Posts by Tim99

How Windows got to version 3 – an illustrated history

My personal favourite was that if someone had "upgraded" a program written in dBase III to dBase IV there was not enough available memory to run Novell's IPX/SPX network. In the end we produced a floppy boot disk that the punter had to use without networking. They got their work done, and either removed the floppy and booted to the network, or used sneakerware to transfer the file.

I wrote much of my (similar) stuff in R:Base - Wikipedia (Caveat: I wrote some of this) - Which was, in my not so humble opinion, superior. I had a couple of R:Base applications that ran well with thousands of rows for 5-20 concurrent network users. The secret was to load the program files onto each client, and just share the data files. In the mid-1980s, Microsoft did not have a database, it licensed R:BASE to sell in Europe and the UK.

Debian 12.9 arrives, quickly followed by MX Linux 23.5

Re: timeshift

You might like using Canonical. I don't have a problem with people charging for development and support; but not at the expense of openness, clarity, and security. I started learning *NIX in the late 70s, and am concerned that some have severely compromised "The Unix philosophy" for purely commercial reasons. Partly as a result of that, I'd recommend Linux Mint Debian Edition for casual desktop users, rather than Ubuntu. If still in paid employment, I'd probably use Devuan. Snaps are turning up for some Raspberry Pi installs, which may be troubling.

Perhaps the Urban Dictionary entry Ubuntu is an ancient African word, meaning "I can't configure Debian" has some truth?

Mine's the one with "UNIX: A History and a Memoir" in the pocket >>====>

Re: Saner Ubuntu?

I'm retired; but initially found myself strangely worried by skim-reading "easier to manage Linux with a GUI back then". Then I realized that it was a home NAS, so that's all right.

The rest of the post was interesting. I use the Pi5 a lot. My "server/TV recorder" is a 2GB Pi running 64-bit Bookworm Lite with a 2TB SSD booting from a 64GB "Endurance" microSD in a Flirc case (Runs cool and silent). The SSD was "on special" (Professional paranoia - I bought 2). Backup is a nightly crontab rsync script across the network to another Pi5 "workstation" with the other SSD and an occasional larger HDD. I use fio and dumpe2fs to log the performance and use/lifetime of the microSD (should be years). The cost of the "server" 2GB Pi5, case, card, and power supply was AU$145 (excluding drives:~£75, US$90) which I thought was very reasonable compared to a NAS.

In my previous work experience I round that (inexpensive) NAS arrays were not as reliable as I hoped. When disaster struck recovery was sometimes difficult. These days, the read-speed advantage of multiple HDDs is often bettered by a SSD. A simple periodic rsync to another device is possibly more reliable. I note that the current Amazon prices of a Synergy single and a 2 bay NAS are $265 and $315, these have less RAM and slower processors. For my use (on a Gigabit LAN) connecting an external SSD to a 5Gb/sec USB 3 port, compared to the performance if using a PCIe M.2 or SATA interface is not significant.

Re: timeshift

I'm old, and probably inflexible; what was wrong with apt? Caveat: I avoid Canonical.

Apple's interoperability efforts aren't meeting spirit or letter of EU law, advocacy groups argue

Re: Facebook iPhone services!

Yes, preferably with at least 2 strongly worded warnings in red indicating what you are about to do?

Years ago, I did this on my stuff. If someone wanted to remove a row from the customers table, they got a standard warning. If the customer had open invoices, the first message warned of the consequences. If they proceeded, the final warning was " [username] - Confirm that you REALLY want to delete [customer] with open invoices!". In Australia a customer said that they could tell from my software that I was English - Initially polite; then fairly polite, but threatening.

Megan, AI recruiting agent, is on the job, giving bosses fewer reasons to hire in HR

Who might be replaced first?

HR? It won't be the more expensive executive levels

Microsoft tests 45% M365 price hikes in Asia-Pacific to see how much you enjoy AI

Outlook, and wrestling with.PST files, is just one of many reasons why I retired, and switched to Apple and Linux :-)

An iMac, and iPad Pro for "the real world"; and a few Raspberry Pis for "play" (and recording TV). I dumped the emails and contacts that I needed into the MacOS programs, and started again with Calendar. After retirement from full time work, I moved a professional society's stuff to Thunderbird, that was OK too.

Is it really the plan to take over Greenland and the Panama Canal? It's been a weird week

Re: The unipolar world is officially dead

(Apocryphal?) Quote from Stalin at Tehran about winning WW2: "British brains, American money, and Russian blood."

Is that a bird’s nest, a wireless broadband base station, or both?

Re: Most wildlife in OZ appears to have been designed as anti-human

Nah, everything is bigger in Western Australia (bigger than Alaska). To make sure, we've designated the metre is now based on 100cm.

Apologies, I have just had my second cataract "done". Text is blurry, but improving...

Re: Most wildlife in OZ appears to have been designed as anti-human

The birds can even get you in your car. The Wedge-tailed eagle (Wikipedia) is the largest, at >25 metre wingspan, and 4-6kg. On remote roads they eat carrion, and attempt to fly away "at the last second" - If you are travelling at >100km/hr that can be at windscreen height. An incident where everybody survived: Eagle crashes through windscreen (wires.org).

Google and Linux Foundation form Chromium love club

Re: It's the Marketers

I wrote my small website with a plain text editor. Using only HTML5 and CSS, it is easy to update.

It is really fast . Looks like shit, but it is really fast...

The ultimate Pi 5 arrives carrying 16GB ... and a price to match

Re: Viable as a desktop replacement?

I have an 8GB Pi in an Argon 5 Neo case with a Crucial 500GB M.2. It was a bit fiddly to put together (old fingers and eyes); but works well. Against that, I found that if you only need web browsing, light office work, and nominal storage, a 4GB Pi with an "Official" 64GB microSD is not *that much* slower - YMMV.

Re: Needs more processing power

As usual, it depends. About a month ago I posted (ElReg) a Pi5 set-up for on-line use by retirees. Subsequent work has shown that a 2GB Pi5 with a Flirc passive case and a ”High Endurance" microSD card was satisfactory for normal Chromium browser use (<12 open tabs). Playing a nominal 1080 YouTube video (with Bluetooth speaker) was OK.

The 2GB Pi5 runs consistently 4-5C cooler than the 4 and 8GB versions. We could have saved AU$9 by using the official RP plastic case; but aesthetics, robustness, and not needing a fan, favoured the Flirc. The fan in the standard RP case was usually running, even on idle, with the 4GB Pi5. With the 2GB Pi5 the fan was normally off, but came on when the browser was opened (summer room temp of 25-26C). It seems that the 16GB version has the same "more efficient" chip revision as the 2GB Pi5, so it may run cooler for those who need it.

Microsoft declares 2025 'the year of the Windows 11 PC refresh'

Re: "We believe that Windows 11 is available at a time when the world needs it most"

MRDA (Mandy Rice-Davis Applies).

How the OS/2 flop went on to shape modern software

Re: Summary....from way back then......

Initially we ran IBM TR and DECnet 10BASE5 networks at the same time.

We also used10BASE5 between buildings to interconnect a number of 10BASE2 LANs. The joy of someone moving a 10BASE2 computer and an accidentally/ignorantly disconnecting the cable, or putting the earth connector at both ends (or neither end), or connecting the cable directly to the end PC without the terminating resistor and "T"...

In one lab, I set up a TR test bed with cables snaking around door frames and suspended above head height by string. After a couple of weeks when everything was bedded in, I asked the cable guys to wire it up properly over the weekend. I came in on Monday morning and every station had a wall patress with TR sockets. I plugged everything in and connected the MAU - Nothing worked. After a bit of head scratching, I removed an access panel that had one of the pattress plates and saw that the wiring behind it was standard POTS cable. When the chief cable guy came to look, I asked him why they had cabled it that way. He said "It's just twisted pair, it should be OK". I suggested that he consider why the standard TR leads looked as though they could be used to moor a medium-sized boat. They came back the next weekend and replaced it. About a year later we standardized on Ethernet, so it was all replaced. The good news was that the existing TR pattress plates were rewired with 10BASE2 and double 50 Ohm connectors so everything looked tidy.

Re: I remember reading Letwin's post

Thank you, I feel even older now. Among the first things that I was allowed to be "in charge of" and "program” were a couple of new 1970s Autolab SpectraPhysics computing integrators.

Re: Summary....from way back then......

Most costly accessory? To be fair, genuine IBM PS/2 network cards worked well; but they were at least twice the price of an ISA NE2000.

Re: Of course NT 3 was great, it was VMS after all

MacOS supports document versioning for their own stuff; but you wouldn't necessarily know it, as it is almost hidden. From an open document choose File > Revert To > Browse All Versions...

How a good business deal made us underestimate BASIC

Re: Basic will rise again!

Probably true. The user base was mostly science and engineering but many older staff had not used computers, or were used to PDPs etc. I, like some of my contemporaries, came from FORTRAN. Many of the instruments could use BASIC, so we had some background and had the resources to use/teach BASIC. We were standardizing on MS/PC DOS based networking to link everything together. For political, as well as operational reasons, Forth was never going to happen.

Re: Basic will rise again!

I used QuickBASIC a lot in the mid-late 1980s to connect technical equipment to PC networks. It could easily open a serial port, get data from the equipment, manipulate the data, save it to file and then write back to clear the downloaded data. Similarly setting up an operational sequence from a database avoided a lot of typing on the equipment (often fitted with a rudimentary membrane keyboard/screen).

A lot of mission critical stuff for public utilities used it - Some of which was converted to QBasic to run on NT4 and Windows95/98/Me. After I had retired, a younger friend was asked to oversee the transition of older equipment to PCs for a water company - Everything had to run on Windows 7. Much of their kit was Vista, with some XP/2000. He mentioned to me that a lot of equipment was written with a "funny MS language" that his team of (.NET?) "children" had not seen before. I suggested that it was probably QuickBASIC, and pointed him towards relevant manuals and training literature. Apparently some very expensive equipment took months to transition...

Re: A generation of gray-haired IT folks

and ears and eyebrows...

25 years on from Y2K, let's all be glad it happened way back then

Re: Y2K Today

I "may" be being uncharitable, but I believe that the (MS?) original software mindset that seemed to be "Just good enough is good enough" is now embedded in many things. If you write stuff too well, there is little reason for the punter to upgrade or buy support.

Re: an IT community that came together to solve a fundamental problem - LOL

On Y2K night Mrs Tim99 and I stayed in a very nice small hotel without cell phone coverage. We knew that our stuff was OK, and that any potential calls were "Somebody Else's Problem". We were told that a special dinner was offered at $250 a head. So, we went out and bought chips (crisps), biscuits, decent coffee and tea; and then ordered a nice burger and chips from room service (which finished at 6:00PM). We watched the NY as it rolled around the world on TV, just stepping outside to see the local fireworks. The next night a large amount of left-over food was on offer at $30 as many punters had done what we did.

The aftermath was that a lot of the new/smaller IT players left the market in 2001/2/3 because nobody bought any new kit until about 2004. We were fine as we wrote specialist software with little competition. We sometimes include hardware as a "package" if the punter wanted it, but these margins were not large. This might be one reason why a lot of smaller suppliers were selling multiple anti-virus/fixit/memory doubling scamwaresoftware that *did* have a high margin.

Re: And for other reasons

and for people born before 1949? OK, for staff with a negative/zero age or less than 16(?) a 19xx date; etc... We had a lot of MS based software which was often not Y2K compliant, and some historical stuff hit the MS "1900 is a leap year" problem.

Parker Solar Probe sends a "Still Alive" tone back to Earth

Re: Having seen Star Trek IV…

It was Christmas, "Here We Come A-wassailing"?

Re: Good job

Over 30 years ago, I emigrated from Blighty to a place that has 3,200 hours of sunshine a year. Frequent returns in the UK summer showed a related difference between the two places. When it got to 23C in the UK Midlands, blokes started taking off their shirts - Here on Christmas Day our maximum was 23C, we complained about how cold it felt (It should have been 28-30C).

We told Post Office about system problems at the highest level, Fujitsu tells Horizon Inquiry

Re: Time to produce the audit trail

A long time back I, too, was an expert witness. We were considered to be a "servant of the court" and, indeed, impartial - Giving our "Expert Opinion". As a result, we; along with the accused, prosecution, defence, judge, jury, and court officers; were allowed to remain in court throughout the trial. This was because we might hear evidence that could alter our opinion.

A normal witness was expected to give examined evidence, and not be present at any other time to avoid "contamination". Under English law members of the public are also normally allowed in the public gallery throughout a trial (For some it was a hobby).

Raspberry Pi 500 and monitor arrive in time for Christmas

Pi 500 appropriate price/use case?

I'm retired and have been doing some pro bono work on setting up Pi 5s for use by retirees. Task analysis shows that they never need/use LibreOffice - All they want/use is "in the Cloud" - Google/Docs, MS/365, banking, medical appointments, etc., with a browser and printing. We set up various combinations of RAM, disk, and Pi 5 cases. There was little/no difference in our perceived performance between 4GB and 8GB of memory.

It's summer here, and we noticed that the RP fan was often on at logged-out base-load with the RP official case/heat-sink/fan. This did not improve with the Active Cooler. In the end we found the FLIRC passive case worked well, but could feel hot under heavy load (Chromium and Firefox both open, each with 10+ tabs open with a lot of forced updates, while watching/listening to a 2K YouTube video). As old people's skin can be easily damaged, I added "temp_limit=60" to the boot config file. There was little difference in performance under stress and the case felt cooler (the CPU dropped from 2.4 to 1.8GHz).

We standardised on Chromium and basics like Mousepad, calculator, the viewers, and File Manager for the "user" account; with management and checking software for the "admin" account. When the user logs out the system is reset. This causes about 200MB of disk writes, which initially concerned me - I considered using RAM storage to ameliorate this, but in the end went with a slightly more expensive but slower 64GB High Endurance MicroSD card (expected lifetime 5+ years?) without a measurable performance hit.

In summary: The performance difference was slight but measurable between the M2 SSD and MicroSD setups - opening Chromium took 4 seconds instead of 3, with a slight improvement in responsiveness with more than 10 "busy" tabs open. If this carries over to the 500, there is probably a cost saving as the keyboard is included - At the moment the Pi monitor looks a bit expensive as a local price for a normal 24" screen is ~AU$20 less

Both KDE and GNOME to offer official distros

Re: El Reg existentialism

Example: I'm quite vocally anti the systemd-cancer. I have NEVER suggested they stop developing it ...

I would suggest that they go back to its original "stated" purpose as a reliable replacement for System V init, and expunge the rest of the stuff that has been shoved in :-)

Tech support chap showed boss how to use a browser for a year – he still didn't get it

Re: "learnt many things about how not to run a company"

I knew my (highly technical) trade. I ran a business using that trade for a banker. They do not think like us. I learnt a lot, and started a company that was a success - I'm not sure that it would have been, if not for what I had learnt from the banker.

China has utterly pwned 'thousands and thousands' of devices at US telcos

At the time I wondered if someone had, or had not, a sense of humour, as simple optical beam splitters are made from prisms...

UK council still hadn't fully costed troubled Oracle project 2 years in

Re: Beware of hidden reefs when navigating waters prepared by yachtsman

You may have missed the word "fallacy"?

Why Google's Chrome monopoly won't crack anytime soon

Re: Maybe focus on the root cause ?

“You make that sound like a bad thing.” (Acknowledgement: Gene Hunt - Life on Mars).

Microsoft goes thin client with $349 Windows 365 Link mini PC

Re: Raspberry Pi5

Yes. One thing that MS seems to have forgotten is that they became important by looking after corporate IT staff. If we accept that one's importance in an organisation is proportional to budget and number of staff, MS Windows/Office tended to need a lot of staff and a big budget. Before I retired, I noticed that MS were effectively abandoning smaller companies. I wrote a SQL Server based shrink-wrap product that we sold to companies in the $2 - 20 million turnover range. The MS Small Business Server was an easy recommendation as we could offer the customer Exchange and File Server for 5-50 users for a small increase in cost compared to a SQL Server box and licences. MS crippled and killed SBS as they drove everything online. This has now spread to larger enterprises.

A very long time ago, I worked on the assumption of needing one support person for 2,000 mainframe users, one person for every 200 mini/unix users and one low level support person for every 10-30 MS-DOS/Windows users. A cynical person might very well think that many senior IT people would prefer a MS environment, but I couldn't possibly comment. I might observe that the typical corporate Windows SOE is so locked down that it resembles a prettier GUI version of the terminals/big box systems that I started with.

Raspberry Pi5

Some background on a similar use case? I now live in a retirement village and play with Pis for fun, but not profit, and do a couple of pro bono projects. We connect to the internet using fibre with DSL to our homes. Since a recent equipment upgrade are consistently getting speeds of 90+Mbps for downloads and 50+Mbps up.

A while ago the 10 year old Windows 10 HP PCs in our library became very slow and unreliable. I replaced them with 4GB Pi 4Bs running Raspberry Pi OS, Libre Office, Chromium and a few utilities. I noted that the residents used the Pis for light work like general research, webmail, and printing files; but hardly ever used LIbre Office. The system is reset when the user logs out. When the Pi5 came out we thought that we would see about an upgrade.

Our findings, after a bit of research and use testing, were that a simple Pi5 based system worked well. I removed Libre Office and tried a number of systems using 4GB and 8GB Pi5s with different combinations of microSD and SSD cards with typical and heavy web based loads. For typical use 4GB of memory was adequate when running Chromium with 10 open tabs (usually with zero swap and ~1Gb free memory). For heavier use with Chromium and Firefox both running with 10 open tabs and each browser running a Youtube video 8GB performed better, as the extra memory avoided swapping. For this use we found that there was little point in using NVMe SSDs although they performed excellently (I had access to to several from 256GB to 2TB) - They all required fan cooling. The new Raspberry Pi 256 and 512GB cards worked well, but we found little reason to run them with the higher pciex1_gen=3 lane speed. Boot up times were only slightly faster for SSDs at ~13 vs 15 seconds. The time to open Chromium 3 vs 4 seconds. Cases we used were the standard (black) Pi plastic with standard fan or Active Cooler; Argon 40 with standard or NVMe plastic bases; and a couple of passive cooled cases.

I was surprised at how well the FLIRC passive case worked - Yesterday I ran Chromium with 15 open tabs including 2 large spreadsheets and 2 complex word processor documents with the web versions of MS Office, Google Documents, and Apple's iCloud. The temperature went from 43 to 56 C over 2 hours when I opened each document, made small changes and saved them locally or on the web, whilst also running a Youtube video album in the background. Clock speeds went from 1.5GHz (idle) to 2.4GHz flat out with no sign of throttling. In real terms, the performance was not that different from my iMac M3 for web tasks.

Costings: Pi5 4GB US$60; 8GB $80; Pi 256GB SSD $36.25; Raspberry Pi microSD 32/64GB $11/13 (excellent performance so far); Pi plastic case $10; Active cooler $6.45; Pine NVMe HAT $9 (it fits inside the standard case); 27W power supply $13.60; and FLIRC passive case $23.

My recommendations for similar use: Pi 5 4/8GB, 64GB microSD, 27W power supply, and FLIRC case = $110-$130 - Plus keyboard, mouse and screen (we already had those from HP PCs). If I was still in paid employment I would have costed in a few days for software customisation, corporatising/prettifying and testing, etc. So half the cost, lower power bills, and easy management?

Network engineer chose humiliation over a night on the datacenter floor

As I get older, this sort of thing is happening more often. I have noticed that the "onosecond" : [wordsense] is now more like an onominute.

Whomp-whomp: AI PCs make users less productive

Re: AI uses - writing emails, transcribing meetings, managing files... wtf?

Excel, Word, Sharepoint, and Outlook/Exchange?

Re: AI uses - writing emails, transcribing meetings, managing files... wtf?

My late father was a senior local government officer. He maintained that the Secretary was the most powerful person at a meeting. I thought that its was the Chairman (This is a correct use - it just means the person who sits in the chair, and goes back to the days when a chair was expensive and reserved for important people, others sat on trestles or stools). My father explained that the secretary recorded the minutes, if it wasn't recorded it didn't happen; or the record could state something like "After extensive discussion it was agreed...". Similarly in a well ordered meeting if it isn't on the agenda, it doesn't get discussed - Who writes the agenda? It seems to be a skill, my father probably thought that Sir Humphry's skills were "adequate", "sound", but adequate.

Will passkeys ever replace passwords? Can they?

Re: TOTP?

Fluff?

Undergrad thought he had mastered Unix in weeks. Then he discovered rm -rf

Re: We all learned the same way...: mv and move

I started with RDOS on a large scientific instrument that had a foreground/background Nova for data acquisition and processing. Initially it had a "loan" Phoenix fixed 5MB and a similar removable drive. I kept filling it. A few months later the "real system" was delivered, a huge (19" rack mounted) 25MB Winchester with an 8" 1.2MB floppy drive. A DG salesman came out to see why we had bought such a large system. As I recall, a low level format followed by a high level format and installing RDOS took most of the morning.

A few years later its Tektronix terminal was replaced by an IBM AT as a terminal emulator with its own 30MB HDD. I could copy the data over from the DG and only had to archive the important stuff from that onto cheaper 5.25" 1.2MB disks.

A later instrument used the desktop DG20, which had a tape drive. RDOS might have been "idiosyncratic", but it got the job done. Worryingly, I too can still remember many of its commands, but I'm not sure that I can remember what I cooked for dinner two nights ago.

That instrument was replaced with a competitor's which, of course, used an MS-DOS computer.

Re: We all learned the same way...

A really long time ago I did it as root console in usr...

These days it would be a little harder - ssh into an admin account then - cd /home; sudo rm -fr (?).

Google Gemini tells grad student to 'please die' while helping with his homework

Re: What Kind of Illogical Idiot ...

Yet...

Australia tells tots: No TikTok till you're 16... or X, Instagram and Facebook

So the downvote is because you think that 10 year old children should serve adult prison terms?

Assuming that the stated purpose of this (rather than the actual Federal electoral purpose of "appearing to do something") is that children under 16 aren't mature, I note that an Australian State Government wants to bring in imprisonment for those who commit "adult crimes" to "adult time" for 10 year olds.

The sad tale of the Alpha massacre

Re: don't try this at home...

Always, always do a "ls -l" before "rm -r" whatever...

Intel: Our finances are in the toilet, we're laying off 15K, but the free coffee is back!

Re: Service enshittification

It was. I took it further and emigrated.

Service enshittification

Way, way, back in the day we had "Tea Ladies". They were invariably pleasant middle-age women who knew who you were. At one public service place where I worked they would come around twice during the day; and whilst the tea or coffee was free, they would have a few sandwiches for sale. Regular punters could order their favourite snack, mine was a home made ham (off-the bone) roll/cob.

One of the ladies saved us a lot of money - She asked where our colleague was, as she had a cheese sandwich for him. We couldn't work out who she meant until she described him. He turned out to be an external service engineer for a "mission critical' piece of technical kit. The operator called him in regularly. As I recall (from the 1980s) he was charged out at £70 an hour to travel >100 miles in his Cortina, and then £120 an hour whilst on site. He was present so often the tea lady thought he worked there. We realized the kit was >8 years old and replaced it with a new model from a different supplier. Their engineer was only ever on site for one morning for the "annual check up".

The ladies were replaced by up-market "beverage machines". We sent a junior member of staff out to buy the sandwiches (What did that cost?). After a year the machines were deemed to complex and expensive by the bean counters (pun?), so they were replaced by the Klix type machines - Where the weak tea, chocolate, coffee, and chicken soup all tasted "almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea". I noticed when I visited the bean counters that they had their own kettle and used it to make a decent cup with "up-market" loose leaf tea. For health and safety reason, we were not allowed a kettle.

Skyscraper-high sewage plume erupts in Moscow

Blaster Bates, Youtube: The shower of shit over Cheshire.