Posts by Tim99

The Great Graph Database Debate: Relational can't do everything

Re: Use-case

For (1) - If you really need a small relational database SQLite is your friend. Whilst it is "a single user database", a web server with multiple clients is "a single user". With WAL (write ahead logging) I’ve just prototyped something with multiple related tables (using that) running a multiuser test at ~120 added rows per second on a 2GB Raspberry pi 4. Eventually it got to >5 million rows. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the sqlite3 command line shell could successfully back it up into another SQLite data file whist it was running at close to that rate…

The Great Graph Debate: Revolutionary concept in databases or niche curiosity?

Re: well-architected relational databases

I started with DEC Rdb and Oracle 4. Obviously, by the time I got to SQL Server 6, my systems were nearly perfect :-)

Re: Graph is a view, often stored as relations

A long time ago I wrote relational systems for managing "Heritage". Traditionally this was for storing information for physical "object" items for museums, galleries, and archives - These included artefacts, artworks, photographs, documents, etc. Our problem for connecting these with other things to create "stories" was solved by using "subjects" - People, places, events and topics. Each object could be connected to a number other objects (like a camera, and a photographs that it took) using an object/object relationship table. Each subject could be connected to another subject (like a person lived in a particular place); and all subjects and objects could be connected - Like a camera that was owned by a particular person; who took a photograph of an event; like the opening of a new town hall (a place); covering a topic like "Local Government". All done easily in a traditional database with a few simple relationship tables…

Don't worry, that system's not actually active – oh, wait …

Re: RE: most safety rules are written

A very, very, long time go a Civil Service safety officer (he also did "real work") gave me some advice. " Leave something that is easy to find, because I'm going to keep going until I find something to write up" .

It turned out to be: Me leaving an ether bottle out on the end of the bench - Meaning he didn't have to keep looking until he found that the 60 year old solvent store, that it should have been in, was "inadequate" and should be replaced by one further away from the building.

Arm co-founder: Britain's chip strat 'couldn’t be any worse'

Re: oxbridge

Don't forget "Greats" (Boris Johnson, Literae Humaniores). The last STEM PM was Margaret Thatcher (Chemistry, Oxford), maybe not all of us would want that? Disclaimer: I'm a Chartered Chemist...

MacStadium brings macOS instances orchestrated by Kubernetes to AWS

Re: Hilariously expensive

Is there a minimum charge? Otherwise, a few hours of testing would be cheap…

Kremlin claims Ukraine hackers behind fake missile strike alerts

I’m not sure that inmates of the modern versions of Gulags have internet access…

Puri.sm puts out LapDock for its Librem 5 smartphone

Re: Travelling

Should I have mentioned that a headless Raspberry pi with the iPad is useful? Well, it is…

Travelling

I don't travel much these days; but when I did an iPhone with a small bluetooth keyboard and mouse, and an HDMI cable to connect to a hotel TV was often enough. These days an iPad does to job.

Clumsy ships, one Chinese, sever submarine cables that connect Taiwanese islands

Re: State Actors

Tommy Flowers: Wikipedia.

A tip for content filter evaluators: erase the list of sites you tested, don't share them on 100 PCs

Re: A lot of El Reg Readers really are very old

Well what do you expect for the (alleged) $25,000 Bill paid Seattle Computer Products for a non-exclusive licence (later an additional US$50,000?). I believe that MS bought the last licence from Tim Paterson later...

Re: A lot of El Reg Readers really are very old

When we bought IBM PS/2 PCs, the serial numbers were on the front. It saved a lot of crawling around. We had a Volume Workstation Agreement (for us, up to a 30% discount), so I'm not sure if that applied to all PS/2s.

Make Linux safer… or die trying

Re: @AC - Technology & Economics

Women were wyfmen or wommen. Wyf originally meant adult female. A housewyf was a woman who ran a house (often as the "wife" of the owner). It also became a common word for female servant. Much of that changed after the Norman invasion, when generally women had fewer intrinsic rights to property. As an aside, "world" is likely to have been gendered. It comes from the root weorold/werold; and meant the "affairs of men" - Possibly that things outside the household were the business of men (gendered), whilst those of the wyfman were within the household.

Re: The problem is desktop components on servers

I'm old and possibly senile. and like many older contributors, mostly used *NIX on expensive servers, minis and specialised systems. Before NT "Microsoft had the highest-volume AT&T Unix license": Bill Gates- Microsoft's Xenix (Wikipedia). We shipped a number of systems using it, mainly because it was reliable and ran well on cheap generic boxes.

The Proliferation of Poettering is one reason that I suspect that the premise it's a fact: Linux is a Unix now. In fact, arguably, today Linux is Unix... ...To get the ready-to-use version, though, you have to buy a support contract is not necessarily desirable. Any Unix that had the obfuscation of systemd would have died "back then" as not conforming to the basic "Unix philosophy". My earned cynicism suggested to me that systemd was a cunning plan that was not in users' best interests. I wrote a "Troll" El Reg comment nearly 5 years ago: How can we make money? I still believe that it was closer to a truth than Liam might be comfortable with...

BOFH: Generating a report the Director can show the Board – THIS is what AI was made for

Re: Relocated

I'm old, and went to a UK school with "illusions" of grandeur. I was taught Oxford English. That "-ize" was usually correct, and the blanket use of "-ise" was for the uneducated. My teachers were mostly of the "Americans were late to the War, and over-paid, over-dressed, and over here" generation...

Find My Kids app is basically AirTags for your offspring

Re: Only 8 years old...

I have several watches. One is gold and >55 years old, which I won in a competition; another is an 80+ years old Longines Professional which my father bought in WWII; but the one I wear the most is an Apple Watch 8. It saves me having to walk around with a phone. I have to pay the Apple Tax to have a phone to set it up, but my cheap phone and the watch together seem less expensive than the high-end Apple or Android phones that I see people carrying. I admit to being of the generation that walked miles to school, in the snow, uphill both ways, and know that the author has a point to make, but the article could perhaps have said "which can start from around $300 for the basic GPS and cellular model.

A younger friend has an autistic child who has an Apple Watch, the school that they attend does not allow mobile phones - Both the parents and child have said that it has made a significant difference to their feeling of security. The parents said that they would have considered home schooling without it. Fortunately, I will have shuffled off before there is a conversation about fitting children with iMplants...

Oh, 07734! Internet Archive debuts vintage calculator emulator

Re: Get off my lawn!

Whereas an Otis King can be <$50. I paid the equivalent of ~$120 when I bought it…

Re: Get off my lawn!

I had/have an Otis King cylindrical slide rule. I do feel old…

Software devs targeted as British tax authority makes fraud allegations

So,

We’ll be seeing similar action against merchant bankers, financial consultants, and political think-tanks then?

Microsoft and community release scripts to help mitigate Defender mess

Re: Genius

I suspect it is not new. As a customer I seem to remember doing the work in the early 1980s.

I have heard it said that Bill’s great insight was: Good enough, is enough. I’m not sure about that - It could well be: Just good enough, is enough, and is cheap enough to take the market. Sturgeon's revelation is an adage stating: "Ninety percent of everything is crap". Wasn’t Microsoft’s market share about 90%?

Unix is dead. Long live Unix!

Re: Are you ok?

I’m old, and probably dim, but other than Unixware 7 I can’t find anything that looks like Linux here: UNIX® Certified Products. I thought I remembered (when I was deploying this stuff), that UnixWare came out of System V?

Fat EVs may cause 'more death on our roads' – watchdog

The rule was: Comfort, tyre life, fuel efficiency, and grip - Choose any two, and compromise the other two.

Re: Weight is relative...

Before I saw this thread, I just posted this elsewhere on El Reg, with some calculations...

EU plan to make big tech pay 'fair share' of telco fees reportedly weeks away

OK, another car analogy

As LDS has already used a car analogy on the use of highways and traffic fees - How about another one?

The damage a vehicle does to a road is proportional to the 4th power of its axle weight: A small car, say a 2023 VW Polo, weighs 1.15 tonnes - Axle weight factor = 0.109. A VW Touareg weighs 2.15 tonnes - Axle weight factor = 1.34. So if we do come up with some value to be paid by the original purchaser to maintain road surfaces the Touareg purchaser should pay about 12 times more.

It's more extreme with a lorry: Assume a car axle weight of 1 ton (2 axles) vs a 44 tonne lorry have a maximum axle weight not exceeding 8.5 tonnes (6 axles) the "damage" is 1,650 times more. If you based this on say half of UK annual Vehicle tax rates, the lorry would be £140,000 p.a. Obviously the road transport lobbyists would not accept that, and this "Modest Proposal" ignores any societal good of road haulage...

I suspect that telco costs are more linear, or more likely, come done as traffic increases, so how about the punter and big tech pay? I believe that a punter with the info they give for searches, maps, contacts, etc., can be "worth" about $35-100 US dollars p.a. to Google. Maybe charge say 20% of that? :-)

FAA grounds all US departures after NOTAM goes down

Re: "but which aren't known about enough in advance to publicize by other means"

PINOT Gris for older and more experienced flyers?

My late father said that when he was WW2 RAF aircrew: "Rules are for the obedience of fools, and to advise the wise".

First Patch Tuesday of the year explodes with in-the-wild exploit fix

I'm just a bit younger, but switched to a Mac as my main machine a few years after I retired (Possibly because I used some obscure BSDs in the 70s/80s?).

Occasionally I use Parallels VMs on an iMac to run Windows XP (not networked!) and Windows 11 - A Raspberry Pi 4B to play with; and sometimes, for nostalgia, an original Pi. If I ever upgrade the iMac to Silicon, my life will get simpler as Parallels and Windows won't be included.

Techies try to bypass damaged UPS, send 380V into air traffic system

So the manufacture had under-specced the power supply, or the (privatized?) power company supply was outside specification?

An IT emergency during a festive visit to the in-laws? So sorry, everyone, I need to step out for a while

A very long time ago

I was taught that there are no tested backups, only restores. Even in retirement, each week I still rename a different unimportant file and then restore its original with Time Machine...

When we asked how you crashed the system we wanted an explanation not a demonstration

Re: ... half a brain

I once had to throw myself across the room to physically restrain a colleague who was about to put the third (and last) copy of a Novell server backup tape into the drive that had just chewed up the previous two. Brain-fade can, and does, happen…

Server broke because it was invisibly designed to break

You’re not a BOFH then?

Re: A service provider that doesn't bill because their attempted fixes failed?

We live in a retirement village An elderly neighbour has a "care option" plan with a local supplier. It can be used for a range of things like, taking her shopping, cleaning the house; or in this case, providing equipment to help. She had broken her hip and was immobile, so the nice care options lady suggested an iPad to keep in touch with her family, many of whom lived interstate. The nice lady ordered a WiFi only iPad. When it was delivered they realized that she would need a WiFi base unit to connect to her existing modem router (used with her existing smart TV). The nice lady then arranged for a WiFi access point and an installer. I received a phone call saying that the neighbour and the nice lady couldn’t get the iPad to work. The access point had not been set up correctly, and was acting as a bridge, but without WiFi. A quick prod with a paperclip and 3 minutes later everything was working.

A few weeks later the neighbour got a bill from the installer for $490 for the installation - The access point was not included as it was supplied by the care provider. I asked the neighbour why the bill was so high, she said that the installer was there all afternoon. "What was he doing?" I asked. "He spent most of the time sitting on the floor looking at the paperwork, and on the phone trying to set it up. He seemed overwhelmed, so I gave him coffee and biscuits". It looked like he was learning how to do a simple install, and was charging her for it! All that was required was to unbox the item, check which port on the patch panel went to the wall socket, plug it in and turn it on; then connect the iPad to WiFi and type in the password. I wondered if the installer had spent time teaching her how to use the iPad - No, he said that was the care option providers responsibility. I phoned the installer’s company and the care options lady - After an exchange of views with the installation company, the neighbour didn’t have to pay…

Theranos' Sunny Balwani gets longer sentence than Elizabeth Holmes

A lesson?

Don’t take money away (steal) from the rich.

Programming error created billion-dollar mistake that made the coder ... a hero?

Re: Explosive demonstration

Some of us remember using "naked" centrifuges that you cranked by hand - One had exposed gears! I think you needed a couple of turns per second of the handle…

Re: Explosive demonstration

Quite a headache? At least there was something to ameliorate it. >>======>

Killing trees with lasers isn’t cool, says Epson. So why are inkjets any better?

Re: Hmmm...

Markdown does it for me, but for many (most?), I still have to print it...

Re: Microsoft beat them to it

One reason that we switched to Windows was finding software/printer combinations that worked with DOS.

If you stuck with Lotus 123, WordPerfect, and dBase you were OK, as most common printers had drivers. I had colleagues who had to buy additional printers to use an obscure but vital program. The promise made to printer manufacturers by MS was "write a single driver for Windows" and it will just work. I wonder how that went?

How do you solve the problem that is Twitter?

Re: "How bad will its fall be?"

Don’t forget the anvil drop immediately after…

Exchange Online and Microsoft Teams went down in APAC because Microsoft broke itself

Er, I don’t think it’s Tuesday…

Epson zaps lasers into oblivion, in the name of the environment

I nearly didn't buy a new printer

My 9 year old AirPrint Canon ink jet died.I have access to a shared B/W laser in our retirement village, and a nice receptionist who can be asked (very occasionally) to print small documents on a colour laser - So I thought I didn't need to replace the Canon. Just as well, because of Covid, almost nobody had a printer to sell. Unfortunately I was in a local shop, when they had a pallet of HP Inspire 7200s delivered. I bought one straight off the pallet. Three months later the power supply died. HP support sent me a new one 5 days later, and that has been fine - For casual printing "Don't buy the Ink plan", it is" very expensive. So far it is working well, and a significant improvement on the Canon - The main thing that I don't like is almost being "forced to connect it to the internet - Yes I have turned firmware updates off...

Aviation regulators push for more automation so flights can be run by a single pilot

Link to Flanders and Swan with historical railway video here: YouTube - barleyarrish.

Tesla reports two more fatal Autopilot accidents to the NHTSA

Re: "one hand on the wheel"

If I take (both) my hands off the steering wheel of my Golf 7.5, it gives warnings - Then if I do nothing, puts the hazard lights on and slowly comes to a stop (it is probably programmed to think I've died).

Just follow the instructions … no wait, not that instruction to lock everyone out of everything

I think that, on balance, I would go with the millions of lines of code - Current commercial passenger fatalities are ~1 for every 2.5 billion miles travelled. It seems unlikely that the descendants of the WW2 German and Italian armed forces would be actively trying to kill me.

The WW2 RAF fatality rate from flying accidents, etc., was ~8,000 out of >55,000. This compares to a total aircrew fatality rate of >44%. For volunteers, the casualty rate (deaths, POWs, seriously injured) was >60%. These figures are mostly for bomber crews, the total number of Battle of Britain fighter command casualties was ~550 out of 3,000.

You mean like Oracle Scott/Tiger? Yes, I went to a customer to tidy up a mess left by a previous contractor; and that was still in their production system. It contained customer personal details, discount structures, company financials, etc. All the staff used that login, and (as I remember?) it had been in use for about 5 years.

Re: Bah!

I heard a bit of a bang when I plugged a Nokia analogue mobile phone charger into my small desktop UPS - The charger was welded into the UPS. Yes, the circuit breaker tripped, but I also took out the 50A fuse under the power box, and the distribution cabinet in the street; leaving 26 houses without power. The electrician, and the nice man from the power company who he called out, were both quite understanding, under the circumstances.

Well, pilots have collectively been at it for roughly half a century longer than we have, so more of our hard-way lessons were presumably learned within living memory although, also presumably, skewing towards the older part of that range.

(I'm sure the aviation world still has its lessons yet to be learned, just as I'm sure we do too.)

Towards the end of his life, my father passed on advice that he was given in the WW2 RAF: "Do not leave an aeroplane by parachute unless the aeroplane is on fire". This would still seem reasonable to many of us. As a passenger, I have expanded this to only use large commercial aircraft, preferably in the nicer bit at the front, and I forgo the parachute completely...

DEC

I liked DEC VMS. MS DOS (and later, Windows and NT), not so much >>=======>

I wonder if the company mottos may have given us hints as to why that might be? Digital Equipment Corporation's was 'Honesty and respect for customers and employees'. Microsoft's, at a similar time, was 'A computer on every desk and in every home, running Microsoft software’.

In about 1985 our Microsoft rep, over a boozy lunch, thought Bill had said "A hundred dollars a year from everybody".

Xiaomi reveals bonkers phone with bolted-on Leica lens that will make you look like a dork

Re: Camera makes little difference, subject is king.

The same teacher also said that much of the ancillary stuff that was carried about by (male) amateur photographers was "gentlemans’ jewellery", implying that it’s decorative potential outweighed it’s functional necessity, a bit like wearing an expensive chunky watch. I suspect that in my case, that may well have been true.

Re: Camera makes little difference, subject is king.

Many, many, years ago the professional who taught me basic photography asked me "What’s the best camera?" "A Pentax K1000?" I replied. They had just come out and we had bought a few… "No", he said, "It’s the one you have with you!" Which may be why almost everything, other than specialized work seems to be done on a mobile phone?