* Posts by Tim99

2001 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2008

The power of Bill compels you: A server room possessed by a Microsoft-hating, Linux-loving Demon

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: This is why...

That’s a (wire-)wrap.

DPL: Debian project has plenty of money but not enough developers

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Trollface

Oh dear

Would it help if the removed systemd?

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

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

Datum...

As promised, Apple will now entertain suggestions from the hoi polloi on how it should run its App Store

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Re: hoi polloi

OK this is 4 days old and won't be seen - "octapodi"?

UK utility Severn Trent tests the waters with £4.8m for SCADA monitoring and management in the clouds

Tim99 Silver badge

Hi Addie, see my self-aggrandising comment above. I liked and upvoted your post, but I suspect that I am more cynical than most, and I believe that my cynicism has been earned - Including being the senior chemist who did the analysis when ST was prosecuted by the relevant authority when THEY had polluted a major system (Admittedly that was before privatisation in 1989, I suspect that things have not necessarily improved).

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Please tell me

I’m a Chartered Chemist, and also have a strong background in IT. In for 25 of the last 50 years have specialized in water and environmental analysis, including for a national authority, and am a volunteer technical assessor for ISO17025. My comment still stands.

Tim99 Silver badge
Facepalm

Please tell me

That a highly trained human being has to sit in front of the controls of the treatment plants, and only the human is allowed to Control the treatment plant.

Samsung reveals new folding stuff for people who like flaunting wads of folding stuff

Tim99 Silver badge
Gimp

Er, no

I'm not even a moderately dedicated fanboy, but I am moderately monied, and there is no way Samsung is going to pry my iPhone from my hands with that...

Happy birthday to the Nokia 3310: 20 years ago, it seemed like almost everyone owned this legendary mobile

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

Re: I'll See Your 33xx and Lower You

I'm sure that the cool adults like me had an 82 series. It was small enough not to ruin the lines of our cool clothes when kept in the pocket.

I'll get it myself, thank you >>=========>

Funny, that: Handy script for wiping directories is capable of wreaking havoc beyond a miscreant's wildest dreams

Tim99 Silver badge
Facepalm

I’ve done it.

And so has everybody who has worked in IT for a few decades, particularly when one of the customer's senior manglement lusers insists on "doing it now".

But my personal favourite was when I was asked to delete customer order data from the previous year in a live SQL database - I knew that a cascade delete would also run on the orderdetails table because I had designed the database. Obviously I checked that they had a backup (from the night before) and what was going to be deleted with a: SELECT COUNT(*) AS NumOrders FROM Orders WHERE OrderDate < "01/01/1999" - Then the phone rang as I was copying part of the line, just before I was about to paste it into a new command that I had started with DELETE FROM Orders - About fifteen minutes later I pasted what I thought I had stored in the paste buffer, just as the manglement luser came in and pestered. The paste added only the semicolon, but I still pressed [Enter] - The statement was therefore "DELETE FROM Orders;". Fortunately I was able to roll it back from the transaction log in spite of their system admin's new policy of saving storage space by truncating logs before they "got too big"...

Relying on plain-text email is a 'barrier to entry' for kernel development, says Linux Foundation board member

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: That way, I know roughly what it will look like at "their" end.

If you are ever tempted to try sending plain text again, can I suggest no line breaks except at the end of paragraphs? Using a double break is usually OK, single breaks do seem to get mangled...

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Is setting up a non-shitty email client really that hard?

People who’s browser often displays pornography?

Tim99 Silver badge
Gimp

Re: Is setting up a non-shitty email client really that hard?

Sorry, this is probably because I’m a grouchy old fart - My Apple Mail is configured to always reply in plain text. That way, I know roughly what it will look like at "their" end. I did this (to keep what little mental capacity I have left) after seeing what my emails looked like when they came back via a long chain of additional comments and replies where each author had used "whatever" platform. Many people now use their phones for almost all of this - I put in a feedback request to Apple to give me a similar option on iOS, but no luck there - My workaround is to copy/paste everything in/out of txt4ios or QuickText before sending it.

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Re: Where's the IT content?

Microsoft... The joys of receiving an unreadable Mail Attachment.eml on a “standard” email client after a couple of “standard” attachments have been routed through a couple of different corporate Outlook/Exchange systems...

Be very afraid! British Army might scrap battle tanks for keyboard warriors – report

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

Re: I want one.

Not sure, but some might find the colour and chrome-work offensive?

Tim99 Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: Soldiers versus gunships

Sorry, autocorrect on a tablet...

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Think of the complexity

Or Arthur C Clarke’s "Superiority"? Although it should be stated that the main purpose of complex and expensive weapons systems is actually to channel large amounts of taxpayer’s money to a very few of the "right sort" of rich people...

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Soldiers versus gunships

The British came fairly close by using just aircraft and a very limited ground force when "policing" Somaliland, and later Mesopotamia Wikipedia link. It is possible that the relatively cheap use of effective air power, rather than troops on the ground, was also behind Churchill’s Statement in a War Office meeting (Wikipedia) where he considering the use of dropping tear-gas from aircraft.

Epic move: Judge says Apple can't revoke Unreal Engine dev tools, asks 'Where does the 30% come from?'

Tim99 Silver badge
Big Brother

Re: Switching to Android

As far as we know, snooping is not their main business - People pay a very large amount of cash to Apple for their iPhondlers - Who pays Google? Advertisers and snoopers...

SQLite maximum database size increased to 281TB – but will anyone need one that big?

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: How is that possible ?

Yes it’s a bug. The workaround is something like:-

CREATE TABLE table_name ( ..., column_name column_type NOT NULL, ...); or

CREATE TABLE customers (customer_id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, customer_name TEXT NOT NULL UNIQUE, customer_city TEXT NOT NULL);

Tim99 Silver badge

Multiple files

Whilst you may not be able to easily split a database across multiple files, you can ATTACH multiple files and manipulate them. Example at: SQLitetutorial.net

Sun welcomes vampire dating website company: Arrgh! No! It burns! It buuurrrrnsss!

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Inappropriate garb

A very long time ago, I went for an interview with the Civil Service. I had a straggly beard, hair down to my shoulders, tended to wear Slopp shirts or pullovers, but had a decent blazer. Shaved of the beard, cut the hair so it went just below my ears, and put on the blazer with a tie. The panel was led by a middle aged man with a short frock coat and broad striped trousers, who ushered me in to meet the rest of the interviewers - They were scientists who had straggly beards, hair down to their shoulders, and were wearing pullovers... I got the job, so perhaps my attire and appearance met the average of the panel?

Australian government wants power to run cyber-response for businesses under attack

Tim99 Silver badge
Big Brother

Why aren’t I surprised?

Peter Dutton’s department. That may tell us all we "need to know" >>===>

Can't decide which OS to run today? Why not Linux inside Windows inside macOS?

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Re: Now how about OS/X in a VM?

When I did FileMaker stuff, Apple seemed OK, but Windows was borked.

Haven't used it since Version 12 though (multiuser was starting to look too expensive for my customers). I don't use it at all now - The last job with it (in 2015) was to export some historical data to SQL Server from FileMaker 6!

Tim99 Silver badge
Gimp

Upgraded it

Works for me, and does seem faster. Time to a "working" Windows 10 2004 desktop ~10 seconds from a cold start (2019 iMac Retina 4K, 16GB RAM, SSD).

Not that I use it much, but it's handy when I want to run old shrink-wrap that I have written on DOS, Windows 2000, XP etc. Devuan is OK (install it as Debian) although these days when I'm doing UNIXy stuff I tend to use the Mac Terminal. I learnt *NIX in the 70s, and as the mind is going a bit, I can remember it - Linux and Windows 10 "not so much".

Whoops, our bad, we may have 'accidentally' let Google Home devices record your every word, sound – oops

Tim99 Silver badge
Big Brother

Really?

"*may have been quietly recording* sounds around your house without your permission or authorization": Doesn’t sound like Google - Surely you meant to write "*has been quietly recording*..."?

Geneticists throw hands in the air, change gene naming rules to finally stop Microsoft Excel eating their data

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Why you don't use a spreadhseet as a database

SQLite usually works for me...

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Excel (now there’s a misnomer)

Treats the year 1900 as a leap year because Microsoft’s main aim when they introduced it, was to kill Lotus 123. Lotus (on the PC) replaced VisiCalc on the Apple II who’s epoch was 1 Jan 1904, so VisiCalc didn’t go back that far. Microsoft’s original spreadsheet Multiplan didn’t cut it, so Excel (originally introduced for the Macintosh) was rapidly promoted to run on Windows... and spreadsheet-jockeys attempt to run major business with it...

I got 99 problems, and all of them are your fault

Tim99 Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: Ever done a good deed, only to have it thrown back at you by an angry user

Only 18 months? Your friends and family probably change computers regularly - The ones I used to deal with KNOW, that for the rest of the lifetime of the equipment, ANYTHING that ever went wrong was my fault.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then we'll begin. Hang on, the PDP 11/70 has dropped offline

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Workmen

It was the Civil Service? Obviously tea is more important than computers.

Australia sues Google over data collection practices that merged DoubleClick data to create single user profiles

Tim99 Silver badge
Big Brother

Google Ethics

A county to the north-east of London?

Bill Gates debunks 'coronavirus vaccine is my 5G mind control microchip implant' conspiracy theory

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Yes, this... Have an upvote.

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Possibly QDOS; Tripod/Ruby; etc.?

It's July 2020, and your PC or Mac can be pwned by a dodgy Photoshop file – Adobe emits critical patch batch

Tim99 Silver badge

Er, no it can’t

I haven’t installed **anything** from Adobe for years...

From 'Queen of the Skies' to Queen of the Scrapheap: British Airways chops 747 fleet as folk stay at home

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Interesting Wing Arrangement (article image)

Er, port...

We just left port, with a cargo of red port wine.

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Once...

When I became an old bloated plutocrat I always tried to travel upstairs. Some aircraft had a bar up there...

UK's Co-operative Group to centralise IT teams across various divisions, warns redundancies 'inevitable'

Tim99 Silver badge
Stop

And...

In less than 10 years they restructure to a decentralized highly federated business structure, rinse, repeat... I’ve watched this happen for 40 years now.

So Darned Kind of you, Facebook: SDK bug sends popular iOS apps crashing earthwards

Tim99 Silver badge
Big Brother

Simples

Find the apps that crash, remove them, and never use them again. >>=====>

The reluctant log trawler: The buck stops with the back-end

Tim99 Silver badge

16bit

A customer used the default short-INT auto-incrementing key on a Microsoft Access table they had created to import a CSV back-up file that our software generated at month end. Obviously it was our fault when it stopped importing after 4 months when we had generated 32k rows. So a quick un-billed site visit fixed that. Were they grateful? Of course not - It was obviously our fault for not making sure that their database, that we did not know about, was "incompatible".

MariaDB inhales $25m. 'People tried to get away with simpler' but now there's a 'relational renaissance,' says open-source biz chief

Tim99 Silver badge

Overkill?

Some of the medium/smaller MySQL/MariaDB backed websites out there would work well/better with SQLite. It is also a good prototyping framework for bigger sites, as it is easy to port to PostgreSQL.

When a deleted primary device file only takes 20 mins out of your maintenance window, but a whole year off your lifespan

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Re: Sybase

I remember it as a joint venture from Sybase, Ashton-Tate, and Microsoft from 1989. It was possibly also a lesson on why companies should not partner with Microsoft. Although for Ashton-Tate their dreadful dBase IV was what probably finished them off.

LibreOffice slips out another 7.0 beta: Spreadsheets close gap with Excel while macOS users treated to new icons

Tim99 Silver badge

I use SQLite to "tidy" recalcitrant data: Command Line Shell For SQLite

Apparently the maximum database size is 140,000 gigabytes - I wouldn't know, I've only tried it with a few million rows with a hundred or so fields :-)

Hey, Boeing. Don't celebrate your first post-grounding 737 Max test flight too hard. You just lost another big contract

Tim99 Silver badge
Unhappy

airplanes

OK, Boeing is a US company, but in future please use "aeroplanes" or "aircraft".

Finally, a wafer-thin server... Only a tiny little thin one. Oh all right. Just the one...

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Do you recall the smell of burning UPSes in the morning?

Sod’s law: A previous post...

Apple gives Boot Camp the boot, banishes native Windows support from Arm-compatible Macs

Tim99 Silver badge
Gimp

Re: Hackintosh?

This is true. However at the end of 2019 they 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

Here's a headline we never thought we'd write 20 years ago: Microsoft readies antivirus for Linux, Android

Tim99 Silver badge
Trollface

Careful!

It's a trap I tell you.

Microsoft emits a colourful Windows Terminal preview

Tim99 Silver badge
Trollface

Re: it ain't json

"This is one of the reasons I just don't get this obsession over the last few years to adopt JSON everywhere for config files

So like MS had INI files in DOS-->Windows ME then? (Other than comments).

A memo from the distant future... June 2022: The boss decides working from home isn't the new normal after all

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: New Normal?

Many Geographically dispersed teams suck balls. (edit: probably after it they reaches about 2 dozen people - for really small groups it's fine) FTFY...