* Posts by Tim99

2001 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2008

Apple, Broadcom allowed to press Ctrl-Z on billion-dollar Wi-Fi patent payout to Caltech

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Ctrl-Z?

It may depend on the age of the computer? On my 2+ year old iMac the flc are labelled "command". The option keys have a graphic that looks like a sunken swan. A much older wired keyboard uses mostly text with few symbols - it only has the flc...

Western Australia Health taps SAP and Deloitte for AU$220m SaaS HR system over 10 years

Tim99 Silver badge
Meh

History

One WA Government Department that I billed typically took 60+-120 days to pay. Invoices were processed in a single batch monthly. Business complained, and the Liberal (think Conservative/Republican) Government introduced a new single system across most Departments. My first invoice took 9 weeks to be paid, after a call to the customer, and then I got another cheque for the same invoice 2 weeks later. Eventually payments stablized at about 30 days. Perhaps this one will be better? :-)

This new system is being introduced by the Labor Government. This sort of stuff has been done by computer for 50+ years, and we probably should have got the hang of how to do it by now - Perhaps, some of the main purposes of such systems may reveal themselves to be: Allowing politicians to big-note themselves; getting the right people promoted; and distributing monies to the current governments' friends?

Disclaimer: The Author may have a somewhat cynical view - Before retirement, he has been employed as a Civil Servant, worked for a Public Utility; run businesses for a banker; and owned his own business.

Trio of Rust Core Team members take their leave

Tim99 Silver badge
Unhappy

We had one that liked/would steal Caramac bars. We had to limit his access because it gave him diarrhoea.

Happy birthday, Windows Vista: Troubled teen hits 15

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

… it wasn't all bad either…

Really!? I was writing some shrink-wraps for Windows at the time. Looking at the bin-fire that was Vista was, genuinely, one of the main reasons that I decided to plan semi-retirement to avoid any involvement with it.

Website fined by German court for leaking visitor's IP address via Google Fonts

Tim99 Silver badge
Big Brother

Re: So, when will El Reg lose its Google dependency then?

According to my browser, it is blocking google-analytics.com; googletagmanager.com; and doubleclick.net .

Hands up who ISN'T piling in to help Epic Games appeal Apple App Store ruling

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Apple is getting shafted by very guilty parties

Gins and tonic is correct, but may sound wrong too…

ISO.org outage hits day 3: Still in the dark as the important matter of bunk bed standards enters discussion

Tim99 Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: Ironic

Few conform to ISO 8601 with correspondence that they generate…

BOFH: On Wednesdays, we wear gloves

Tim99 Silver badge
Boffin

Re: I'm not sure about the key stuck to the phone at the end?

I’m a Chartered Chemist (Royal Society of Chemistry, by examination), and am probably professionally obliged to use the "f" spelling. I remember back in the 1970s this came up. There was a forthright discussion in 2012 which refers to this; https://my.rsc.org/forums/viewtopic/39/2567

Nature also has an interesting read https://www.nature.com/articles/nchem.301

Although I am also a member of the American Chemical Society, I hope that we can all agree that the (American) "acceptable" IUPAC spelling of aluminum is just wrong and that we should all use the "correct" (UK) IUPAC spelling aluminium. See: https://www.quora.com/Why-does-the-IUPAC-accept-the-American-spellings-for-aluminium-and-caesium-but-not-the-British-spelling-of-sulphur-Could-the-IUPAC-be-biased

Tim99 Silver badge
Mushroom

Re: I'm not sure about the key stuck to the phone at the end?

When I did this stuff for work, if we wanted something a bit more energetic, we used hydrazine diperchlorate…

Tim99 Silver badge
Mushroom

Re: I'm not sure about the key stuck to the phone at the end?

In theory ammonium nitrate is an oxidizing agent and not an explosive in its own right, although very large quantities (many tons) can detonate. Oxidising agents are typically mixed with fuels to create explosive mixtures. Potassium nitrate is the oxidizer in black powder (gunpowder), the fuel is charcoal and sulfur (note correct IUPAC spelling). Other fuels can be, and are, used.

UK Home Secretary Priti Patel green-lights Mike Lynch's extradition to US to face Autonomy fraud charges

Tim99 Silver badge
Devil

Hmm...

So Priti is getting the US establishment on side to get even more hidden dirt on her possible competitors for the soon to be vacant PM's position?

How to polish the bottom line? Microsoft makes it really hard to claim expenses, say staffers

Tim99 Silver badge

It got so bad with one EO who loved delaying/denying expenses, that I did once take two day's leave and claimed court expenses for two days/nights because Mrs Tim99 wanted to go with me. She went shopping on the one day I was in court.

Tim99 Silver badge
Angel

Top-Down system?

Almost always specced by bosses and people outside the department. When I did this, the punter often finished up with two joined systems - One to keep the bosses happy, and the other for the peons who actually used it. Typically, I called the first a "Management System" with a pretty screen and lots of reports; and most importantly, snazzy "Export to Excel" facilities. The other often had several streamlined CRUD screens with a simple main data entry screen, and only a few reports. The most important people (Boss's secretaries) got both...

Former Oracle execs warn that Big Red's auditing process is also a 'sales enablement tool'

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

Re: recursive backronym

In the 1980s, on their DBA course (Reading?), I heard:-

One

Rich

Arsehole

Called

Larry

Ellison

Tim99 Silver badge
Facepalm

Surprised?

Water is wet; bears crap in woods; Oracle gouges customers hostages…

Disclaimer: Author still bears scars from architecting systems with Oracle 4/5.

Throw away your Ethernet cables* because MediaTek says Wi-Fi 7 will replace them

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Re: You can pry the ethernet cable out of my cold dead hands!

I think I remember last using 10BASE5 to connect 2 10BASE2 Novell networks in separate building a few hundred metres apart. I can’t remember what the adapters were though…

'Please download in Microsoft Excel': Meet the tech set to monitor IT performance across central UK government

Tim99 Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: in line with agile delivery best practice

Sometimes the "build one to throw away" becomes the "it works, we’ll keep it”. This will be used until it blows up because of problems of scale; lack of (referential) inegrity; not "one source of truth"; etc…

UK, Australia, to build 'network of liberty that will deter cyber attacks before they happen'

Tim99 Silver badge
Devil

Look a squirrel/koala

Two governments with problems with the electorate. Truss wanting to be PM - or de pfeffel setting her up to fail? Scotty from Marketing trying to look strong, or Dutton setting himself up as leader if they lose their majority in May?

Web daddy Tim Berners-Lee on privacy, data sharing, and the web's future

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Re: Pods......and other attractive possibilities.......

"....two local backups (one offsite) seems a better proposition!"

Hmm, a bare minimum I would have thought. After doing this stuff for >50 years, I now have 2 Time Machine backups; 2 full disk bootable backups (1 off site for each); and an encrypted internet backup - With incipient old age/forgetfulness I'm wondering if that is adequate...

Bug in WebKit's IndexedDB implementation makes Safari 15 leak Google account info... and more

Tim99 Silver badge
Big Brother

Google?

What is this Google? Is the same one that I may occasionally use by typing in "my search terms !g" into DuckDuckGo…

Planning for power cuts? That's strictly for the birds

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

Re: I say it's plausible

It’s murder that the plan didn’t past muster?

Insurance giant Lloyd's hires DXC to migrate org off legacy mainframes to AWS cloud

Tim99 Silver badge
Trollface

I wonder

Do we think that they can get affordable insurance to cover this?

Another day, another ERP project behind schedule: This time it's Norfolk County Council and an Oracle system

Tim99 Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: NFN (Normal for Norfolk)

Sorry, no. I looked for it after his death, but couldn’t find it.

Tim99 Silver badge

NFN (Normal for Norfolk)

Sorry to rain on your meme, but…

My father was the Treasurer of a Norfolk Council when documents were still hand written or typed. He was responsible for the installation of one of the first local authority systems (in the mid/late 1960s, Burroughs?). It’s main job was to look after the rates, and pay bills and salaries - It worked. I was just getting into science/technology then, and was allowed to go and see it working in its own room. The manufacturer was sufficiently pleased that it was used as a reference site, and for some reason "gave" them an ANITA calculator to "check everything was OK" - I think that cost about £400. He took early retirement when local authorities were reorganised in 1973 (Redcliffe-Maud). He predicted that the new large authorities would become an inefficient bureaucratic mess, so he grabbed the pension and left. When he left he was allowed to buy the ANITA for £5 and was still using it in 1991.

Microsoft tweaks Teams and Viva to help bridge gap between frontline workers and their managers, among other things

Tim99 Silver badge
Pint

Re: Two points....

An upvote and a >>======>

Nvidia promises British authorities it won’t strong Arm rivals after proposed merger

Tim99 Silver badge
Unhappy

Corporatism

That's all right - It will only be the little people who pay (indirectly). Privatize the commons, subsidize business.

UK government tool to monitor its legacy application estate is… LATE

Tim99 Silver badge
Devil

Re: Depends on what you want

Before retiring I worked in the Civil and Public Services, ran companies for a banker, and then my own technical consultancy. Here is an outline proposal for somebody to create a "top line" system:-

Scoping the problem: 2 leads, 3 person-months total £100,000; 4 juniors, 6 person-months £150,000. Overheads: leases, accomodation, travel & expenses £250,000.

System: 4 basic servers running BSD with hot swappable drives (R350s? should be overkill at ~£2,000 each) i.e. a web server; one Running Python and SQLite; the other 2 as cold backup servers; cabling, etc. £2,000 - £10,000. Software cost ~£0.

"Consultancy" fees, etc.: £9,500,000 (Bolly isn't cheap). Total spend £10,010,000.

Looking at it again, I might have over-specced the hardware...

The inevitability of the Windows 11 UI: New Notepad enters the beta channel

Tim99 Silver badge
Facepalm

Yes, but my typing isn’t good enough to do 4 lines at a time and get them all right…

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

echo this is the first added line in file >> test.txt

echo this is the second added line >> test.txt

echo this is the third added line… >> test.txt

Not looking forward to a greyscale 2022? Then look back to the past in 64 colours

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Angel Delight

To the pure, all things are pure; but for the rest of us…

Tim99 Silver badge
Gimp

Re: Angel Delight

Another advert in same telephone box as Angel Delight ?

Tim99 Silver badge
Happy

Re: Angel Delight

I don’t remember being particularly fond of it when I lived in the UK, but we found the butterscotch flavour in the "ethnic aisle" of our local Oz supermarket. I made a dessert for our friends from a gingersnap basket filled with Angel Delight and topped with fresh raspberries. We all liked it, and I had to make more. Mrs Tim99 and I now eat the butterscotch variety perhaps once a month - I will admit that the pink one is unpleasant, and the chocolate one is worse.

Nothing's working, and I've checked everything, so it must be YOUR fault

Tim99 Silver badge
Facepalm

Normal operation

About 35 years ago I worked in a laboratory that had a lot of expensive, sensitive kit. Each item drew kWs of power, but they normally weren’t turned off as we could almost guarantee that at least one wouldn’t come back up. The exception was Christmas, when staff were normally expected to take a couple of days off and the lab was closed for at least a week. As expected, one important instrument didn’t restart. The reliable and competent operator called the service department, ran through the standard check list, but the kit refused to work. A service engineer was sent, who was charged out at "only" £95/hr including travelling time. After 3 hours on the road, he arrived and we made him a cup of tea - While it was mashing he walked around to the back of the equipment and turned the power supply relay switch on. The equipment restarted. The operator was almost in tears, "I always turn it off at the front panel, the back is hard to reach" she said - Nobody else admitted responsibility. To avoid unpleasant repercussions (it may have been her boss), the engineer wrote it up as a dirty switch contact (Well, we had given him biscuits too).

You've stolen the antiglare shield on that monitor you've fixed – they say the screen is completely unreadable now

Tim99 Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: IBM ATs are "liquid" proof

I developed a way of carrying IBM XTs within a large office block without having to disconnect the cabling. I balanced the keyboard on top of the monitor and lifted the whole system up, wedging the keyboard in place under my chin. Obviously I wasnt entirely stupid, if it was more than 2 flights of stairs in an 8 story building I took the lift. I must have been fairly fit then - It may well have contributed to my back now being stuffed though.

Roll forwards 20+ years, I was installing some of our software on a database server for a government department. I met the department's IT bod in the car-park as we had agreed he would sign me in. He opened the boot of his car, struggled to lift out a cumbersome foldable trolly (weight >>5kg?), and unfolded it. He then reached in and removed a Toshiba notebook in its shoulder-bag (weight <2kg) and placed it on the trolly. He explained that it was "the rules" and that a number of colleagues had reported back injuries before the rule came in. Some months before, an older colleague had taken time off after hurting themselves lifting the trolly - They were still awaiting the outcome of the incident analysis to see if the rules needed modification...

The Filth Filter is part of the chipset, honest. Goes between the TPM and SEP. No, really

Tim99 Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: A little nervous sometimes...

"...although maybe only Grandma can keep it straight...

Oh dear. From personal (government sanctioned, legal) experience, that can't be guaranteed - I know I'm old, but I often wish I wasn't as cynical and world-weary.

Thank you, FAQ chatbot, but if I want your help I'll ask for it

Tim99 Silver badge
Meh

Re: I am here to help. What can I do for you today?

...to replace my trusty, now ageing, Pixma TS6150. Which does all I need...
Good luck with that. I've been trying to replace an MX516, which was a distress purchase after my previous 10 year old Canon failed three days before I was moving house nearly 10 years ago. It seems to be almost impossible to avoid buying a multifunction that doesn't want you to install hundreds of MBs of software and "help you" print over the internet.

I'm retired, so I am wondering if I can manage without one when this one packs up. I thought that my main use would be to scan the occasional document, but I have discovered that my iPhone makes a reasonable job except for the paper not being flat (laying a sheet of glass over it fixes that). For the 4 pages or so that I print every couple of months, a USB stick and the local library and will probably do...

Ooh, an update. Let's install it. What could possibly go wro-

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Re: Netware? Less than 20 years ago? Where was he working - Jurassic Park?

About that time ago (2002), I was installing some of our systems for government owned hospitals - Windows 95 clients on NetWare 4 networks. Our customers required "advanced audio" and plug and play. I received formal written permission from their head of IT to install Windows 98 on 9 PCs (3 sites each with 3). The staff were told to "not tell anyone", otherwise other users would expect Windows 98 too…

MySQL a 'pretty poor database' says departing Oracle engineer

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Nuts to them all. MongoDB is web scale.

I've not used jdbc. With C, or even Python, it's a bit messy but doable for a few 10s of concurrent users on a LAN server. The good news is that it is extremely easy to port up to PostgreSQL if the application does grow.

For most web applications the db talks to a single user, the web server. The post indicating hundreds of SQL statements per second on the SQLite site was made in 2015, I would imagine that it would have gone up since.

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

The run time version of Access as a front end to SQL Server might not be too bad. We made a few shrink-wrap apps each with ~50 concurrent CRUD users with tens of tables and a few millions of rows - The heavy lifting was done with transactions, stored procedures, and server-side views. BUT, the learning curve was steep and long - Once mastered it was a very quick and quite powerful toolkit to put useful Windows client-server systems into production.

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Nuts to them all. MongoDB is web scale.

I’m old, so I used SQLite with bash, C, and Python. I found it particularly useful when "tidying up" CSV data that I generated from luser Excel "databases". A dirty secret is that most (95+%?) of the data driven websites out there could probably use it (sqlite.org):-

Generally speaking, any site that gets fewer than 100K hits/day should work fine with SQLite. The 100K hits/day figure is a conservative estimate, not a hard upper bound. SQLite has been demonstrated to work with 10 times that amount of traffic.

The SQLite website (https://www.sqlite.org/) uses SQLite itself, of course, and as of this writing (2015) it handles about 400K to 500K HTTP requests per day, about 15-20% of which are dynamic pages touching the database. Dynamic content uses about 200 SQL statements per webpage. This setup runs on a single VM that shares a physical server with 23 others and yet still keeps the load average below 0.1 most of the time.

Tim99 Silver badge
Joke

Re: Reality is a vampire - it both bites and sucks

For data integrity use SQL DDL/DCL/TCL - For fast, use > /dev/null

This House believes: A unified, agnostic software environment can be achieved

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Re: One software

I think you'll find UNIX and C before that - Until AT&T realized that they "owned it" (well except for all of the bits done by Berkley, other universities, other business, and users). Then we had the "UNIX Wars"

Welcome to Microsoft with there sound business idea that "Just" good enough is good enough - Some of us remember that Microsoft licenced more copies of UNIX (Xenix) than anyone else, and paid AT&T for the privilege. You might well think that that was a good reason for MS to employ Dave Cutler to produce Windows NT.

What if it could be SysAdmin Day, every day? Would anyone actually notice?

Tim99 Silver badge
Trollface

Hmm...

The skills level within many companies has been reduced over all, Stremlau continues. And fewer techies at entry level mean even fewer skilled techies moving up the organisation over time. "We've lost a lot of people that still understand those little lines of code, DOS scripts, and scripting capabilities."

This leaves companies looking for help with even the most mundane tasks. That help is even harder to find as a result of Covid. And harder to deliver when the end user workforce is largely at home.

Theory tells us that supply and demand should tend to set the price of labour in the market - So, techies have had a massive pay-rise?

The dark equation of harm versus good means blockchain’s had its day

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Lack of comprehension and imagination ...

Several points: People like gold because it's pretty; it is malleable and ductile; hence jewellery and ornaments; it is near permanent (except for aqua regia); heavy, so you can't easily shift large amounts, but sufficiently "'valuable" that an amount that you can carry in a purse can be traded for worthwhile things. Other than gold reserves and jewellery, its main use is electrical circuits/electronics; smaller amounts are used for dentistry and medicine.

Piss did, and can, have a value. Until modern times it was collected and sold to make gunpowder; and large amounts were used for cleaning, textiles, and dyeing. It is used as a raw material for many valuable pharmaceuticals (particularly from human females) and is still used in much of the world as fertilizer.

Microsoft: What's that? A patch for make-me-admin vuln? Sorry – can't hear you. Have a new jumper instead

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Re: There was a good Windows once........

NT 3.51? Just before the Explorer/Windows 95 crud was incorporated.

Microsoft's Teams Essential tier seems designed to coax people on to Business Basic

Tim99 Silver badge
Trollface

Hmm

"The absence of Google Calendar integration, as an example, could be a deal-breaker"

I’d pay a lot more NOT to have Google and MS… >>======>

You forced me to use this fancypants app and now you're asking for a printout?

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: I guess I’m just lucky

I find that fexofenadine works best for me. It also stops the itching I can get when my symptoms are bad. For milder symptoms Beclomethasone Dipropionate (Beconase) works for me, when it is really bad, both together help.

Tim99 Silver badge
Unhappy

I guess I’m just lucky

Allergic rhinitis in both the spring and winter. The winter one is caused by moulds…

Apple sues 'amoral 21st century mercenaries' NSO for infecting iPhones with Pegasus spyware

Tim99 Silver badge
Big Brother

Re: But .. Isn't U.S 4 letter agencies and allies doing exactly the same stuff as NSO ?

...US and the other 7 eyes nations? I know who the 5, 9, and 14 eyes countries are, but that I hadn't heard of before.

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Seriously?

Alternatively, there may be two posters who use a similar style? I am old and went to a school that had "illusions" of grandeur - I was taught to use Oxford spelling and commas; longer, adequately punctuated, sentences; and the excessive use of subordinate clauses. I now try to use shorter sentences.