* Posts by Tim99

2002 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2008

Python swallows Java to become second-most popular programming language... according to this index

Tim99 Silver badge
Trollface

Re: "Python creator [..] joins Microsoft"

No, keep the C# people away from him...

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

Re: Sin tax

"you can't start kids with programing using C." Why not? K&R is ~250 pages long - A couple of bits from each section should do it. They need it to be "pretty"?

Guess what's in my pocket >>=========>

Brit Conservative Party used 10 million people's names to derive their country of origin, ethnicity and religion according to ICO report

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: So what did they think of Boris ?

A friend's son was at Dulwich with Farage, apparently then he did rhyme his name with cabbage...

Apple now Arm'd to the teeth: MacBook Air and Pro, Mac mini to be powered by custom M1 chips rather than Intel

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Re: Parallels

I too use Parallels, but these days, only occasionally (Windows XP and 10) to run Windows software I wrote over a number of years, and the occasional specialised technical application. We may be OK: Parallels on Apple Silicon.

Test tube babies: Virgin Hyperloop pops pair of staffers in a pod, shoots them along 500m vacuum tunnel

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: 'is hyperloop safe?'

Now there’s your problem...

Tim99 Silver badge
Joke

'is hyperloop safe?'

Say somebody had done 4 years of research to start up a new business that relied on people travelling inside a metal tube 12 km above the ground at 900 km/hr with an outside vacuum equivalent to 0.2 atmospheres, would you feel safe?

Bad software crashed Boeings. Now it appears the company lacked a singular software supremo

Tim99 Silver badge

And...

How much of that software will be outsourced to an external contractor?

We've made it: Microsoft deems El Reg relevant enough to have a play with the nerfed version of its upcoming Xbox

Tim99 Silver badge
Trollface

But

I thought the cool kids had moved on to the iPhone/iPad?

Linux Mint pushes out its own Chromium build to help users avoid Canonical's Snap Store

Tim99 Silver badge
Linux

Re: No.

It’s simply the pursuit of money - Canonical, IBM (Red Hat), etc. This is why the commons can’t have nice things when somebody can make a quid by obfuscation and complication...

You only live twice: Once to start the installation, and the other time to finish it off

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Not just in exotic places

I was the front line IT person for some scientists and engineers at a large UK public utility. One Monday morning I had a call from a department who said that "nothing is working". Obviously I got the blame as I had been in there on Friday updating their network and installing their new kit (a couple of ATs and XTs). Two computers wouldn’t boot, another seemed to come up but nothing showed on the screen and a couple of the rest gave various ominous boot chimes. After a brief investigation I realized that the bad computers all had bits missing. Someone over the weekend had taken stuff from most of them - Enough to build two complete XTs with Hercules graphics cards and an AT with VGA, and 3 10-Base2 network cards. I guess they sourced the cases and monitors from elsewhere. We could never prove it, but we think the bits went out with a cleaner or security person. I wondered why they hadn’t nicked the complete PCs, but a colleague thought that "It would be too obvious, or maybe they thought that no-one would notice?".

Did I or did I not ask you to double-check that the socket was on? Now I've driven 15 miles, what have we found?

Tim99 Silver badge
Unhappy

My favourite

In the days of separate switches for monitors and computer cases, you could almost guarantee that one of them would be off. Sometimes the luser would turn the one that was on off, and then the one that was off on. Blinken-lights didn’t seem to help these people...

MongoDB rolls out pick 'n' mix multi-cloud DBaaS, hopes to win over footdraggers by playing well with AWS, Google, Microsoft

Tim99 Silver badge
Trollface

And... An oldie, but still apposite?

MongoDB is Web Scale - YouTube, NSFW.

Top doctors slam Google for not backing up incredible claims of super-human cancer-spotting AI

Tim99 Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: "vibrant ecosystem that supports future innovation"

If you are a parasite, maybe you need good PR to keep many of your hosts?

Hey Reg readers, Happy Spreadsheet day! Because there ain't no party like an Excel party

Tim99 Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: lotus

I had a colleague who took all of the 1,2,3 functions seriously:-

1 - Spreadsheet - Yes that's what we bought it for.

2 - Database - Sigh, it saved him having to keep logging into the Rdb/VMS database. OK until he added stuff and didn't put them back into Rdb.

3 - Wordprocessor - So he didn't have to learn WordPerfect. Yes he wrote multipage technical reports in 123 without headings, then printed multiple copies with his local small dot-matrix sprocket printer...

Your web browser running remotely in Cloudflare's cloud. That's it. That's the story

Tim99 Silver badge
Happy

Re: 1990s called

Before that, Novell was OK...

Google won’t let Australia have shiny new toys unless it picks apart pay-for-news plan

Tim99 Silver badge
Joke

If you weren’t an AC

You could have used the Joke icon >>======>

BOFH: Rome, I have been thy soldier 40 years... give me a staff of honour for mine age

Tim99 Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: Thats my first guffaw in delight for a while.

Yes, but only because we have no teeth...

Tim99 Silver badge
Angel

Re: Thats my first guffaw in delight for a while.

Dark chocolate digestives are good, so are milk chocolate digestives. With old age comes wisdom, Grasshopper - Normal McVities digestives are better.

Death of the PC? Do me a favour, says Lenovo bigwig: 'I'm expecting the biggest growth in a decade... for 2021'

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Re: I think Lenovo is right

There is a useable NIX OS for the corporate desktop. IBM use two. I posted this earlier:-

———-

...At the end of 2019 they (IBM) had ~290,000 Apple devices of which ~200,000 use macOS. At the same time they had 383,800 employees, obviously some employees will use more than one device. I have a relative who is a very senior IBM techie who told me that in his (large) part of IBM far more techies use Linux than Windows - He was also of the opinion that a number of IBMers elected to go to Apple rather than move from Windows 7 to 10.

According to IBM, Mac users cost less to support with about 1/3 of the support personnel and are generally happier and more productive.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/ibm-cio-mac-users-perform-better-more-engaged-than-windows-users/

https://www.jamf.com/resources/press-releases/ibm-announces-research-showing-mac-enables-greater-productivity-and-employee-satisfaction-at-ibm/

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/IBM/ibm/number-of-employees

————

OK - MS Office runs on OSX but not on Linux, but I’ve suspected for some time that MS really, really, wants more punters to use the web "friendly" Office 365 in a browser, and they themselves are now using some of their traditional back-end products like SQL Server on Linux. With the expected rise of ARM chips, perhaps there isn’t so much future for the traditional Windows PC?

A freshly formed English council waves £18m at UK tech industry, asks: Can somebody design and run pretty much everything for us?

Tim99 Silver badge

Standard?

It must be a standard set of requirements by now... My late father was the Treasurer to our (smallish) local authority. 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. 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.

We couldn't deliver prisoner rehab plans because Sopra Steria ballsed up our IT, Interserve tells High Court

Tim99 Silver badge
Facepalm

Oh dear,

Some commentators seem to think that the main purpose of these projects is to get working systems that are able to do a job. Sorry people, it isn't - The main purpose is to shovel large amounts of taxpayers' money to a government's friends - If it "sort of works" it's an unexpected bonus. If it works well someone probably failed - It's hard to ask for even more money to patch up something that does the job...

Apple seeks damages from recycling firm that didn't damage its devices: 100,000 iThings 'resold' rather than broken up as expected

Tim99 Silver badge
Gimp

Re: Sickening

Er, you mean like this: Apple refurbished website.

What a Hancock-up: Excel spreadsheet blunder blamed after England under-reports 16,000 COVID-19 cases

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: VBA implicated yet?

"on error resune next" <> "on error resuMe next" - Unless that was on purpose?

Big IQ play from IT outsourcer: Can't create batch files if you can't save files. Of any kind

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Not a pipe

Or perhaps ‘>>’ that way it would append to the (existing) file as well as creating it...

There ain't no problem that can't be solved with the help of American horsepower – even yanking on a coax cable

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Closest I've had to that ....

Back in the day, the approved version was BFBI - Brute Force and Bloody Ignorance.

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: 45 degree electricians

What he’d do with the couple of quid he’d saved on cable; or the next job where he'd use the "saved" cable?

It's 2020, so let's just go ahead and let Amazon have everyone's handprints so it can process payments

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Hey Amazon

Not on the right side of the pond.

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

The Mark of the Beast?

So, the handprint and forehead references were probably intentional?

'John of Patmos - Revelation: 13 (King James Version)' : "... And he doeth great wonders, so that he maketh fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men" (Blue Origin?) ... "And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name".

I don't suppose we'll find that in the Washington Post.

Apple, Epic trade barbs in App Store brouhaha while judge pins July for jury time

Tim99 Silver badge
Joke

Re: Apple and Google Business Models

OK, we get it - Somebody makes you use an iPhone 11 and you are not happy about it. Can I suggest a refurbished Nokia 8210? You can get them on Amazon for a couple of hundred dollars...

SAP S/4HANA rollout at Queensland Health went so well that hospitals bent over backwards to avoid using it

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Lack of training on the new ERP system seems to have been at the heart of the problems.

Partial invoices - About 15 years ago the customer using our SQL Server based system that we had written for them as a franchiser (and including local systems for their franchisees) "suddenly remembered", just as I was leaving for lunch on Friday, that they needed partial invoicing and the ability to accept a single (partial) payment that could be applied to several invoices. As I recall, it needed a new field in one table and three in another, an extra pick box that also showed the relevant invoices sorted by date descending with Yes/No boxes, a check that all of the payment had been allocated, and that any invoice that was fully/partially paid was receipted with the relevant outstanding balances, a couple of triggers, and a new report. I had it working and tested on dummy data by Monday evening and implemented by Tuesday lunchtime. Two weeks later, they asked if they could roll back some of the paid/partially paid invoices so that they could reallocate the payments to new invoices - That only took another day, as I suspected that they might need it, and had set up the fields to accept a rollback. I’m probably not a genius, and the franchiser's turnover was "only" about $70 million a year, but...

No - They didn’t pay me for it as they had a service contract that I reallocated, but their MD did take me out for a nice lunch.

All those ‘teleworking is the new normal’ predictions? Not so much, say bosses

Tim99 Silver badge

Middle-management needs people to manage?

Senior management/CEO level may be more amenable. A senior Australian banker was quoted as saying that CIVID had made them realize that the business really didn’t need a large tower block in the CBD housing thousands of employees.

Frames per second? Windows Terminal brings back text animation with the VT100 blink

Tim99 Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: I'll take a pass

Yes, took about 4 months. Typical UK Public Service purchase embargo/cock-up. The instrument was covered by one bill that was signed off; but between the Data System being specced/quote agreed and the final purchase order being sent, the Department ran out of money so it was deferred to the next period.

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: I'll take a pass

Our original kit was a magnetic-sector mass spectrometer with a capillary gas chromatograph. To start with we had no data system at all, so it used an oscilloscope, oscillograph and a 3 order 3 pen chart recorder. After a few weeks the manufacturer lent us a Nova 3C with a removable Phoenix drive while we got the funding for “our” data system sorted out.

Tim99 Silver badge
Gimp

Re: I'll take a pass

When D9 serial ports started to disappear, I found that most of the problems were *from* USB serial ports. Now I'm retired, most of my time spent on a "modern un*x" machine" is in an iMac CLI, so if the GUI does go TITSUP, I'm probably stuffed (although Target Disk Mode, or SSH from an iPad, has saved me on occasion).

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: I'll take a pass

DG stuff was generally OK - It made a change from rooms full of PDPs. The main reason we had them was because they were a "standard" for control and data acquisition with some very expensive analytical kit. As a price guide, an earlier instrument had a Nova 4 with a Winchester, tape and floppies for ~£50,000. The instrument it connected to was ~£400,000. By the mid-1990s, the data system was PC based, and cost at most £5,000 - The instrument's technology had changed and they were ~£150,000. Today something that "does the job" much more reliably, and with better performance, costs about £90,000 "all up". So allowing for inflation, the current stuff is about 450/(90/3)=15 times cheaper (Still a lot more expensive than Moores Law suggests - Because much of the kit is still fairly large, has precision engineering and low production runs).

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Re: I'll take a pass

Yep, I loved the VT220. The later 320 was neater and took up less space on the desk. I still remember how we thought the 330 with 4010 graphics looked better and was "cheap" compared with the Wyse/Tektronix kit at the time. Eventually most of them were replaced by IBM AT/PS2s with terminal emulation software. I think the only "terminal" that I bought after that was included with a Data General DG30, but the DG30 included an Intel Board with a custom version of PC-DOS that could be run in parallel.

Oracle adds Arm-powered servers with up to 160 cores to its cloud – must be why it sunk millions into Ampere

Tim99 Silver badge
Trollface

Snark

..."an order of magnitude of cost savings" - It might be 2 orders of magnitude, but we do need to keep our margins up...

Microservices guru says think serverless, not Kubernetes: You don't want to manage 'a towering edifice of stuff'

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

Re: Well managed on-prem vs. the "normal" "normal"

..." works almost every day"... Snark...

>>===> Mine has a draft of "My career, 50 years at the bleeding edge" in the pocket.

Tim99 Silver badge
Trollface

Aternatively

For 90%+ of the businesses out there...

How about two nice big hardware boxes (and an additional spare) located wherever you like? One with OpenBSD and relayd/httpd (and Python?) - Connected to the other running PostgreSQL on OpenBSD. Before I retired, my consultancy rate for something like that would have given you a nice report with lots of pretty graphs, and sufficient management-speak to look good for $10,000.00. I would even have worn a jacket and tie for some customers. Training would have been at my "bargain rate" (say another $25,000.00). A couple of jobs a year, plus ongoing consultancy; a few odds and ends; and plenty of time on the beach, or in the coffee shop - Sorted.

Cheap at twice the price :-) OK, an exaggeration, but not that much of one for the 90%+...

Second lockdown? Perfect time to unveil Teams Breakout rooms and another ginormitor – the 85-inch Surface Hub 2S

Tim99 Silver badge
Meh

Or, if you want a '4K Touchscreen Monitor', from say Dell, the prices are: 55" - £642; 70" - £2,201; and 86" - £5,519. So how big does it need to be?

Halloween approaches and the veil between worlds wears thin – the Windows 10 October 2020 Release walks among us

Tim99 Silver badge
Gimp

Re: Windows update

I now only run one machine with Windows 10 on it - It's in a Parallels VM on an iMac - It gets used about twice a month, about the same as an XP VM with some old shrink-wrap I wrote before I retired...

Tim99 Silver badge
Trollface

FTFY

This being preview code^Windows 10, there remained a long list of issues that could catch out the unwary. Office apps might crash or disappear, and the install process could hang for extended periods of time. Certainly, we found this one a little on the flaky side...

Surprise! Apple launches iOS 14 today, and developers were given just 24 hours' notice

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: huh

And, I did the reverse...

I have a theory, going back to at least Xtree Gold and Norton Commander, that for most users whatever they try first is "right", and whatever they try later is "wrong".

Apple takes another swing at Epic, says Unreal Engine could be a 'trojan horse' threatening security

Tim99 Silver badge
Trollface

Re: Did Google back off?

Nice (online) business you've got there. Shame if something was to happen to it, like not being able to be found with a search engine...

If you're modernizing your complex database stack and keep glancing at better storage, you're not alone

Tim99 Silver badge
Trollface

Equipment?

".. that are considered to be too old or not up to the job, there was a clear correlation with negative factors such as poor performance and availability issues" - So, not much to do with replacing experienced in-house operators with children, outsourced from wherever the outsourcer can make the most money, then?

Typical '80s IT: Good idea leads to additional duties, without extra training or pay, and a nuked payroll system

Tim99 Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: Remember floppy disks?

I had a colleague who told me that 3.5s would never take over from 5.25s "because they weren't reliable enough" - I pointed out that at least people wouldn't staple them to their covering letters - Then I showed him what I thought the real killer of 5.25s was likely to be: I put a 3.5 in my shirt pocket...

Tim99 Silver badge
Meh

Re: We make backups ...

There is no such thing as a backup, only a restore. Our SOP was to rename a large, but not critical file on the host, and then restore it from the backup - If it restored, the BUP might be OK - Now take another backup on different media...

Ireland unfriends Facebook: Oh Zucky Boy, the pipes, the pipes are closing…from glen to US, and through the EU-side

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: "does this prevent people accessing it from the US? "

I know I'm an old fart when someone reminds me that I have written "agendum" when I was the Board Secretary for a charity - I referred to a singular item on the agenda - Yes, I'm the one who started the datum thread...

IBM repays millions to staff after messing up its own payroll

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Odd practice..

Yep, and some businesses "restructure" your job before long service is due, and magically your position disappears and you are retrenched. They have to pay out pro-rata though...