* Posts by Tim99

2000 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2008

If you're despairing at staff sharing admin passwords, look on the bright side. That's CIA-grade security

Tim99 Silver badge
Happy

Re: Numpties, the lot of 'em.

It’s usually described as mathematics, physics, chemistry, engineering...

Not so nice, we investigated them twice: EU opens double whammy of inquiries into Apple's biz practices

Tim99 Silver badge
Trollface

Re: I don’t quite understand this

So, depending on where you are in the world, you probably abused Copyright and are possibly subject to criminal prosecution as well as a civil claim?

Don't like Mondays? Neither does Microsoft 364's Outlook Exchange Online service

Tim99 Silver badge
Trollface

Or they might just have kept you/IT out of the loop and used “social media”...

Someone got so fed up with GE fridge DRM – yes, fridge DRM – they made a whole website on how to bypass it

Tim99 Silver badge

Yes you are right. Mandarins were the bureaucracy, I structured my rule of thumb, because military positions of authority were also Mandarins - Military Mandarin Ranks went from Field Marshalls/Generals down to Corporals/1&2Class Privates. As you know, Party committees are embedded in almost all state bodies, as well as most private and state companies. So, in a similar way to the structures of the Imperial past; when the administrative, bureaucratic and leadership functions for the military were generally controlled by Mandarins; the party permeates nearly everything.

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Advertent FUD

Yes, sorry. I’m a Chartered Chemist - It was a very sloppily constructed sentence. Dry black tea contains about 30mg/g of tannins (often expressed as tannic acid equivalent), of which only a trace amount is free tannic acid. I expect that I hadn’t drunk enough caffeinated beverages before I posted...

Tim99 Silver badge
Big Brother

You might find it difficult to deal with any large Chinese company that is not backed by the military. I have a working theory that China is relatively stable because they just replaced the Emperor, Court, and Mandarins with the General Secretary, The Party, and The Military...

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Advertent FUD

The BRITA type filters also do a pretty good job of removing Pb and Cu which may come from plumbing - Pb is now unusual, but can come from poor quality modern brass fittings. If you are a tea drinker, these filters will remove Fe and tannic acid which form a dark coloured scum on the surface of tea. Iron tannates are the main ingredient of most inks that were used in Europe for about 1500 years.

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Next great idea

Then came modern, stainless steel blades that lasted far longer...

What blades do you use? After about 50 years (on and off) of using safety razors, I use Feather blades. They are the best I have tried, and give an excellent shave without cuts/soreness; but still only last a week (Mon-Wed, one side; Thu-Sat the other; Sunday, no shave or both sides - Cost about £0.30 each).

IBM blames 'external' network provider, incorrect routing, traffic flood for its two-hour cloud outage

Tim99 Silver badge
Trollface

IBM

Not to do with replacing expensive people who knew stuff with children then?

Frenchman scores €50k compensation for suffering 'bore-out' at work after bosses gave him 'menial' tasks

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Sooo....

When I was in the (Scientific) Civil Service we had "mobile" and non-mobile" grades. A non-mobile grade was usually at a low level; and if your job disappeared, a similar one was found within a reasonable commuting distance. If you were "Established" in a mobile position and you upset someone, an unpleasant job many miles away could be found for you. It was known that some people took the punishment, worked hard and eventually were rehabilitated - Others resigned.

MacOS on Arm talk intensifies: Just weeks from now, Apple to serve up quarantini with Kalamata golive, reportedly

Tim99 Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: Kalamata

When I buy the pit-less most of the flavour goes away as well...

As UK Parliament heads back to in-person voting, select committees are told they can continue working via Zoom

Tim99 Silver badge

Not necessarily environmental. I emigrated to Oz 20+ years ago, and am appalled at the UK.Coronavirus deaths - 8 June 2020:-

Country... / ...Deaths... / ... Population... / ... Deaths/million

Australia... / ... 102 ... / ... 25m... / ... 4

New Zealand... / ... 22... / ... 4.9m... / ... 4.5

United Kingdom... / ... 42000+... / ... 68m... / ... 620

Deaths/million to 2 significant figures. Note: Australia is mostly an urban population (~ 2/3rds live in capital cities and >1/2 of the rest live in towns/cities), and Australia also had until our lock-down a lot of immigration and travel between Asia and Europe.

It is almost unbelievable that so few in the press/media seem to be doing their job. Apparently a lot of the Tory/Brexit mind-set still bangs on about WW2 - My late parents both served in the RAF, my father as aircrew, and I know that they would have been very angry about what has happened to the country of my birth. The UK Government has by its policy actions/inactions killed more British civilians than the Luftwaffe. I am truly fearful for you if/when a No Deal Brexit happens, in what is looking like a World-wide recession. I suspect that for most the outcome could, at best, be extremely uncomfortable and could well be a catastrophe.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes: UK man gets 3 years for torching 4G phone mast over 5G fears

Tim99 Silver badge
Childcatcher

Re: It's a shame...

Er, governments really don’t want their populations to be capable of critical thinking - Particularly those that rely on populist propaganda to stay in power...

Office supplies biz owned by UK council shrugs off ransomware demand for 102 Bitcoin

Tim99 Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: Good!

"Backups" are useless - Its a successful restore that's required.

Amateur astroboffins spot young brown dwarf playing with planet-forming hula hoop just 102 parsecs from Earth

Tim99 Silver badge
Boffin

Confusing units in article

I think Richard meant about 1.05 x 10^31 double-decker buses...

Home Office waves a cool £1bn to outsource handling of British visa, citizenship applications

Tim99 Silver badge
Unhappy

A failed State?

Perhaps a sign of this is when a government outsources the basics like who is a citizen and who can enter the country to an outside group without direct Ministerial or Departmental oversight...

Trump issues toothless exec order to show donors, fans he's doing something about those Twitter twerps

Tim99 Silver badge
Flame

Re: Simple Response.

Or, perhaps, chlorine trifluoride (Wikipedia)? >>=====>

Apple promises third, no, fourth, er, fifth time's a charm when it comes to macOS Catalina: 10.15.5 now out

Tim99 Silver badge
Trollface

Re: Bizzarely

I've not had any problems either. I'm an old fart who uses it as a zsh and GUI Desktop system on an iMac. My battery is a nice big UPS. If I need to go away from the desk I use an iPad Pro - I drank the special beverage and bought two expensive toys...

Hooray! It's IT Day! Let's hear it for the lukewarm mugs of dirty water that everyone seems to like so much

Tim99 Silver badge
Boffin

Re: ISO 3103

Yep, one of the most useful things (to show to the uninitiated) I got out of the RSC in 40+ years of membership.

Tim99 Silver badge

Wot, instead of adding milk? Sounds good...

We really doing this again? Rumour has it that Apple is nearly finished developing augmented-reality glasses

Tim99 Silver badge
Big Brother

Re: Name?

Thanks for the reminder: Glassholes indeed...

A real loch mess: Navy larks sunk by a truculent torpedo

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Of course it was going to hit the boat!

Thank you for the memory, although it has reminded me just how damn old I am. I constructed a small balsa-wood/doped-tissue glider in ~1960 which actually worked. I was given a Jetex motor as a birthday present and tried it out. Yes, I noticed that the steel casing was nearly red hot after a static test firing - No, I didn't think that suspending the motor from near the glider's midpoint with wire was a "bad idea". Surprisingly it flew reasonably well for a few yards before landing, the wire bent; and of course, it caught fire. It was quite exciting, and might be one reason why my first "proper" job was with HMG as an explosives/propellants chemist...

Apple's MagicPairing for Bluetooth fails to enchant after mischief-making bugs found hiding in the stack

Tim99 Silver badge
Trollface

So

The misspellings are because those coders are twenty-somethings who have received the benefits of modern education systems? Some of whom could have English as a second language (although it's quite possible their spelling may be better)? The "checking" might be done by a thirty-something with a similar education who has had longer to develop bad habits?

If it feels like the software world is held together by string and a prayer, we don't blame you: Facebook SDK snafu breaks top iOS apps

Tim99 Silver badge
Facepalm

Oh dear

App makers can add the Facebook SDK to their apps to use Facebook's Login system as a single sign-on provider, to access its analytics service, to get social graph data associated with the app user, to implement deep linking to content within the app, and to utilize Facebook mobile ads

Surely, they could have earnt a more honest living? An update of old saw "I told my mother I play the piano in a brothel, I didn't want her to know that I'm a developer that used Facebook's Login" could apply.

MongoDB and Rockset link arms to figure out SQL-to-NoSQL application integration

Tim99 Silver badge
Trollface

I’ve posted this before

MongoDB gained popularity in the mid-2010s within web applications by helping to provide personalised content without developers worrying too much about database schema

This still applies (NSFW- YouTube): MongoDB is web scale Sigh. Just Learn SQL...

Spyware slinger NSO to Facebook: Pretty funny you're suing us in California when we have no US presence and use no American IT services...

Tim99 Silver badge
Big Brother

Re: But..

I have always maintained that a clever government agency that wanted to keep tabs on it's entire population would have invented Faecebook.

Perhaps they were just building upon their existing systems? Try searching with DuckDuckGo for 'google nsa cia start'.

Obviously you don't want to use Google as the search tool >>========>

As Brit cyber-spies drop 'whitelist' and 'blacklist', tech boss says: If you’re thinking about getting in touch saying this is political correctness gone mad, don’t bother

Tim99 Silver badge

Way back in time, two common inks were red and black - Black inks go back to prehistory, red (HgS) inks were certainly around 2000 years ago. Both of these inks were "permanent". Early 20thC typewriters could have dual colour red/black ribbons and were often used for accounts.

Square peg of modem won't fit into round hole of PC? I saw to it, bloke tells horrified mate

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: ain't no problem in the world that can't be solved with hot-snot

... or cyanoacrylate Superglue? I forgot to mention a set of 6 medium & small Halford's double open-ended metric and imperial spanners (purchased in the 1970s).

Tim99 Silver badge
Meh

Re: ain't no problem in the world that can't be solved with hot-snot

In the late 80s I purchased a basic tool kit from one of the first IKEA UK stores. It contains a medium and large flat-blade, and a medium Philips screwdriver; an imperial/metric steel measure with spirit-level; a medium claw hammer; a (sharp) knife and sheath; a pair of pliers; and a Bradawl. Since I retired they are about the only tools I use - With a couple of essentials, like a junior hacksaw; power drill; punch down and cable stripper; side cutters; medium molegrips, large adjustable spanner; socket set; and a jewellers/pentalobe screwdriver set. The soldering kit went along with the failing eyesight. As others have posted: WD40 (although for some uses, like locks and hinges, a dry-film spray can is better) and gaffer tape (and electricians, and plumbers tape).

When I think of the (hundreds?) of tools I have purchased over 50+ years, I realized that most of them were just toys that looked attractive but were not very useful...

Elevating cost-cutting to a whole new level with million-dollar bar bills

Tim99 Silver badge

Lifts

I posted this last year:-

In the 1990s one of our customers moved to new larger premises as their business expanded. They had started with a single computer, and then a small 10BASE-2 network with the cable carefully snaked around their main office (tied to ceiling panels, run under carpet edges etc.). Our software ran on a small server in the corner. Fortunately we had persuaded them to install network cards with both 10BASE-2 and 10BASE-T connectors as we knew that they had bought land to build new premises. A couple of years later we were asked to help move the network to the new building that they had built themselves (they were in the building trade).

They had build a small comms room under the stairs with a couple of 19" rack slots and square section steel drainpipe conduits down the wall for the cabling. We bought them a 16 port switch to temporarily connect two computers in the reception areas, and a new server placed under the receptionists desk. We moved the software to the new server - It worked. The owner said that the "proper" cabling was being installed over the weekend next week (Yes, AFTER the building was built), and asked us to move the server and switch to the comms room on the Friday after they closed.

On Monday they phoned us and said that nothing was working and we needed to be there. When we got there they said that it must have been us moving the server that broke everything as no-one could log-on. After faffing about for a while we realised that it must be the cabling. I disconnected all of the wiring to the switch except for the server and connected the nearest reception computer with a 10m ethernet cable - The receptionist could log in. After experimenting we found that a couple of users in nearby rooms could also log in, but when we connected up the others everything stopped working. We got blamed for recommending the fancy new networking when the old coax stuff "had worked fine". I made up a ~30m cable and ran it from the switch, up the stairwell, to the bosses office in the upstairs corner of the building - He could log on, when we connected "their" cabling he couldn't.

I asked who had done the cabling - It was his brother in law, who "knows what he is doing, he's an electrician". Oh dear, the conduiting went past the wiring and motor for the lift and the main air-con unit. We pulled one cable and saw that the sheathing was damaged where he had pulled it through the metal conduit. The business owner got a mate's brother, who's business was actually cabling, to rewire it properly. They earthed the metal conduit and ran lengths of ABS piping down it from the top and put labelled patch panels in at the top and bottom. I suspect that the brother in law didn't get paid.

The rumor that just won't die: Apple to keep Intel at Arm's length in 2021 with launch of 'A14-powered laptops'

Tim99 Silver badge
Meh

Re: The rumor needs to die before the Macintosh does.

"What they don't realize is that killing the Mac WILL eventually kill Apple." You didn't get the memo? Most of the real world is using their phones and the Internet to get "real work" done (some have tablets too) .

The PC model, that we are used to, is a vital tool for clerical support work/administrators/mid-level managers; but unfortunately their jobs are disappearing extremely rapidly. PCs might be left with the niche work of "developing" and serious multitasking between multiple windows (I don't see too many people doing that much these days either). However, I could be wrong...

Tim99 Silver badge
Gimp

I'm an edge case - I run (very occasionally) Windows 10 in a Parallels VM on an iMac with 16GB RAM and an SSD; it takes about 15 seconds from a cold start to get to a responsive desktop, which seems to be as good as many of the Intel PCs I see.

The main reason for me running Parallels is that I still have old stuff that I have written that runs in DOS, Win XP, and Win 2000 VMs, and "one of these days" in my retiree lockdown I might consider updating/porting some of it to something more modern.

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Re: How about both?

Yep, some of our admin/clerical staff were issued them in the 80's. As I recall some of the "PC Compatible" mainline shrink-wrap either wouldn't run properly, or had to be ordered specially. They were soon replaced by vanilla PCs. It could have been worse, many of the technical staff were issued DEC Professionals running POS (There's an appropriate name), the people who could benefit really wanted PDP11s or MicroVAXen. Typists got DECmates running WPS, which were quickly replaced by PCs running DEC WPS Plus.

All of this was just in time for Windows to come along and replace almost everything. I thought that at the time this was a shame as the various versions of WPS and DEC ALL-IN-1 offered pretty good integration of file sharing, word processing, terminal emulation, timekeeping, and data access (For the time, particularly compared to Windows/DOS).

A paper clip, a spool of phone wire and a recalcitrant RS-232 line: Going MacGyver in the wonderful world of hotel IT

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Proper lash up

Yep, it worked on a Hardy Perfection 9ft that I had. The "permanent” fix was to rub the male ferrule with 6B pencil lead.

Australia to make Google and Facebook disclose ranking algorithms and pay for local content

Tim99 Silver badge
Trollface

Of course

If it got too expensive, Alphabet could just set up their own news service...

SE's baaaack: Apple flings out iPhone SE 2020, priced at £419

Tim99 Silver badge
Trollface

I'm sure we can fix that Sir. Leave the phone behind with our cellular watch.

IBM age discrimination lawsuit suddenly ends, suggests Big Blue was willing to pay to avoid discovery process

Tim99 Silver badge
Boffin

Re: @cschneid

Back in the day, the Civil Service had "Special Merit" promotions, where someone could be appointed to a higher grade and still carry out the work they had done at a lower grade. Usually these were engineer/scientist boffin types who did not have to do the normal admin/bureaucratic stuff that was expected at the higher grade. As I recall this was available up to Senior Principal level (roughly between NATO Code 5 & 6).

Absolutely everyone loves video conferencing these days. Some perhaps a bit too much

Tim99 Silver badge
Unhappy

Back in the day, I had users who loaded images from their digital cameras, then copy/pasted them into an empty Word document to email or print them...

COBOL-coding volunteers sought as slammed mainframes slow New Jersey's coronavirus response

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: How systems were all too often documented in the 60s and 70s

Commented code: A post of 2 years ago - My experience 35 years ago...

'We use to run projects based on the "Rule of Two":-

Write code be twice as easy to understand than the team is capable of producing. Never put two or more expressions in the same line. Never write a function that addresses two or more business rules. Always write at least two lines of documentation for every function (Or, even every line of code). Always wait for at least version two of the tools that you are going to use to put software into a production environment. Stop writing code at two o'clock in the afternoon, then use the next two hours to check it (Then, if necessary, have a meeting about it - Which will be short because everyone wants to go home/down the pub).'

Watch: Rare Second World War footage of Bletchley Park-linked MI6 intelligence heroes emerges, shared online

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Thank you, El Reg

Before The Manhattan Project: The UK Tube Alloys programme - (Wikipedea Link) - Gives quite a lot of the early background.

Official: Office 365 Personal, Home axed next month... and replaced by Microsoft 365 cloud subscriptions

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Re: Aduntgeddit

So they can include Windows?

Microsoft staff giggle beneath the weight of a 52,000-person Reply-All email storm

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Exchange killed by ~20 users

Over 10 years ago I was a volunteer Board member for a charity. They had an MS Small Business Server that ran Exchange/IIS/SQL/PDC etc. I was asked to "keep an eye on the IT" as they had nobody trained up for it. The person who had been asked to run it on a day-to-day basis managed to kill it by cleverly breaking their multimedia PowerPoint presentation into a number off smaller bits (<10MB?) and sending it to only about 20 users, asking them to make any changes they thought necessary. As the 20 were Managers, trainers, or Board members all of them (except me) had an input. So within a couple of days of Reply All, each mail message went to everyone with each individuals' changes to each bit of the presentation. Exchange fell over when it ran out of space on its disk. The disk that was normally used to repair/truncate/pack Exchange was not big enough -So when I tried to fix it it crashed. The fix was obvious - Add a bigger disk - The only problem was that our vender had supplied a "proper" IBM Server with SCSI drives and our local supply chain didn't have any, so we had 2 weeks of people using their personal email accounts...

Two years late, but upgrade wave finally washes a billion folk onto Windows 10 as its Android phone waits in the wings

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Re: How many chose to buy it?

MS, back in the days, is one reason why I look like this >=======>

Some of us thought that XP was a just a borked 2000. The very idea - A Playdough interface and plug-and-pray pasted on quite a pleasant stable (for Microsoft) OS. Even cutting down the screen overload with Classic mode did not help that much.

Control is only an illusion, no matter what you shove on the Netware share

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

BootPROM

For light admin and word processing for groups of up to 10 users we used NetWare servers with networked diskless PCs that got their DOS images from bootPROMs. Bit slow at 8:30 when everybody started up, but not too bad after that. A couple of bean counter admin types thought that they would be OK for shared database work with Windows 286, they weren’t. So everybody who was affected had their PCs upgraded with a 10MB hard drive. Then we had the fun of getting users to save their work onto their servers. They didn’t...

Tinfoil hat brigade switches brand allegiance to bog paper

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Copper foil

Cupronickel, bronze, and brass surfaces as bactericides can be almost as effective as copper; many of these alloys kill bacteria quite quickly, usually in a couple of hours. There is evidence that they work with a number of viruses too. Stainless steel is generally ineffective - Live bacteria can remain for a week or so.

Chips that pass in the night: How risky is RISC-V to Arm, Intel and the others? Very

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Maybe we have been here before.

In the 1980s I remember two types of chips that were going to "revolutionize" science and engineering applications: One was RISC based - The other was the Transputer. I spent a bit of time with them both, and we even bought expensive kit that used them. I think that they died because neither could run off-the-shelf WinTel/DOS business/general software for (clones of) the IBM-PC.

Sadly, the web has brought a whole new meaning to the phrase 'nothing is true; everything is permitted'

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Some people lie, some people cheat, ...

"Because it's the public order they're worried about most, then violent crime, then everything else." You might hope so, but from my experience it's more like: Public order, crimes against rich/important people (particularly involving them being deprived of large amounts of money), violent crime, low level drugs; and then if you are lucky, the rest.

Tim99 Silver badge

Sometimes, just sometimes, it is genuine. I was waiting in the lounge between changing aircraft in Dubai when I got an email telling me that a friend was stuck in hospital in Bali and needed money to get home, as his insurer had declined the claim. Before I left home, I had seen him on TV two nights before, with his wife at his bedside in a story about the failure of insurance cover. The good news was that when I logged into the linked website there was a message from his daughter to say that the insurers had agreed to fly him home, and that they didn't now need the money (Obviously nothing to do with the unfavourable publicity from being shown on a popular TV news program two nights running).

Afterwards, I did wonder if a scammer could have set up something similar, if they had seen something like it on TV - In this case there was a photo of the daughter, and. the wife's and daughter's genuine email address, so it would probably have been alright; but maybe they could have found that out from social media?...

Have I Been S0ld? No, trusted security website HIBP off the table, will remain independent

Tim99 Silver badge
Big Brother

It seems that it was probably forced disclosure/Patriot Act: groklaw.net.

Maersk prepares to lay off the Maidenhead staffers who rescued it from NotPetya super-pwnage

Tim99 Silver badge
Unhappy

Maidenhead

Screwed, medical dictionary, and not in a good way.