate account of the reason why remediation was required. Year 2000 Problem
It also lists a considerable number of ‘falures’ where the problem hadn’t been fixed. An example:
‘In New York, a video store accidentally generated a $91,250 late fee because the store computer determined a tape rental was 100 years overdue.’ – It doesn’t mention whether the tape renter had a heart attack when he was given the bill.
The BBC article: Internet Outages
AI – The madness continues
Jerry Kaplan, an early entrepreneur in AI has recently commented:
“We’re creating a new man-made ecological disaster: enormous data centres in remote places like deserts, that will be rusting away and leaching bad things into the environment, with no one left to hold accountable because the builders and investors will be long gone”
A post on BBC.com gives an account comparing the ‘bubble’ of investment now, with the hype and swipe of the dotcom.bubble.
There is one particular statement made by Jeff Boudier, who builds products at the AI community hub Hugging Face, made me laugh at its’ absurdity.
“The thing that comforts me is that the internet was built on the ashes of the over-investment into the telecom infrastructure of yesterday,”
The ‘Internet’ Mr Boudier, was built on the back of military spending, primarily by the US government on it’s ARPANET project. The ‘ashes’ you refer to are the ashes of the dreams of greedy investors in a bubble.
But I’m guessing your ‘comfort’ is an attempt to soothe concerns for investors in your company.
In a separate post I relate my experience with ChatGPT, simply a lazy way of accessing scraped items from other folks postings on the web. ‘Comfort’ is not the word I would use for idiotic crap ‘counselling’ worrying young folks about their personal relationships.
BBC post: A Tangled Web Of Dreams
My post regarding ChatGPT: Advice to young people
joesportugal 