Posts by Tim99

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

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

Maidenhead

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

Apple drops a bomb on long-life HTTPS certificates: Safari to snub new security certs valid for more than 13 months

Re: It's optional

True, but a (significant?) portion of them who may well have money will still use Safari and go somewhere else...

Chrome deploys deep-linking tech in latest browser build despite privacy concerns

DuckDuckGo

If you really must use Google, DuckDuckGo allows the use of bangs: e.g., terms followed or preceded by !g for Google, !gi for Google images, and !w for Wikipedia. This should give some added anonymity. Because I may be paranoid, I tend to run searches through a VPN and a private DNS with an ad-blocker. Funnily enough I see almost no advertising, and the little that does get through appears not to be targeted.

C'mon SPARCky, it's just an admin utility update. What could possibly go wrong?

Some of us preferred Norton Commander. I still use its descendants including the *NIX Midnight Commander.

Microsoft and Oracle, sitting in a cloud... in-ter-ope-ra-bi-li-ty: Friends-with-benefits deal is working out nicely for both

Oh, joy!

Microsoft, Oracle, and the Cloud...

Who needs the A-Team or MacGyver when there's a techie with an SCSI cable?

Re: SCSI

No. The rule was don’t mix scanners and disks NOMATTERWHAT the relevant suppliers’ technical documents said. The use of sacrifices and incantations appearing to produce a working system was just the universe screwing with you.

Hear, hear: The first to invent idiot-cancelling headphones gets my cash

Re: Last time I traveled first class

Unfortunately, from the mid 1980s the merchant banker/ commodity trader type of passenger with his £2000+ mobile brick phone started to infect 1st class. Their conversations were mostly “Can you speak up, I’m on the train - Sorry the reception isn’t very good”. Some wanna-be wankers even bought dummy phones so they could have loud pretend conversations to try to impress with their “big deals”. The Loadsamoney meme soon followed.

Oi! You got a loicence for that Java, mate? More devs turn to OpenJDK to swerve Oracle fee

Re: How can OpenJDK etc carry on

You must have been around for a while. I realized that they were not people to do business with in 1991...

Things I learned from Y2K (pt 87): How to swap a mainframe for Microsoft Access

Re: dBase III?

Yes QB was brilliant for data acquisition. We used it on Netware/PC-LAN networks to talk to instruments. About 40 lines of code would open a file, open a serial port, download data to the file, copy the file to a "safe" folder, check that the "safe" file was OK, tell the instrument to delete the data at its end, and then close the serial port. The data file was then used to load data into a database - At the time we often used R:Base as it was about the only SQL compliant DB for the PC. This worked well for about 100 scientists/engineers on about 10 different networks. We could then merge the data into a bigger DB.

Yes. Generally it was worse, dBase IV was much worse.

(Edited icon) >>===========>

Access

Access applications could be dreadful, particularly when produced by a user to get a job done; but as usual, a bit of thought could produce a useful and stable solution. Access 97 was OK, Access 95 was dreadful. We produced a number of applications for $1million-$10million p.a. organizations. The rough rule was: Always split the application into a front-end (forms, code, and reports); and a back-end (data, relations, and rules/integrity). An Access back-end was usually OK for ~5 concurrent users and 10s of thousands of rows of data on a reliable network - For important data, or more users, or an imperfect network, replacing the back end with an MS SQL Server (V6 at the time) could produce a fast and reliable application. For Y2K we replaced several green screen mini-computer applications with Access/SQL Server systems - Typically a few hundred thousand rows and 20 concurrent users.

Originally I had been developing applications with traditional Oracle type systems; but after we prototyped something in Access for a customer with the intention of upscaling to a “proper system”, the customer said the prototype works fine so why would you do that?

We picked up quite a lot of work because most of our competitors were doing what we had been: Big databases with lots of code. Typically our prototyping took a couple of weeks with another week or so to upscale to a Server version. Having said that, the initial learning curve to get around undocumented bugs and performance issues was quite long, but I had been playing Access from version 1 and using version 2 for small systems. One reason that Access was not popular with professional developers was that it required 6-8MB of RAM when many desktops had <=4MB, but we usually quoted to upgrade the punters’ PCs and still came in cheaper than the typical MS VB-SQL/Powerbuilder shops who would quote several months for development time. I’ve been retired for a while, but the company still has many customers using updated applications with the latest versions of Access and SQL Server.

At last, the fix no one asked for: Portable home directories merged into systemd

Re: I Do Not Understand Why the Hostility Toward Systemd

I can't upvote you more than once, so have one on me >>=====>

Brits may still be struck by Lightning, but EU lawmakers vote for bloc-wide common charging rules

Re: Hopefully the UK will follow this

Yes, by a French-Dutch company Gemalto, owned by the French multinational Thales - Resulting in the British company who were previously making them, De La Rue (OK, they sound French) laying off >250 people. That may, or may not, say something about Brexit.

Thunderbird is go: Mozilla's email client lands in a new nest

Re: "Around 0.5% of emails opened in the 'bird today, apparently"

Apple clients allow you to choose to prevent loading remote (image) files. I would hope that most users would turn loading off, but these days many punters are used to webmail which usually includes all of the pretty pictures.

Take DOS, stir in some Netware, add a bit of Windows and... it's ALIIIIVE!

There is a reason why I look like this >>=======>

I still bear the scars of PC/MS-DOS V1.x (on 5150s), 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 & 7; Windows 286, 3, 3.1, 3.11, 95, 98, etc., running on NetWare/IBM/DECnet/*NIX networks.

I think the market decided it was "just good enough" or "nearly good enough" and that that was "good enough" "for now", and that MS would fix it and make it better.

Windows 3.51 was OK, but NeWare was better. Unfortunately, I won a bet with an OEM that Windows would replace NetWare (because it meant that people would think it was all "Windows" and they did not have to support two systems) even though we both thought that NetWare was "much better".

Re: Indeed.

Sounds about right. A couple of years later I ordered a 25Meg drive for a Data General Nova. I think it cost about twice what my new VW Golf cost at the time.

It was a 19" rack mount (6 or 8 U?). People came from DG to see why we were using such a large disk...

German scientists, Black Knights and the birthplace of British rocketry

Westcott's sister site, The Royal Gunpowder Mills:-

Could be a good day out for those who are interested in this sort of thing, particularly if you have children/grandchildren: Site link.

Making gunpowder on the site goes back to the C17th; which was purchased by the Crown in the C18th. By WW1 it was an import centre for manufacturing Cordite. At the start of WW2 it was the only UK manufacturer of the "modern" explosive RDX, and significant research was carried out on the explosives used in Barnes Wallis's bouncing bomb, Tallboy, and Grand Slam weapons.

After WW2. the site became the Explosives Research and Development Establishment (ERDE) and in 1977 it was merged with the Rocket Propulsion Establishment Westcott (RPE - Parent Article) to form two Propellants Explosives and Rocket Motor Establishments, PERME Waltham Abbey, and PERME Westcott.

Remember that Sonos speaker you bought a few years back that works perfectly? It's about to be screwed for... reasons

Re: Why indeed...

I had the Linn version of the Chartwell LS3/5As - Linn Kans. Stupidly I traded them for bigger Linns because I wanted more bass. I really should have kept them and just upgraded by adding another Naim250 and a bi-amp kit.

Now the hearing is going, I have a 22yr old pair of active B&Os connected to the headphone output of a networked TV, and they still sound better than an acquaintance’s Sonos Play:3

Server-side Swift's slow support story sours some: Apple lang tailored for mobile CPUs, lacking in Linux world

Re: I learnt Swift last year - now my brain is better.

Yes, I’m pretty much the same, with a background in C, and other stuff including Smalltalk which helped with the OOP thing. Initially I just wrote CLI stuff on the Mac with C, but I must say I do like Swift, I’m looking at moving a Database App I wrote about 20 years ago to an iPad (just as a hobby).

Linux?

As any fule know, it must be run on the right server:-

Mac Pro (Rack, 2019) - Technical Specifications. >>============>

World-record-breaking boffins reveal the fastest spinning thing on Earth – and it's not George Orwell in his grave

In Oz go-faster stripes are not a thing. Red vehicles are known to go faster than any other colour, so heading away from you they would appear infrared-black?

But what colour? White-van-man added go-faster stripes?

The delights of on-site working – sun, sea and... WordPad wrangling?

Norton Commander

NC had a decent ASCII/Hex viewer and editor - F3 to view F4 to edit. It saved me on more than a few times when some muppet had changed/forgotten a password (Yes, in the 1980s they were often saved as readable text in a key file).

I still use NC and it’s *NIX clone Midnight Commander to have a quick squizz inside copies of database files, etc., searching for particular strings.

The Curse of macOS Catalina strikes again as AccountEdge stays 32-bit

Re: How can it take MULTIPLE YEARS to go 64 bit?

Not only hacks, it may well be the "lead developer" (or whatever the person who knew stuff was called) cashed-in/was let go//left, and that the marketing and bean counter droids just drove the company with enough technical input from a couple of junior "programmers" to paper over the cracks and do routine updates.

Disclaimer: A long time ago I designed and wrote specialist technical/financial/business software, and now look a lot like this >>====>

Microsoft's on Edge and you could be, too: Chromium-based browser exits beta – with teething problems

OK

Just why would I install Edge on anything? On the rare occasions that I use Windows, I don’t use Edge.

Are you getting it? Yes, armageddon it: Mass hysteria takes hold as the Windows 7 axe falls

Re: Ah, Git ...

Gentleman’s Relish, dear boy.

As internet pioneers fight to preserve .org’s non-profit status, those in charge are hiding behind dollar signs

Rent Seeking

Move along - Nothing to see here at this Wikipedia Link.

Hey kids! Ditch that LCD and get ready for the retro CRT world of Windows Terminal

Re: You had one job.

Crap, I’m old. I still use them both.

The time PC Tools spared an aerospace techie the blushes

A yes, the good old days when IBM’s DisplayWrite for PC DOS wouldn’t work if combined with their own LAN and screen Menu programs.

A personal favourite: deleting from a database

SELECT FROM table. WHERE colname = some complex IN condition probably including a Count; to see what will be deleted. Followed by an edit...

DELETE FROM table WHERE colname = some complex IN condition; distraction from luser’s complex call just before pressing [Enter] so edited statement becomes...

DELETE FROM table (now has semicolon at the end of first line) ; no I don’t know how it happens either...

iFixit surgeons dissect Apple's pricey Mac Pro: Industry standard sockets? Repair diagrams? Who are you and what have you done to Apple?

In Parallels on an iMac with a Quad-Core i3, 16G of RAM, and an SSD: Windows 10 gets to a responsive desktop from start in about 10 seconds (assuming Windows is not in the middle of one of its interminable updates).

Re: Just Throwing It Into Sharper Relief

but OSX makes me feel like I'm operating a computer in kid-friendly mode

Us oldies use Zsh in a real UNIX CLI for the hard stuff. The GUI is just for show >>=========>

Re: 256GB SSD?

The SSD is just to boot it. The OS and standard Mac use ~15G. The punter’s work will be on big RAIDS.

Alphabet, Apple, Dell, Tesla, Microsoft exploit child labor to mine cobalt for batteries, human-rights warriors claim

Re: One-eyed selectivity

Yes, if it’s the one I think it is, they were just adding sodium cyanide to the “tank” (a hole in the ground with a plastic liner) and then extracting the gold complex with carbon. The waste cyanide was left to decompose on the surface.

Re: One-eyed selectivity

A different Tim. I’m considerably older, with a background in chemistry and IT...

Re: One-eyed selectivity

OK. I’m a Chartered Chemist, and have worked in this area - Although I am now retired from paid employment. Many conflict minerals and “rare earth” elements are not rare, but their refining process can be complex and potentially highly polluting. Processing is often carried out with little regards for the environment in developing or rapidly developed countries.

Tantalum is difficult to refine, but not necessarily to recycle. Two large producers, Greenbushes and Wodinga are both, like the Boddington gold mine, in Western Australia. They export the element as the refined pentoxide. The major mines have not produced much tantalum since the GFC because of the (as I wrote) lack of demand, although one of them is mining large amounts of spodumene (lithium). It could be said that production of “conflict minerals” is always cheap because of exploitation and this means that other resources are not used.

Something over 20% of tantalum used already comes from recycling. Landfill could be (and occasionally is) used as a “mine” for some materials. Your couple of orders of magnitude more is way too high, more likely 2-5 times more. As the technology is developed proportionally less of these materials are likely to be used.

The Japanese batteries are a different problem: Lithium Is only about 3% of the cost of the battery. Lithium recycling rates can be as high as 95%, but it is currently cheaper to use “new” lithium carbonate in the manufacturing process.

Re: One-eyed selectivity

I'm not sure that it is quite as bad as that. I'm assuming that Coltan is mined mostly for tantalum (which also comes from tantalite) rather than niobium (used for things like magnets) - There is a lot more niobium in the earth than tantalum. Some of the reserve figures suggest that the largest annual tonnage of tantalum mined was <1500 tonnes in the mid 2000s. Since the GFC tantalum use dropped, and as a result the largest miner, Australia, ceased production (One of the biggest businesses went broke). Shipping has recovered somewhat since then. So far the known reserves of tantalum are ~150,000 tonnes implying that at past usage there is perhaps 100 years of supply. Most of the reserves are in Brazil and Australia - Africa as a whole has ~10% of known reserves.

Something that we might forget is that once technologically-critical elements have been used they can be recycled. Obsolete recycled equipment could be considered to be an ore containing many of these elements - So if the element becomes expensive enough, it is recovered. As a similar example, gold is mined down to very low levels. Boddington, Australia's largest gold mine, is viable at parts-per-million levels (a gram of gold from each tonne of ore) - It produces ~350 tonnes of gold and ~570,000 tonnes of copper a year (Which I think is ~£12 billion in gold and ~£2.5 billion for copper).

Wham, bam, thank you scram button: Now we have to go all MacGyver on the server room

Re: And this is why...

I had a new light blue Volvo in the 80s (Yes, I know - It was an overreaction from the previous car, a somewhat unreliable FIAT). Mrs Tim99 and I stopped for a lavatory break, and an evening snack at a Little Chef (That dates it) in the depths of rural Lincolnshire. When we returned to the car, unlocked it, and I tried to start it, I realised that this car had a manual gearbox - Ours was an automatic. Our car was parked on the other side of a van parked next to the "wrong" Volvo.

How much cheese does one person need to grate? Mac Pro pricing unveiled

Re: Well

I weakened on Black Friday and paid <AU$3000 for mine to replace an 8 year old iMac that I originally bought as a retirement present - It seems very fast, but the software looks a bit tacky. I don't expect to buy another desktop computer...

Former Oracle product manager says he was forced out for refusing to deceive customers. Now he's suing the biz

Re: SAP/Oracle --> SOP Oracle

One of the worst demos I saw was a Oracle ported Mac HyperCard/Spinnaker live presentation with an Oracle V6 back end, running on Windows 3 on a 486 in 1990/1. It was slow, but the boss still licensed it. I had to try and make it run on a 386SX. The boss thought that a screen update taking 30 seconds was OK, prospective users were not impressed - The same form on a Sun or MicroVAX terminal took maybe 2 seconds. I also had the same form running on DOS 386 PC talking to NetWare updating the same screen in similar times to the Sun. The boss ordered a Compaq 486 - Strangely, when I tried it, it was still much slower than the demo...

Re: I don't believe it

Of course not, but don’t ask if they punch kittens and kick puppies...

It's what they do

As posted before (going back at least to Oracle 5): "One Real Arsehole Called Larry Ellison" allegedly. Those yachts don't pay for themselves.

It's Hipp to be square: What happened when SQLite creator met GitHub

A different model to most.

I think that Richard has a point. SQLite is one of the more/most used software projects in the Public Domain. As on their website the software copyright is:-

"Open-Source, not Open-Contribution

SQLite is open-source, meaning that you can make as many copies of it as you want and do whatever you want with those copies, without limitation. But SQLite is not open-contribution. In order to keep SQLite in the public domain and ensure that the code does not become contaminated with proprietary or licensed content, the project does not accept patches from unknown persons.

All of the code in SQLite is original, having been written specifically for use by SQLite. No code has been copied from unknown sources on the internet."

They have 3 developers/commiters so, presumably, keeping track of the project is not that difficult, vs the small but quite complex Git hosted BSD project, Dragonfly, which has about 20 times that number.

Caveat: I am now retired, but used SQLite an a number of projects. I still find it useful to do the heavy lifting on the data from a number of large spreadsheets that I am sent as a volunteer ISO assessor.

Anthos: Google's bid for Kubernetes differentiation ... and market share

So

Not at all like their stewardship of Chrome then?

Mysterious IT snafu at British Airways causes bunch of inbound flight delays and cancellations

Re: Bring back BOAC

No. You would be old if you can remember Imperial Airways.

If you fly enough, "good fortune" becomes likely. Mrs Tim99 and I had a BA business class flight from Singapore to LHR where the entertainment system didn't work. We got £400 each compo, I hadn't the heart to tell them that both of us normally read, sleep, and eat on similar journeys; so we don't use their entertainment anyway...

We lose money on repairs, sobs penniless Apple, even though we charge y'all a fortune

A lonely bouquet in the brickbats

I admit it. I (still) own an iMac now out of AppleCare. Two months from the end of the 3 year warranty I had a problem with the screen which showed a single line of green pixels. I phoned Apple, who suggested that I took the iMac to the local retailer; I told them that I was a pensioner, so they arranged for an on-site repair the next day.

I might not be typical of the average Apple user, having been around software since 1971; but after writing software for many different OSs, including some Windows shrink-ware, the experience suits me. It allows me to still use the UNIX commands I learnt in the 70s when the (nice) GUI can’t do everything that I need.

Bad news: 'Unblockable' web trackers emerge. Good news: Firefox with uBlock Origin can stop it. Chrome, not so much

Re: Enterprising Developer

Probably not what you want, but I posted the following here a couple of years ago - Caveat: I am no longer involved with using Chrome on Windows, so I have not run this for a year or so:-

A tip for Windows users of Chrome - Delete the local Google Appdata folder to get rid of crap, and don't log in to your Google Acc.

‘ ————————————————————

' A simple vbs script that you can run at logon

Dim delFolderPath(1)

delFolderPath(0)="C\:SomeOtherFolderThatYouWantGone"

delFolderPath(1)="C:\Users\Your_Account\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome"

Dim fso

Dim objFolder

Dim objFile

Dim objSubfolder

For Each x In delFolderPath

'Set objects & error catching

On Error Resume Next

Set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")

Set objFolder = fso.GetFolder(x)

'DELETE files in path unless they are ReadOnly, or set to True for All

For Each objFile In objFolder.files

objFile.Delete False

Next

'DELETE all subfolders in delFolder Path even if they are ReadOnly

For Each objSubfolder In objFolder.Subfolders

objSubfolder.Delete True

Next

Next

Set objSubfolder = Nothing

Set objFile = Nothing

Set objFolder = Nothing

Set fso = Nothing

' The usual warnings apply if you run some VBS file you copied from the Internet!

After 10 years, Google Cloud Print will finally be out of beta... straight into ad giant's graveyard

It's what they do

Why do people expect "free" stuff from Google to have a long life? They have a history of "trying it out" as a beta product and then pulling it when it doesn't produce a sufficient income stream (or no longer allows them to link enough people to the punter).