* Posts by Tim99

2000 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2008

Microsoft slips ads into Windows 10 Mail client – then U-turns so hard, it warps fabric of reality

Tim99 Silver badge
Gimp

Just for the hell of it

I set up an iMac with the included Postfix system; mail -s subject someone@xxx.com [Enter] type or copy message body [Ctrl]+[D] was a surprisingly cathartic experience.

Having said that, the bog standard Mac email client is adequate, allowing viewing "All headers" and "Raw Source" - Turning off "Load remote content" in messages helps a lot too. Whoops! Having just checked, I have 2,200 current local messages and another 15,300 archived in local mailboxes; as I am retired, I probably should sort and prune them a bit.

Holy moley! The amp, kelvin and kilogram will never be the same again

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: SI

@Def

"Arbitrary base-60 measurements" go back to at least the Babylonians. Most of us cary an easy way of counting to 60 around with us - Using the thumb of one hand start counting by touching the top joint of the same hand's little finger, then the second joint, then the third; now move on to the ring finger and count the three joints, then the middle finger, and then the index finger giving a total of 12 - Now count off the thumb of the other hand for the first 12, then repeat and count off the index finger for 24, middle for 36, ring for 48, and little finger giving a total of 60. The number 60 is divisible by 2,3,4,5,6,10,12,15,20 and 30 - So for people who traded (and needed to count) a much better system than stopping at 10 (only divisible by 2 and 5), when you run out of fingers (and toes at 20 [sandal wearers?] divisible by 2,4,5 and 10).

Oi, Elon: You Musk sort out your Autopilot! Tesla loyalists tell of code crashes, near-misses

Tim99 Silver badge

We mght be able to have fairly safe autonomous cars now

Unfortunately the rest of us would have to be banned from the roads and pavements...

Macs to Linux fans: Stop right there, Penguinista scum, that's not macOS. Go on, git outta here

Tim99 Silver badge
Gimp

Maybe, or maybe not?

Link: applemust.com.

Clunk, bang, rattle: Is that a ghost inside your machine?

Tim99 Silver badge

I really don’t believe in the paranormal, but

Before I retired, I had a customer site that is now a museum, It had been a Victorian prison. I was doing some on-site database work one night, when nature called. I left the small room that contained the server and workstation that I was using and walked past an adjoining small room to get to the corridor. It suddenly felt very cold (yes, it was a cold night, and the corridor was draughty) and more than a little creepy. I knew that the first small room had been a warder’s guard room (from the sign on the door), later I found that the second room was the condemned cell where prisoners were held before their execution.

Official: IBM to gobble Red Hat for $34bn – yes, the enterprise Linux biz

Tim99 Silver badge
Linux

A question

Does this mean more, or less of Poettering‘s spawn?

Assange catgate hearing halted as Ecuador hunts around for someone who speaks Australian

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: It's simple...

No worries, she’ll be right.

Erm... what did you say again, dear reader?

Tim99 Silver badge

A very long time ago I was a pupil at a UK school that wished to project an illusion of grandeur. We were taught to use the "z" form as it was deemed to be correct Oxford English. As a consequence, my writings are sometimes thought to be authored by an American.

SQLite creator crucified after code of conduct warns devs to love God, and not kill, commit adultery, steal, curse...

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Coat

Re: It's 2018. Christian values are yesterday

Doing it may be OK - The sin is enjoying it.

Tim99 Silver badge
Happy

Having said that

From experience, SQLite is excellent. I suspect it's good for 80% of websites that use (Oracle) MySQL: Appropriate Uses For SQLite.

Microsoft Azure looks to make cloud-native payments SWIFTer

Tim99 Silver badge
Joke

Re: I'm wondering...

Don’t worry, MS will make this secure with a corporate standard system like 2FA...

Take my advice: The only safe ID is a fake ID

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: A different name for every site?

@TRT

An acquaintance knew a male Kenyan called Strawberry Bicycle, apparently it was normal for parents to name children after what they liked or aspired to.

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Silly first name.

@big_D

Thompson/Thomson?

Microsoft reveals xlang: Cross-language, cross-compiler and coming to a platform near you

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Re: Stupid conflicting name

It’s what Microsoft do: IMAP/MAPI, OpenOffice/Microsoft Open Office, Office Open XML/Microsoft Open XML...

Google now minus Google Plus: Social mini-network faces axe in data leak bug drama

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

Google+ users

A service for people who thought that Google didn't have enough data about you, your friends, and casual acquaintances?

Decoding the Chinese Super Micro super spy-chip super-scandal: What do we know – and who is telling the truth?

Tim99 Silver badge
Alert

Re: Chinese Super Micro super spy-chip...

"You know: the country that makes everyone's iPhones phones electronics". FTFY

DEF CON hackers' dossier on US voting machine security is just as grim as feared

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

FTFY

"It would require the crookslocal political supporters to get their hands on the machines long enough to meddle with the hardware"

Why are sat-nav walking directions always so hopeless?

Tim99 Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Badger?

Bastard, the 10 hour one!

Blueprint of modern construction can be found in a tech cluster... of 19th century England

Tim99 Silver badge

William Strutt

The Thomas Strutt mentioned is very probably William: "Thomas Strutt, a builder of textile mills. In 1792, Strutt had come up with the idea of building mills with some iron columns, as well as encasing timber within brick and plaster, to make them less flammable" - Wikipedia link.

Cookie clutter: Chrome saves Google cookies from cookie jar purges

Tim99 Silver badge
Big Brother

Its Google (again)

This is what they do. Why are people surprised? (Yesterday's post)

Hopefully this still works - About 3 years ago when I looked after some Windows PCs for a seniors computer club, I found that the only way to clear out Chrome was to delete the:-

[X:\Users\*User*\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data] folder

That syncing feeling when you realise you may be telling Google more than you thought

Tim99 Silver badge
Big Brother

It’s Google

This is what they do. Why are people surprised?

How an over-zealous yank took down the trading floor of a US bank

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Re: Unplugging the keyboard = kernel panic ?

@Korev. We need an icon for greybeards -->

Some of us have looked like this for a while now; but in my case it might be because I used and programmed Windows stuff, on and off, since MS released 2.0 (I avoided 1.0).

I want to buy a coffee with an app – how hard can it be?

Tim99 Silver badge

Barclays?

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Has anyone?

@John Brown (no body)

At the risk of being hipsterish, you could use your flask of hot water with an AeroPress. They cost about £30 and work well, it's not quite like an espresso, but close enough for many of us.

Tim99 Silver badge
Trollface

An explanation?

"These are big coffee shop chains with bags of cash and immense marketing resources, so they can afford a few grand on an app that only needs to do two things: (1) pay for a drink and (2) tick your loyalty card."

Alistair, I thought that you were nearly as cynical as me (Well all right, I'm older, so I have more experience and practice). The truth is likely to be: At the marketing meeting that decided that they needed an "App", the 29 year old who was sitting fiddling with their phone said that this was easy. Said person then got in touch with their 29 year old mate's 26 year old brother "who was, yeah, really good". The brother leads an Agile team of a 23 year old and two interns who use 5 different 5GB frameworks of Apps development de-jour. The system was tested, once, by the 29 year old and then shipped...

30-up: You know what? Those really weren't the days

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

Re: ...Delphi, now rated as one of the least popular...

Sometimes you have just got to use goto, Pascal/Delphi really, really, discouraged it. Mine’s the one with FORTRAN and Dartmouth BASIC manuals and K&R in the pockets. >>====>

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Screens

I hardly ever use Windows now, but this is somehow appropriate >>===>

"showed code in light text against a dark background - specifically green or amber out of black"

Screens: *Back in the day*, we never even dreamt of using a screen. When I started, proper data input/coding used optical recognition cards (punched cards were expensive) - These looked like punched cards but you filled boxes in with a soft pencil. I spent a lot of time rubbing stuff out after the nice data input clerks said things like "It didn't run, there is a divide-by-zero error". Then, if the clerks liked you, they would convert the optical cards into punched cards; apparently they were "more reliable". If the punched card programs were run regularly they would transfer them to punched tape. Eventually, when I was senior enough, I was allowed to use a shared teletype on this new fangled Internet (ARPANET) thing.

This is why a lot of us went out and bought stuff like Apple ][s and Commodore PETs for work. Eventually, when I had my own budget, I could use amber/green screens or even real Tektronix and VT terminals: Some of which could even do *colour* text and graphics.

Sysadmin misses out on paycheck after student test runs amok

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

Re: All the servers are called Gandalf...

TRT, Gimli a break...

Probably for the best: Apple makes sure eSIMs won't nuke the operators

Tim99 Silver badge
Gimp

Like in an iPad

Just come back from a trip to the UK. My iPad has a plastic SIM from my Australian Supplier. It was really useful to just switch to the built in eSIM for a local UK provider, it worked.

In a phone I could see that this would be useful, a friend wants to have one of the SIMs on a cheap prepaid plan just for crap callers (like car salesmen, insurance touts, etc.) and then periodically kill and replace the cheap plan.

A real shot in the Arm: 3% of global workforce surplus to requirements

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Only 3%?

Cyril Northcote Parkinson's "condensed version" of his Law "That work expands so to fill the time available for its completion" is famous, perhaps, less so is "bureaucracies expand over time" published in the 1950s.

A personal thought is that the public service is unfairly maligned for having too many "who do nothing but fiddle about with PowerPoint and attend meetings" the truth is that all large organizations become infested with these people - Particularly when they are natural privately owned monopolies or oligopolies - Organizations that have been privatized to rentier capitalists could be good examples.

I have noted that when a headcount reduction is applied, usually to increase bonuses for the C-Level and Boards, the PowerPoint/meeting crowd are often spared (Perhaps because they "look busy"?) whereas the essential customer-facing and technical staff are disproportionately hit. This can work well in times of employment stress, but fails when there are reasonable opportunities, as the staff who are keeping the business running leave for something better paid/less stressful.

Trainer regrets giving straight answer to staffer's odd question

Tim99 Silver badge
Unhappy

I once felt sorry for a trainer

In the mid-late 1980s I was asked to get 450 scientists supplied and connected with PCs. Our (very large) corporate's standard was to connect everyone up using Novell Netware 2.15 servers. After fighting with the documentation for a few days I managed to get our lab up of 20 users up and working as a prototype for everyone else. I quickly realized that I did not have the time (or skills and personality) to train everybody, so I contacted our corporate training company and arranged several courses for different groups and levels of users to be run over a month or two.

I cabled up the training area and the supplier sent a very pleasant bloke to do the training. The first basic course went very well, but I thought he was struggling a bit on the second (administrators) course. At the end of the first day he asked if he could borrow a set of the manuals - These were in multiple volumes and supplied in a large sturdy red box. I probably thought that he just did not want to cart them around and that he was doing a quick recap in his hotel room for the rest of that course. At the end of the course, he returned them and thanked me, telling me that he only had access to the course training notes and not the official manuals - When I asked him why, he said that the training company "didn't seem to have any" and their policy might be that "if he knew what he was teaching, he would probably leave and getter a better paid job".

Obviously, the final part of the course was run by a less pleasant person, who told me that the pleasant bloke had left to be a supervising administrator for a company that was installing and standardizing on Netware...

Do I hear two million dollars? Apple-1 fossil goes on the block, cassettes included

Tim99 Silver badge

One reason that the old stuff from our youth is valuable(?) is that most of it got thrown away. Generally something that was popular and relatively expensive when we were children becomes collectable and expensive 20-30 years later when the child who wanted the toy can now indulge themself.

'Surprise!' West Oz gummint is hopeless at information security

Tim99 Silver badge

I retired long ago

so, hopefully, the perpetrators have moved on. "For example, because disk storage is in short supply, medical records are getting scanned at low resolution, and the paper records are then being sent offsite for archival storage" This is a SOP by many State contractors, underspec the hardware, then there is more money left from the tender for "consulting" and unaccounted costs; and if you are really lucky lots of opportunity to extend the contract by consulting on why the system is suboptimal. Why solve the problem when there is good money to be made by letting it continue?

I did a small job specking a couple of PCs to run our software for the Health Department years ago. At the time they were using Windows 95 on Novell, it was almost reassuring to find the fences that had to be crossed to install a Windows 98 PC with a necessary multimedia attachment...

If you drop a tablet in a forest of smartphones, will anyone hear it fall?

Tim99 Silver badge

...School kids and the Elderly.

I’m retired myself, and for a number of years have been a volunteer teacher to retirees in Australia. The government has a number of initiatives to get older people online, so that we don’t clutter-up Goverment Offices, as well as other benefits like shopping, banking, staying in touch with relatives, etc.

Almost always we recommend a tablet to people who are starting out. Windows are is too complex, and unless they have a relative who is computer literate the systems often fall out of use after the user has got into trouble and called out a professional who charges $100+ each time. Tablets generally keep working.

In out experience we can usually get most people up and running in about 3 afternoons on an iPad; an Android tablet often takes a couple of afternoons more, and does require more “hand holding”.

I agree that a Bluetooth keyboard can be useful, particularly for older people who learnt to (touch)type on a real typewriter.

Google keeps tracking you even when you specifically tell it not to: Maps, Search won't take no for an answer

Tim99 Silver badge
Big Brother

Re: Plain English

Alternatively, read George Orwell written in 1946. >>=========>

Talk about left Field: Apple lures back Tesla engineering guru

Tim99 Silver badge

I really don’t want to start a flame war here

Maybe it is just for the extension/improvement of Apple CarPlay compared with Android Auto?

Personal anecdote: In the last few weeks I “helped” a friend get her new bog-standard Nokia Android phone talking to her Skoda Fabia - After nearly 3 hours of faffing about updating and downloading the necessary apps we were successful (after checking the [sparse] documentation, and finally connecting the phone to the car via Bluetooth before connecting it via USB). The next day the app would not work... Just for the hell of it I connected an iPhone to the car via USB. Within 30:seconds it worked. I was driving a Mercedes A Class hire car, which worked almost instantly with the iPhone, we tried the Nokia - nope/nada/nothing, trying the Bluetooth thing got music and the phone working but no maps. Disconnected the phone turned the ignition off, still no maps, after another 90 mins of faffing still no Google Maps, so I gave up.

Devon County Council techies: WE KNOW IT WASN'T YOU!

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

Re: Actually back in the 1990s I was at a company...

@Kubla Cant

No, they just let random ones out, in this case it was an "o"...

Grad sends warning to manager: Be nice to our kit and it'll be nice to you

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Foul Language?

Stress - The feeling you experience when your mind overrules your body's natural desire to beat the living shit out of some arsehole who *really* deserves it?

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Sometimes violence is the only answer

@Alister

I think that I have posted this before as well, but it is, hopefully, relevant. Back in the days when I was responsible for a few hundred computers in a very large public utility we had a standard “fix” for our standard original IBM XT and AT PCs - Any that misbehaved were switched off and carefully raised ~2cm above the desk by lifting them with a hand on each side, then dropped. Usually they started working after they were switched back on. We had several theories as to why, including the sudden deceleration reseated loose chips and cards, or that it acted as a veiled threat to the machine that the next drop would be further...

Oracle Database 18: Now in downloadable Linux flavour

Tim99 Silver badge
Trollface

"Oh, and Windows, but cool kids don't use that"

I suspect that many of the cool kids won’t be using Oracle either...

Sysadmin sank IBM mainframe by going one VM too deep

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Just to mudddy the waters a trifle ...

@jake

I was told nearly 60 years ago at school, that the confusion with the pound weight (lb) and the pound currency (£) may be because they go back to a similar ancient derivations. The old Roman pound ("libra" roughly about 11-12 ounces) and the Saxon coinage of the old penny, a silver coin - 240 of which were made from a pound weight of silver. The shilling (derived from the Roman solidus gold coin weighing 1/72 of a pound) was equivalent to 12 silver pennies. There were 20 shillings in the £ so 12x20=240 is easily divided by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, 16, 20, 24, 30, 40, 48, 60, etc. The penny was divided into smaller coins: 2 ha’pennies (half pennys) and 4 farthings (“fourth things”) so there were 960 of the smallest coins to the £ allowing a wide range of quantities to be costed.

Incidentally that is why small/inexpensive things were sold by the dozen (12) because 12 items at, say, 3 pennies each would cost 3 shillings, and as 12 is also easily divisible by 2, 3, 4 and 6. The seller and the buyer would know that 12 inexpensive items at a farthing each would be 3 pennies etc...

Boss helped sysadmin take down horrible client with swift kick to the nether regions

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Am I missing something?

I believe the progress bar may be a hangover from mainframe/mini terminals (IBM?). Apparently customer behavioural research had shown that if nothing appeared to be happening within ~4 seconds after the punter had initiated an action, they would repeat the action (often several times) causing “all sorts of problems”. With a VDU it was easy to echo something back to the user - For teletypes the carriage was programmed to move, showing that something was happening...

Samsung’s new phone-as-desktop is slick, fast and ready for splash-down ... somewhere

Tim99 Silver badge
Gimp

Might not be appropriate here

I have used an iPhone with their HDMI adapter, a TV and a small Bluetooth keyboard - Not ideal, but reasonable for typing a longish report when away from my normal kit.

People hate hot-desking. Google thinks they’ll love hot-Chromebooking

Tim99 Silver badge
Trollface

Re: Nothing new here

No, if it was “correctly set up” it ran on a single large box. If the lusers terminal screen or keyboard broke, they logged in at another seat...

Do you really want your kids' future in the hands of Capita? Well, too bad

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Press 'F' for fault reporting

@Rich 11

I find that my thoughts on cynicism are similar to some people’s attitude to violence: If it is not working for you, you probably aren’t using enough.

IBM wins five-year whole-of-government deal with Australia

Tim99 Silver badge
Big Brother

Well

I suppose it might make it a little easier for the current government to consolidate our data and flog/give it to their mates?

Uh-oh. Boffins say most Android apps can slurp your screen – and you wouldn't even know it

Tim99 Silver badge
Trollface

Surely

Google’s version of Android slurps by design?

IBM memo to staff: Our CEO Ginni is visiting so please 'act normally!'

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: We expect 100% occupancy during the visit

I think they call it “a pre-scrap overhaul”...

MongoDB turns on, tunes in, drops ACID and goes mobile

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Coat

Mongo DB is Web Scale

This: NSFW YouTube link.

Tesla fingers former Gigafactory hand as alleged blueprint-leaking sabotage mastermind

Tim99 Silver badge

Basically grid-scale batteries are a solution to a problem renewables have created

You may be forgetting that batteries don’t have to be electrochemical; one technology from before WWll pumps water up a hill when you have excess supply, like lots of sunshine or wind, and when you haven’t the water runs back down generating electricity. The technology is well understood, costs little to run, and has a decades-long lifetime.