Posts by Tim99

Iran plots 'infrastructure warfare' against US tech giants

Re: Miss

We might suspect that Netenyahu’s objective for the war was to remain Prime Minister to avoid going to prison after being indicted for breach of trust, accepting bribes, and fraud.

Re: Miss

Winston Churchill who fought in the war in Afghanistan in 1897 wrote: “Financially it is ruinous. Morally it is wicked. Militarily it is an open question, and politically it is a blunder.”

Blustering Blackbeard's PC was all at sea, sysadmin got him shipshape in seconds

Being deeply sad, and probably having too much money, the Naim kit owned by myself and Mrs Tim99 was satisfactorily matt black. It just had rotary controls for volume, balance, and input selection. A later version had a toggle switch to set "normal/mute/monitor (for recording) - Yes we sometimes forgot it was on mute, and wondered why the wireless or LP12 weren't working properly...

Re: Toshiba?

I live in a retirement village and turned my last Windows (VM) machine off 27 months ago (yes I keep count and celebrate). I used to help a few residents out with Windows. Now I say to them that I don't know anything about V11, so I can't help them. Does networking on some machines still randomly die after patch Tuesday?

Atomic Britain: UK plans regulatory reset to boost nuclear power

Re: Not in the UK

"Good, fast, cheap – you can have 2" - Don't worry, wanting to get all 3 is why we have AI. >>========>

After years of being stood up, ARM64 Linux users finally get Chrome date

Damn!

There goes another excuse for curtailing Alphabet Inc's prying.

RAM is getting expensive, so squeeze the most from it

Back in the days of database servers we set ours up with one small drive for the OS; another small one for swap; another for code, forms and reports; a biggish disk (set for dedicated contiguous space) for the data; and a fast drive for the transaction logs. At the prices that Oracle, IBM, etc were charging for DB licences the cost of the extra hardware looked pretty small.

Flying cabs, next-gen aircraft cleared for takeoff in 26 states

Re: Taxi!

I remember seeing Milla Jovovich, and I think Bruce Willis was in it - But it had taxis?

Critical Microsoft Excel bug weaponizes Copilot Agent for zero-click information disclosure attack

Thanks, I have used Claris - particularly to extract data from old versions and export it into something else. I found it OK. The main reason I didn't distribute much with it was the lack of a cheap runtime version (MS Access runtime still is "free"). A quick look shows that a developers Pro version (which I used) is now AU$913 which is reasonable, but on-prem licensing of ~$250 per user/year is not...

This post is not necessarily a recommendation. We may not like MS Access, but I can't think of another small database system with integrated forms, reports, and programming that can be run on-prem; or without a subscription - anybody know one? BTW, I've posted this before - If you can't get it to work with only cell formulae (if it needs VBA or macros) you probably shouldn't be using it as an enterprise spreadsheet...

LibreOffice learns to speak Markdown in version 26.2

Re: no asciidoc?

Apparently later versions can support ISO/IEC 29500 Strict but they default to Transitional format. This may well be why sometimes older versions of Word documents can sometimes be opened by Libra Office, but not some versions of MS Word…

US struck Iran with copies of its own drones

Re: Proof this was long planned

It's what they do. In the 250 years since 1776 they have been at war (and other military engagements) for 225 years (90%). In comparison, the UK (even with its colonial past) over the same period it's less than 90 years.

Re: Proof this was long planned

“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth” - Attributed to Mike Tyson and others.

Apple's budget-friendly MacBook Neo is bursting with color and compromise

Re: Why would it need a SIM?

Chances are they have an iPhone? If so, it can automatically tether if it can't connect to WiFi.

As an iPad Pro user (an iMac and Raspberry Pis as well). I have found the expensive Apple Magic Keyboard was a good buy for me. It sits on my desk, and is also convenient for heavier work when travelling. Away from the desk, I just lift it from the keyboard and use it on my lap; and often for travelling don't need the keyboard - just slip it into my (protected) backpack.

Re: Down with the cool kids

"GNU/Linux-libre working, it continues to work forever without fiddling" - Including Kernel updates? Don't know - just asking...

I'm retired. Started with DEC/DG minis; various proprietary "NIXs, and BSD, then PCs, but turned my last version of Windows off 26 months ago. These days to get stuff done, an iMac and iPad. For fun and some pro bono work, a few Raspberry Pis - surprisingly capable and burning a new image and running a couple of install scripts is easy.

Re: Down with the cool kids

True, I had a pink pair in the 60's. They went with a psychedelic floral pattern shirt, desert boots and long hair. I vaguely remember some girls saying it was a good look. I'm now bald and 50+lbs heavier - So definitely No.

Re: Swap

When I was travelling, and not expecting to need a proper computer, I sometimes took a lightweight HDMI cable and Apple adapter, small travelling Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. This allowed me to use my iPhone as a make-do computer that I could connect to a hotel TV. Not ideal for serious work, but good enough for writing a document, emails, and web browsing.

I'm in my mid 70's. A 13" MacBook is now too small for writing/debugging and large spreadsheets. As well as a couple of Raspberry Pis, I spend most time on an M3 iMac (replaced on old Intel). The screen is good. If I need portability my 13" M5 iPad is excellent (8th generation -12GB RAM) but pricey - it replaced a 4th Generation 13" Pro with 6GB of RAM which was OK - If I really need to see small stuff, double-tap zoom is convenient. I'm sure that for a large number of users the Neo, even with 8 GB is fine. I might recommend the 512SSD though, particularly as it has TouchID (same as on my iMac).

As an aside, elderly (like me) people's fingerprints change, the ridge patterns fade and "wrinkles" increase - If you were a criminal when younger and have fingerprints on file you might now be OK :-)

US state laws push age checks into the operating system

Re: Still running with no Apple account

Tried the normal punter’s version of Windows 11?

Techie was given strict instructions not to disrupt client. Then he touched one box and the lights went out

Perhaps I'm gifted?

I worked from home and managed to take down the electricity for our entire block with a Nokia 8200. I plugged it into my desktop UPS and there was an immediate very loud bang and everything including the PC on the UPS went dark. Not a major problem I thought, I'll disconnect the UPS, and reset the breaker. Still no power. The next door neighbour saw me checking the outside breaker, and said that their power was out too. Checking showed that all 26 units in the block were down. I called the electrician who did some checking. The main fuse to my unit was blown, and the main fuse to the block. I told him what had happened, he came inside and we both saw that the terminals to the phone charger were fused into the UPS socket. He then called the power company, who replaced the blocks' fuse... I was expecting trouble but the power company electrician said "it was unexpected", and it would be a good story to tell his mates. The phone and UPS were totalled though, the PC needed a new fuse.

AWS says drones hit two of its datacenters in UAE, urges users to move resources to different regions

Another reason for on-prem?

If a drone hits your in-house hardware, you probably have other problems than not being able to access your data?

Popular prayer program becomes propaganda pusher after reported Israeli hack

Re: There's very little app users can do beyond

So "Do you want fries with that?" is not enough?

Denizens of DEF CON are 'fed up with government'

Thanks, I deliberately gave a factual post without any personal opinion. I can be quite busy with my own moral compass, yet alone others :-)

I'm definitely not endorsing the OP here, but it seems that he personally purchased slaves from 1735 and owned slaves for well over 40 years - yes he did campaign against slavery in his later life...

Yeah, Nah

How about leaves - several deciduous forests?

NUC, NUC! Who’s there? ASUS with a client device for Microsoft’s cloudy PCs

Re: Back to the Future!

By about 1984 NetWare 68/S-Net was around with a proprietary box linking CP/M and early IBM DOS PCs. We had a few up and running for WP with diskless or floppy workstations. A couple of years later the Ethernet base Netware 86 series were everywhere in our organization. By the time I left, in the early 90's, we had 10's of thousands of NetWare "seats" connected to many 386/486 networks. It was particularly useful for connecting disparate kit together (*NIX, PDP/VAX/DG etc.). If there was no approved drivers, our lowest common denominator was a PC running a terminal emulator, where we could copy-paste/scrape/save the screen and then transfer it. We did have some other networks like MS/IBM PC/LAN Manager, DECnet, 3COM etc., but they were all replaced by NetWare.

Burger King turns to AI to flame broil employees who aren't friendly enough

Re: Guest Experience

It's been a long time since I have been there but the Bakewell Tart Shop was worth a visit too. Not as fancy (the shop too), and somewhat different to the pudding - Go to one for a sit down snack, and then try the other for a take-away?

'Merica-made Mac Minis marked for manufacturing

Re: Tech's Ass

Did you mean recently, the US? Here, older migrants are mostly from the UK, Italy, and Ireland, with some from the US - well who could blame them :-)

For the last year, the top five are: UK (recently overtaking India that was first); India; New Zealand; The Philippines; and "The Rest of Australia". About 70% of foreign migrants are assessed as "Skilled".

The data that I could find for South Africa, finished in 2021, includes everyone who was alive then: England; New Zealand; India; *South Africa*; Phillipines; Malaysia; China; Scotland; Ireland; and Italy.

Most Italians came after WW2, particularly working in agriculture and fishing. When I first arrived many lived in Fremantle, a walk down the main street looked a lot like an Italian fishing town, with old men in dark suites and hats sitting outside drinking coffee. Where I first lived was called "Pom City" because the majority of the population had come from the UK (particularly in the 50s and 60s), mostly to build the steel works, oil refinery, and minerals processing plants.

The vast majority of the more recent South African population are skilled migrants (particularly in the mining industry). I personally don't know any SA farmers, but I do know a couple of accountants...

About 1 in 3 of us were born overseas and about 1.4% from South Africa. The UK English "born overseas" population is ~16% (roughly 11 million?) of which about 1.9% were born in South Africa. 30 years ago, a local politician was quoted as saying that we had migrants from everywhere in the world, "Except Eskimos" - the next week, there was a letter from somebody saying that he had gone to Canada, married an Inuit, and they both now lived here.

Re: Tech's Ass

QLD is only about twice the size of Texas. Here (WA) may, or may not, have 1000 times less interesting stuff - but we have less than one tenth the population, a decent public health service, a firearms homicide rate ~60 times lower, and a relatively high standard of living (except for many of our indigenous population). In spite of a number of US cultural imports, as a retiree, I think I’d rather live here, thank you…

Re: Tech's Ass

I live in Australia in a State where the locals occasionally say to certain visiting USAians "Three times the size of Texas". Otherwise we keep quiet, and hope that people don't find out how nice it can be here. Thinking about it, that might not be working - I may be part of the problem, migrating here 35 years ago when the population was one third its present size.

China’s ‘The US hacks itself to make us look bad’ theorists return with a crypto conspiracy

Re: The almighty dollar

It has been suggested that if you are a horrible leader of a country that has oil, the US doesn't have a particular problem with you being horrible - like exporting weapons to "freedom fighters", or invading a smaller country to grab its resources. The only crime is asking for payment in Euros, or bartering for food, services, etc. (from countries other than the US?) rather than the Petrodollar. Some even suggest that the Petrodollar is the only thing holding up the US...

UK tech hit by double trouble: Fewer foreign techies amid skills squeeze

An acquaintance said "We are governed by people who want to become multi-millionaires, who do the bidding of billionaires".

Microsoft teases ‘reimagined SharePoint experience’ with added AI

Re: AE

Yes, some staff at one of the sites I’ve looked at substituted the product’s first vowel and its following consonant…

I’ve posted this before

I'm a volunteer technical assessor for a national ISO accreditation authority. One of the assessed said after they had difficulty finding something that I asked for: "Sharepoint is good if you know where the document is" - often they didn't, and finding it was an exercise in time-wasting. I'm hoping that the problem was inadequate training or design, but it has come up several times.

I’m not confident that these changes will improve this…

The idea of using a Raspberry Pi to run OpenClaw makes no sense

Re: "weapons of mass stupidity" ✓

No longer use an email server, but do play around with 16GB Pis for SQLite/web servers. Often with an SSD; but, perhaps surprisingly, for applications that are mostly reads a μSD may well be OK.

The days of reputable cards randomly killing themselves seem to be over. I suspect that a lot of reliability problems come from overheating and mishandling. The increasing use of microSD cards in surveillance cameras has driven a lot of R&D in this area.

A standard microSD card was typically rated at 100 cycles (a 128GB card rated to record 12.8TB). Now, 300+ cycles is normal (nearly 40TB). One of my Pi5's with a 256GB microSD shows a usage of <4GB a day, indicating a mean expected life of >50 years (possibly closer to 10?!). For critical information I use an "extended life" microSD which are rated at 10 times this . A very rough calculation for a 1080 recording rate of 8GB/hr indicates that a microSD 256GB card has a lifetime of ~76,000 hours or over 8 years. In the last 5 years I have had failures of 1 SSD (1GB), 4 different USB thumb drives, 1 old HDD (500MB), but no microSD cards. As a result, I tend to use them as small portable backups. I run my Pis from a small UPS which probably helps.

Typical speeds with the Pi 5 are: μSD CommandQue - Read 92 MB/s, Write 70 MB/s; USB3.0 SSD - Read 430 MB/s, Write 320 MB/s; M2 pcie Gen2 - Read 453 MB/s, Write 414 MB/s; M2 pcie Gen3 - Read 887 MB/s, Write 749 MB/s. Extended life cards (no CommandQue) μSD write speeds are slower at ~55 MB/s, but similar reads at ~88 MB/s. A viable system is to boot from a μSD, but use an external SSD for write-intensive operations.

Re: "weapons of mass stupidity" ✓

Yes, I use a 16GB Pi 5 for web-LAN SQLite web tasks with an M2 SSD pcie Gen 3. I have a standard test script that I run on 4-8 clients (it levels-off) that adds a row/updates it twice/deletes it/then logs to another table for 60,000 SQLite rows (180,000 rows in total) - It ran at 756 rows/second. Comparing it to a iMac it ran at 13,850 rows/sec - About 18 times slower than the iMac (makes sense - CPU and SSD both about four times slower).

It was pretty good for random SQL SELECTs - in the order of roughly 5,000 rows a second - with 8 concurrent clients it drops by about 15%. I haven't tried it with more, but some literature suggests that using 50+ concurrent working clients is feasible. A quick calculation suggest that for a single client that's pushing 1.5 million rows for a normal working day.

I tried SQL SELECTs on a 256GB Pi μSD with CommandQue on the same 980,000 row database and (as expected?) got roughly 20% of the performance (that could still be >250,000 in a working day). The Pi was in a fan-less FLIRC case running at <58C for the internals.

I have seen numbers that disk reads on a PC can be ~ 450,000 with WAL Mode and ~50,000,000 from RAM. As usual, YMMV depending on indices, joins, network, etc...

Re: Raspberry Pis haven't been cheap for a long time.

OK, I'm a retired, old, fat, rich, white man who enjoys fiddling with software on Pis. I have a couple of Zero 2Ws for testing (if it works on that, it will probably work much better on the bigger stuff). The rest are Pi5s, bought before the recent memory price increases. I still keep my original Model B; and occasionally boot it up, look at the screen, then turn it off; for old times sake. I had a pile of older 3s, 4s, and some of the first 4GB 5s mostly put away in drawers - As part of a "death clearance" I put them on Ebay at favourable prices, hoping that others might find them useful. The rest of current line up are all Pi 5s with either 2GB or 16GB of RAM - I standardised on them because they had the "more efficient" custom chip, and I had noticed that they ran significantly cooler.

The 2GBs are all in fan-less cases - just checking the one I use as a TV server and recorder shows the uptime is 116 days, 21:33 - occasionally it runs with the processor at 70% for up to 40 mins or so, but the internal temperature is always below 60C. I also keep a "spare" for the library in our retirement village - cut down GUI, no office, programs, simple file management and Chrome browser which we found works well for casual use (not Firefox) - runs cool, and the software resets itself on logout.

The 16GBs are for writing and testing software (mostly web and SQLite) for a couple of pro bono things I'm fiddling with - the main one (web server - just LAN facing, but with GUI) has "only" been up for 103 days, 22:13.

Yes they have become more expensive (currently, approaching some of the cheaper N95s) but the stability and software support still make it worthwhile for me.

Final step to put new website into production deleted it instead

Re: Delete

Generally, I avoid deleting. My current mail system has a folder called 'ArchivedSent' containing emails going back to March 2005. The performance is still good - searching for a person's first name found 272 messages, several going back to 2005, and took about 1 second. In all there are just over 41,500 messages in 31 local folders, occupying a total of 4.43 GB - No, I don't use MS Exchange or Outlook...

Crims create fake remote management vendor that actually sells a RAT

Re: Clearly ...

Best one I've seen here for a while. Have an upvote and a beer >>===>

If Microsoft made a car... what would it be?

Patch Tuesday

On the second Tuesday of the month, things that used to work don't. The control screen and instruments have changed appearance and functionality, and the problem with the fuel gauge indicator and the SatNav you told MS about in Version 1.1 still have not been fixed, but they are now wrong in a different colour and font.

The big FOSS vendors don't eat their own dogfood – they pay for proprietary groupware

For good or bad

Many (most?) small business applications (the majority of businesses?) seem to be web based. I'm not saying I like it.

I'm elderly now, and bits are falling off, so I spend a fair bit of time in offices of medical professionals. I note that almost all of them have some web based system for PMS (patient Management Systems). Similarly when the receptionist is "doing the financials" it's almost invariably in a browser, often with an iMac in smaller practices (Probably because the TCO is less, and the owner/son/daughter is "IT"?). Several of the practitioners use iPads. As a retired developer it makes a lot of sense, whilst the interface may not be as powerful as a local client, distribution and maintenance is easy. Word is being replaced by emails... If a spreadsheet is needed, the web based ones are probably adequate for this user base...

I'm still a volunteer technical assessor for a national ISO accreditation authority - 3 out of the last 4 management systems I saw were web based. One extremely large multinational proudly told me, that due to compliance and document management issues, they had replaced all of their Excel spreadsheets with a dedicated web based system - The IT problems that they were having when I was there were down to Sharepoint; they were looking at incorporating the function they needed (where is that document?) into their own system. As an aside, another site said "Sharepoint is good if you know where the document is" - often they didn't, and finding it was an exercise in time-wasting. I'm hoping that the problem was inadequate training or design, but it has come up several times.

Apple's Creator Studio creates a subscription where free apps used to live

Pages is OK-ish. For complex/long documents on a Mac, plain-text TextEdit is OK. I can tidy-up and prettify them if needed.

Numbers, for me, is good - even for complex spreadsheets. I find it much simpler and quicker to create something in Numbers and then convert it to Excel. There are a few things to consider. Numbers only allows table locking, not cell-locking; although if you don’t need Excel, one advantage is that you can have several tables in the same sheet, and lock them appropriately. A very small number of obscure functions may not export properly; conditional formatting colours can vary; and rule processing orders may be different. I never use macros or VBA - if I can’t do it with cell formulae, it probably means that whatever it is shouldn’t be in a spreadsheet.

AI connector for Google Calendar makes convenient malware launchpad, researchers show

Err…

I thought Google Calendar was information sucking malware already?

Pakistan to test students for real-world skills before they graduate from IT degrees

Re: Complete nonsense

The old trick was to use a soft pencil or crayon to put a shallow diagonal line on one side of the deck. If you dropped them, it was fairly easy to stack them back in order. When I started, we didn’t use punched cards. If you stuffed up (and I did, regularly) the card was binned - We used optical card readers that looked for oblongs that had been filled in with a soft pencil, errors could be rectified with an eraser and the cards used again. When I finally got something to work, I was allowed to transfer it to punched tape…

Four horsemen of the AI-pocalypse line up capex bigger than Israel's GDP

Re: Profits? We don't need no stinking net profits

Privatise the profits, socialise the cost?

Ad blocking is alive and well, despite Chrome's attempts to make it harder

Re: Its why

It may have other issues, but the Duck Player in DDG seems to cut adverts without slowing down.

New hire fixed a problem so fast, their boss left to become a yoga instructor

Gunpowder was very probably made the mid to late 900s (Tang Dynasty, China). Whist the invention of nitroglycerine (Propane-1,2,3-triyl trinitrate) is attributed to Sobrero, its transportation, storage and use were extremely hazardous. It was sometimes mixed 1:10 with gunpowder in an effort to stabilise it and increase explosive brisance, but was still extremely hazardous. It was not until the mid-late 1860s that "safer" formulations, like Nobels' Kieselguhr adsorbent dynamite were used.

I saw the stools at my first "proper" job in the early 1970s. The site was a relative latecomer, only having started making explosives in 1665. It was "nationalised" in 1787 to gain access to a better supply of (superior?) product after the government purchased the Faversham mills in 1759; and decommissioned in the 1990s. It's now a scheduled monument, an SSSI, and part of European Route of Industrial Heritage: Royal Gunpowder Mills. Well worth a day trip, particularly with children.

These days, much of the products that used nitroglycerine have safer alternatives - e.g. replacement of nitroglycerine with generic organic plasticisers added to nitrocellulose in ammunition propellant (single-base vs. double-base propellant).

One-legged stools were also used by milkmaids, often strapped to them; and there are indications that they were also used in general work, particularly manufacturing (including gunpowder).