* Posts by Tim99

2000 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2008

UK pr0n viewers plan to circumvent smut-block measures – survey

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: "a large proportion – 17.7 per cent – say they will give up using online porn"

MRDA - Wikipedia Link.

What made a super high-tech home in Victorian England? Hydroelectric witchery, for starters

Tim99 Silver badge
Happy

For a good day out

NT scones are important too. Disclaimer, Mrs Tim99 and I are life members.

All good, leave it with you...? Chap is roped into tech support role for clueless customer

Tim99 Silver badge
Gimp

Re: Well The Big Problem with Helping With Your Windows, OSX Problem Is ...

Why would you use a Linux CD/USB with OSX when you can just use [Command]+[Space] type in terminal and go to Full Screen? Then type in techy stuff like ls -la ...

I suppose you could also use [Windows]+[R] and type in cmd.exe for Windows, but the punter would still see Windows behind the command screen.

Tim99 Silver badge
Facepalm

I had an acronym

OBTW - Oh, By The Way - Usually heard just as I was heading home. Almost always it meant at least an hour extra on site.

Science says death metal fans delightful and intelligent people, great at dinner parties

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Two kinds of music

I’ve got the original Frankie Laine version.

Tim99 Silver badge

Two kinds of music

"There are only two kinds of music - good music and bad music” attributed to Rossini, Duke Ellington, and Louis Armstrong. Armstrong said he liked the good kind.

The good kind that helped when I coded varied from Gregorian plainchant to Hendrix...

Airlines in Asia, Africa ground Boeing 737 Max 8s after second death crash in four-ish months

Tim99 Silver badge

A friend who trains pilots...

...for several international airlines advised “If things are going wrong with the aeroplane, and the aircrew don’t know why, you want them to panic in English as their first language”.

Put down the cat, coffee, beer pint, martini, whatever you're holding, and make sure you've updated Chrome (unless you enjoy being hacked)

Tim99 Silver badge
Trollface

Why worry about being hacked?

You have already installed a rootkit: Link to previous El Reg post.

'They took away our Cup-a-Soup!' Share your tales of bleak breakout areas with us

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: From my cold, dead hands!

Many, many, years ago when I was a relatively junior Scientific Civil Servant the Union Rep came into my office (it was an area where smoking was allowed) and noticed that I had a large glass ashtray. Hang on, he said, you shouldn’t have that at your grade... He then looked around and inventoried a triangular hat stand with 3 coat/hat pegs (should have been a peg on the back of the door); a kneehole desk with drawers on each side (should have been a table and cabinet); a square of carpet on the Lino under the desk (not senior enough for carpet); and an anglepoise type desk lamp (How did you get that?).

He said that the office should have been cleared and “appropriately fitted”, so we had better get that fixed. “Fixed” meant that I needed to have my staff file updated, because now that I had this stuff I was entitled to it even if I was moved.

Tim99 Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: From my cold, dead hands!

Tea bags?! No thank you.

Oracle sued for $4.5m after ERP system delivery date 'moved from 2015 to 2016, then 2017, then... er, never'

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Hmmmm

1. Spreadsheet jockey thinks that they drive business with Excel reports.

2. Jockey thinks that Excel "databases" are all they need to run business.

3. Consultant tells business that they need a basic SQL database to store data.

4. Jockey gets business managers/owners to ignore consultant's report.

5. Crap happens.

6. Smarter consultant suggests use of "Server" (consultant's favourite SQL system).

7. New consultant gets jockey on-side by showing them how to get data into Excel.

New claim dogs Oracle: After $11m of sales, I was unfairly axed before next big deal – because I am a 64yo woman

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

Re: Drip, Drip, Drip...

One Real Arsehole Called Larry Ellison, allegedly...

Mine’s the one with SQL*Plus Version 2.0 in the pocket >>=========>

From Red Planet to deep into the red: Suicidal extrovert magnet Mars One finally implodes

Tim99 Silver badge

Nah, they didn't think on a large enough scale.

Golgafrincham B-Ark?

How I got horizontal with a gimp and untangled his cables

Tim99 Silver badge
Facepalm

Electrician Cabling

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 metal 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 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 cabled 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.

Apple puts bullet through 'Do Not Track', FaceTime snooping bug and iOS vulnerabilities

Tim99 Silver badge
Trollface

Google Project Zero

"Three out of the four vulnerabilities in the latest iOS advisory were exploited in the wild, yikes."

We looked at exploiting at least two of them, until other people found them too. >>===>

German competition watchdog tells Facebook to stop combining user data without consent

Tim99 Silver badge
Big Brother

Re: It's mine, mine, mine!

I'm fairly sure that you have the right to add more of "yours" to "their" data...

Website programming? Pffft, so 2011. Python's main squeeze is now data science, apparently

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Re Good job Python isn't a syntax Nazi.

"Literally random indentation and spacing in the Java code in a very large product I work on. It's not even consistent within statements."

Cut and paste from a multitude of sources?

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: “the surging popularity of Flask, a bare-bones web framework ”

"It's also famousy not made by aliens." ???

Tim99 Silver badge

“the surging popularity of Flask, a bare-bones web framework ”

It might also be be worthwhile to have a look at Bottle: bottlepy.org.

Apple yoinks enterprise certs from Facebook, Google, killing internal apps, to show its power

Tim99 Silver badge
Childcatcher

"but it also treats mobile users like adults capable of making their own decisions"

You really don't have experience of many mobile users - The majority aren't typical El Reg readers, some people really will load almost anything to "see the dancing ponies".

Furious Apple revokes Facebook's enty app cert after Zuck's crew abused it to slurp private data

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

Re: Promise to do better

Er, Facebook is a rootkit?

You like JavaScript! You really like it! Scripting lingo tops dev survey of programming languages

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

Sometimes I turn it off

With JavaScript off I can still often find what I want - Perhaps, if we had all stuck with CGI/FastCGI, there would have been a lot less advertising/web crap in our lives. and we would all see a lot more nice, sane, static sites. Well there would have been a lot fewer pages anyway.

So, if we go with Sturgeon's revelation, that would mean that there would be a lot less crap to wade through before we find the 10% that isn't crap. We might even have had commerce sites that didn't rely on 100+Mb of obtuse frameworks just to add a purchase to a shopping trolley.

Thank you, mine is the old grubby one with K&R in the pocket >>===========>

Should the super-rich pay 70% tax rate above $10m? Here's Michael Dell's hot take for Davos

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Simple solution to Dell's problem

Yes, in my lifetime, the top rate of (“earned”) Income Tax was 19/6 in the £ (97.5%).

Remember Woolworths? Well there's a different* one that still exists in Oz. Telstra wants NBN Co to help shove fibre in it

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: They won't do it in all of the stores

Unfortunately no relation to the UK or US Woolies. Apparently one of the original Oz store founders, a Mr Christmas, was dared to register the Woolworths name in New South Wales as it had not been registered by the “proper” Woolies.

Wow, fancy that. Web ad giant Google to block ad-blockers in Chrome. For safety, apparently

Tim99 Silver badge
Joke

If you weren't an AC you could have used the joke icon >>======>

French data watchdog dishes out largest GDPR fine yet: Google ordered to hand over €50m

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

Re: Tiny mammoth

I think you have your units confused. Mass is measured in Jubs (or in this case KiloJubs). Sheep are used to measure velocity: Approved Reg Standards.

Ooh, my machine is SO much faster than yours... Oh, wait, that might be a bit of a problem...

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Well that was an invisible problem

Yes, but the advent of WiFi meant we only needed 5 connections plus a spare for a visitor's laptop with ethernet. The extra $30 for unneeded ports could buy biscuits...

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Well that was an invisible problem

Where I volunteer they had a 1990s vintage HP unmanaged switch with 8 x 10Mb ports and one 10/100Mb connection that could be used to connect to a single server (we didn’t). It was fully populated and used to share a single internet connection. It cost several thousand dollars, last year we replaced it with an 8 x 1Gb port switch for less than $50.

Dear humans, We thought it was time we looked through YOUR source code. We found a mystery ancestor. Signed, the computers

Tim99 Silver badge
Alien

Dah, Dah, Dah, Daahh

They came from outer space.

Are you sure your disc drive has stopped rotating, or are you just ignoring the messages?

Tim99 Silver badge
Angel

Sturgeon's Revelation

Many of us accept that Sturgeon's Revelation applies to equipment, software, manuals, etc. When working in support, I realized that Sturgeon's Revelation could also apply to the people in organizations; in particular: coders, administrators, employers, sales and support staff, and computer users.

In retirement, I still find it useful in attempting a near Zen-like calm.

Microsoft sends a raft of Windows 10 patches out into the Windows Update ocean

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Not really. I came from an Rdb, Informix, Oracle, Sybase, etc background. Access 97 was fine if you were a professional developer. It’s problems often came from the failure/i ntransigence/l ack of resources of larger organizations’ IT departments - Users just wanted to put together something to get a “simple” job done. The job then became mission-critical and was required to be adequately supported, that’s when “professionals” were brought in - The professionals were (usually rightly) horrified as to what had been produced.

We would use Access 97 to prototype systems for small/medium businesses as we could quickly develop something to show how it might/would work. One customer said that what we had produced seemed to work, so why couldn’t he use what he had seen rather than wait for us to produce a “proper” system - So we looked at what he was trying to do and realised that if we split the system so that the data was separate from the user interface/forms/reports it would be robust enough for his 10 user $2million dollar business. We had already produced a range of single-user shrink-wrap solutions that went back to Access 2.0. I am retired now, but the company still has many hundreds of customers who use Access based applications (The bigger/multi-user ones have a SQL Server backend, but the interface forms and reports are still separate Access clients for each user - These are OK for tens of million rows of data and at least 50 concurrent users, the server does the heavy lifting and Access gives a nice friendly interface).

The historical background of Access is that it owes a lot to MicroRim’s R:Base from the 1980s: Wikipedia link. Microsoft used to sell R:Base with their own sticker in Europe, and when MicroRim got into financial difficulties developing a VAX based product, Microsoft acquired a number of their staff that helped produce Access 1.0, and then Access 1.1 which included Access Basic. Access 2.0 ran on Windows 3.1 was quite fast (contained a fair amount of assembler?) and generally worked fairly well unless the PC crashed/was powered off with an open database. Access 95 was a major rewrite (all in C?) and available as part of the Microsoft Office Professional suite - It ran like a badly crippled dog for anything but a very simple application. Access 97 worked (Very well, if you knew what you were doing).

CES flicks the off switch on massager award… and causes a buzz

Tim99 Silver badge
Headmaster

Re: Metadata

Met a datum.

Whoosh...

The D in SystemD stands for Dammmit... Security holes found in much-adored Linux toolkit

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

Re: what?

But he did such a good job with PulseAudio...

Just updated Windows 7? Can't access network shares? It isn't just you

Tim99 Silver badge
Trollface

FTFY

>>======>

Just updated Windows 7? Can't access network shares stuff? It isn't just you...

Cambridge Analytica sister firm pleads guilty, fined £21k for failing to obey UK information commish

Tim99 Silver badge

We can’t nuke it from orbit

So why wasn’t it £21,000,000 payable by the original company directors or their insurers?

You were told to clean up our systems, not delete 8,000 crucial files

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Thanks, yes, I look like this >>======>

Probably because I was one of the XT/AT installers, supporters, and system architecture & software specifiers at a very large public utility. A tip was to put a spare key in the IBM installer ring folder as nobody ever looked at them after the system was working - Many people "lost" the key/folder when they moved office, so we also kept a register of which key fitted each machine. Our standard install was a WordStar or DEC WPS/IBM Displaywrite word processor (Depending on whether the user's job was as an engineer/scientist or administrator/secretary - Later we standardized on WordPerfect); Lotus 1-2-3; and R:Base or dBase III if required. Generally a suitable pseudo-menu batch file was supplied by us and called from AUTOEXEC.BAT on start-up. Some people paid for the IBM DOS menuing program which was OK, or later we supplied Norton Commander or XTree. When Windows became common we noticed that people who had used NC seemed to prefer separate Windows Explorer windows, and XTree users tended to drag files into one window, so what they learnt first seemed to stick with them later...

Tim99 Silver badge

BSD apropos and whatis - Bill Joy - 1979.

You can blame laziness as much as greed for Apple's New Year shock

Tim99 Silver badge
Gimp

The ecosystem thing was/is important. The easy transfer between iPad, iPhone and computer was/is important in smaller businesses that use iPhones. The whole “it just works” thing was nearly true (in my experience, certainly compared with Windows8/10). A sign that they took their eyes of the ball was the decision to drop the Airport/Airport Express - They were expensive compared to an entry level Belkin, but if you had an iPhone and an internet connection they were working within a couple of minutes, and they kept working - Their networks were very extendable, and capable of relatively high-end and sophisticated use by a knowledgeable installer. The prices almost look reasonable compared to later generations of mesh WiFi networking.

Is Google purposefully breaking Microsoft, Apple browsers on its websites? Some insiders are confident it is

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Old boss same as the new boss

Great browsers are almost always bad browsers?

Apologies to John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton.

You better watch out, you better not cry. Better not pout, I'm telling you why: SQLite vuln fixes are coming to town

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Not sure if I read this right...

@Lee D

"Why operating systems don't offer centralised database functionality as part of the OS, I never understood. Everything from users to configuration files to program installation manifests should really be a database, meaning something DESIGNED to be query and modified like a database. MSIs and things do contain databases but not in the same format. A generic, OS-wide, database feature (even down to filesystems, remember the WinFS promises?) is something sorely lacking."

As I recall, the Pick operating system from the 1970s offered something very similar. I spent a bit of time in the 1990s moving small multi-user businesses off Pick onto Windows [The users liked Pick, so not necessarily an improvement :-) - Their managers wanted Windows...].

The AS/400 OS was object-based and relied on a DB2 relational database. Even Netware (from 2.0 upwards?) included a database, but I think it only included file and user attributes; you could extend this with additional business functionality, but I'm not certain that it was used much - A very large public utility where I worked ran a version of XDB ES on top of Netware in the 80s, but I never saw it anywhere else.

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: I think you are underestimating the potential security problems

Funnily enough, I have deployed Access as a front-end client to MS SQL Server/MSDE on LANs, it generally worked well.

I am retired now and only fiddle with this stuff - I had some problems with Monty Widenius’ and MySQL going into MariaDB licensing with a product that we developed that was mostly used by not-for-profits and government users; so we normally used licenced MS or open source PostgreSQL and SQLite. It was relatively easy to move from a SQLite DB to Postgres; and not too difficult to move from Access prototypes to MSDE/SQL Server.

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: IF you allow random internet users to run arbitrary SQL on your system, you should upgrade.

I think you are underestimating the potential security problems of "MariaDB, MySQL, Oracle, MS-SQL” databases. SQLite works surprisingly well as an internet database because the web-server is acting as a single user to the DB (i.e. not a true multiuser system). From personal experience, SQLite can work well as a website database engine - See the "Websites" section in sqlite.org/whentous:-

"SQLite works great as the database engine for most low to medium traffic websites (which is to say, most websites). The amount of web traffic that SQLite can handle depends on how heavily the website uses its database. Generally speaking, any site that gets fewer than 100K hits/day should work fine with SQLite. The 100K hits/day figure is a conservative estimate, not a hard upper bound. SQLite has been demonstrated to work with 10 times that amount of traffic.

The SQLite website (https://www.sqlite.org/) uses SQLite itself, of course, and as of this writing (2015) it handles about 400K to 500K HTTP requests per day, about 15-20% of which are dynamic pages touching the database. Dynamic content uses about 200 SQL statements per webpage. This setup runs on a single VM that shares a physical server with 23 others and yet still keeps the load average below 0.1 most of the time."

College PRIMOS prankster wreaks havoc with sysadmin manuals

Tim99 Silver badge
Joke

Re: Unintended consequences

@bodi_thung

You are Bill Gates, and I claim my $1,000,000.00

Official: Voyager 2 is now an interstellar spacecraft

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Science 50 years old

My wife bought me a Linn Sondek LP12 in 1974, it is still working well. It became a bit of a Trigger's broom as various bits were upgraded, but the basic chassis is still the same. When I was younger, and even more foolish, we spent serious money adding similar "quality" Linn/Naim HiFi kit to it until the late 1980s - So a thoughtful (but expensive) gift became a very expensive hobby. I had a car accident that meant that I could not drive and enjoy it, so it was sold on - The new owner is about 25 years younger than me and still very pleased with it, so hopefully it will live on.

My only other bit of long-lived "high tech" kit (for the time) is a 1941 Longines wristwatch from my father which still works well. Nothing that I have acquired since has/will last anything like as long; but to put it in perspective the LP12 was about a month's wages and the watch about a fortnight's.

Do not adjust your set: Hats off to Apple, you struggle to shift iPhones 'cos you're oddly ethical

Tim99 Silver badge
Gimp

Re: Have to agree....

Earlier this year I upgraded my 6 to an X. I was quite happy with the 6 until it started to have intermittent problems charging. A bit of experimentation showed that the problem was with the lightening connector, and that cleaning it did not improve things. I was just about to go on a longish trip and my wife suggested that I replace the phone - At her suggestion (because the screen was better, honest guv), I bought the X instead of a 7 or 8.

I must say that, for me, it was a noticeable improvement. FaceID seems to work better than fingerprints (I suspect that may be because many older people’s prints are relatively indistinct) and swiping up seems easier than clicking. I did not own many 3.5mm accessories, so that was not a problem. BUT the article is correct, I will not be replacing the X unless I have too (or until my wife wants to upgrade to my X?).

Barnet Council reckons Capita's dropped the ball on outsourced services

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: What a surprise

The surprise might be that the article was written as though someone thought was surprising?

Reverse Ferret! Forget what we told you – the iPad isn't really for work

Tim99 Silver badge

As I tried to suggest, some of the staff who have “real” computers forced on them may not need them and don’t like them. The bleedy things may not be ideal, but might just be OK. Unfortunately, I suspect that a significant proportion of staff that “need” to produce complex highly-formatted Word documents, and huge business analysis spreadsheets will soon be gone from many medium-sized businesses. In some large businesses even sales staff are being automated out as well as admin people. Quite what society is going to do when perhaps 40-70% of these jobs have gone is not clear to me. A friend has suggested that there will be plenty of personal care and support work available as Western countries’ populations age. I am not happy about my thoughts, as I used to be the rotten bastard who got decide what kit was issued to most of the technical staff in a very large national public utility - I also suspect that many of these jobs (including some of the ones I had) will also be restructured, simplified and automated out.

Tim99 Silver badge
Gimp

Devil’s advocate

OK, I’ll take your downvotes. A bit of self aggrandisement before I start - I have been professionally involved with IT and technology since 1971; have written shrink-wrap, not for profit, business and scientific software running on a variety of OSs; been an enterprise architect; run consulting and technical businesses, and have chartered status in one of the basic sciences.

I am retired, but help out as a volunteer supporting and teaching retirees “computing”. Most of the retirees that I see don’t want, or can’t cope with, a traditional computer; an iPad does almost all of what they want. Some other users who may find that an iPad is all the computing that they need might include artists, photographers, some multimedia workers, writers, IT server and website support staff, researchers and managers.

Recently what I have found surprising is the number of small businesses that are run on a mobile phone, often with a tablet too; and the number of younger people who (even on a normal computer) run in a “modal screen” environment where they are mostly doing something in a full screen, with a minimal use of cut & paste.

I do have an iPad Pro, along with an iPhone X, a 2011 vintage iMac, and a couple of small BSD/*NIX servers (as toys). The iMac runs High Sierra, and occasionally Windows and Linux in VMs, but I probably spend most of my time reading the paper on it. I volunteer as a technical assessor for our national accreditation authority, so it is still useful for looking at very large documents and spreadsheets. The iMac is not supported for Mojave, and if it dies I might consider replacing it with a large screen and a Mac Mini; but I have some difficulty justifying this as I have found that I can do much of what I want on the iPad in a split screen with a Bluetooth keyboard, so echoing the iPad to a large screen with an HDMI cable might work OK *for me*. iPads are not aimed at *most* of El Reg’s readership.

As losses narrow, nbn™ says business will drive growth in ARPU (that'll be how much it extracts from each punter)

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Consumers dont need more real bandwidth

Things may be getting a bit better according to nbnco: About half of users are now on nominal 50Mbps (56KB PDF). Apparently they can now expect >30Mbps at evening peak time. This would be consistent with my retirement village’s 100Mbps $33/month unlimited data wholesale plan where we get about 85Mbps down and 38Mbps up during the day; and ~70Mbps down and 30Mbps up at peak times during the late afternoon (Schoolchildren have come home?).