* Posts by Tim99

2002 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2008

Transport for NSW scrambles to patch servers missing fixes released in 2007

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Eh?

"as while offshore labour will be involved it can only do so much when on-premises mission-critical servers require reboots. " Well there's your problem. I'm so old, I can remember when IBM's staff were all locals, and the only offshore people your organization saw were very senior specialists that they occasionally flew in...

Developers dread Visual Basic 6, IBM Db2, SharePoint - survey

Tim99 Silver badge
Pint

VB

VB in Oz has a better known meaning - A mass market beer >>====> This fuelled many a Friday "work" afternoon when VB6 was new and shiny, helping to numb the pain of those who were transitioning from VB4/5. If you want staff to learn to "like" VB6, get them to do a couple of projects with VBScript.

Get tooled up before grappling with Google's Spanner database

Tim99 Silver badge
Big Brother

And

How long before Google drop it/move on to the next great thing. I would be wary of its use as a key component in my "global, relational-capable database".

Half the world warned 'Chinese space station will fall on you'

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Finders Keepers

So space stations aren’t like pheasants then? More like footballs.

I'm not sure, but I think that if you hit one with your car, you can't pick it up; but can another driver stop and take it home?

UK data watchdog's inaugural tech strategy was written with... *drumroll* Word 2010

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

Re: Really?

@Alister

Perhaps K's first language is English but the text was run through Word 2010's spelling and grammar checker before postiing?

Emirates dinged for slipshod online data privacy practices

Tim99 Silver badge
Flame

Emirates - Will not use

Emirates went onto my "Do not use" list when I purchased 2 business class tickets through an agent at >£10,000 which included "free" limo drop off and pick up. They stiffed me £20 for the trip to and from the airport because I was 3 miles over their 25 mile limit. I wrote to them and said that there was no mention of this in the paperwork. They wrote back and said that if I had gone onto their website, I could have searched for the information. The reply was rude and condescending, as I would have needed to know about the limit to have searched for it. I later found that the reason that I did not get stiffed in the UK, was that the limit was 60 miles. Since then I have steered 6 intercontinental business class tickets to other airlines. Service: Have they heard of it?

Sysadmin left finger on power button for an hour to avert SAP outage

Tim99 Silver badge
Facepalm

I guess that beats my post

From last month: my idiocy was only going to trash my work...

Ex-Google recruiter: I was fired for opposing hiring caps on white, Asian male nerds

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

Don't worry

It looks as though the problem is fixing itself - In our new efficient and improved workforce we only employ (independent?) contractors.

UK's Dyson to vacuum up 300 staffers for its electric car division

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

Re: Dyson hair dryer...

"I agree. It really doesn't suck." It blows?

Hypersonic nukes! Nuclear-powered drone subs! Putin unwraps his new (propaganda) toys

Tim99 Silver badge
Mushroom

Possible scenario

As well as embiggening himself, perhaps Putin is trying to break the US economy by getting them to spend pointless amounts of treasure on 'defence' - Just like Reagan did to help break the old Soviet Union?

This may be pointless, as much of the US economy has been purposed to develop unnecessary/late/ineffectual weapons systems for many decades (like the F35?). The US voter might be persuaded to stump up the money on this stuff, rather than on health and social care (which is actually bigger than defence spending) but they seem to be unaware its true purpose - To channel very large amounts of taxpayers' monies to a very small number of (already very rich) people.

Is this why Facebook is such a toxic dump? HP, HPE sued for 'leaking chems' into office site

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: A small irony

@I3N

Really old ones used mercury, PCBs were a later "safe" alternative.

Tim99 Silver badge

A small irony

HP and then Agilent were/are probably the largest manufacturer of gas chromatographs and mass spectrometers used to analyse sites for PCB and TCE contamination. PCBs were used mainly for dielectric fluids for large transformers and capacitors as well as plasticisers, flame retardants, coatings, etc., which might be where they came from.

One use for PCBs was as the pumping fluid for high vacuum diffusion pumps (as used in mass spectrometers). Some modern instruments still use diffusion pumps, but the fluids are normally silicone or polyphenyl ether oils - Although most of these systems now use turbo pumps,

Apple: Er, yes. Your iCloud stuff is now on Google's servers, too

Tim99 Silver badge
Gimp

@Yet Another Anonymous coward

If they wanted the hassle, I'm pretty sure that Intel would sell them a lot of bare-bones rack servers without the pretty panels etc., and then they could run some Darwin/BSD hybrid using some of their own code base. Might it be something to do with the large chunk of "cash" that Google pay Apple to have Google search etc., on the Mac/Pad/iPhone?

Vatican sets up dedicated exorcism training course

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Interesting from 2014...

"If you exorcise all the demons from Parliament, who will be left to govern the country?" The soulless senior civil service who really run it?

Disclaimer: I was a civil servant...

Google gives mobile operators a reason to love it, and opens rich chat up for business

Tim99 Silver badge
Devil

I told you so...

I began to suspect that Google were going to be evil when "Don't be evil" came out in ~2,000. I knew that the probability was much higher with their IPO in 2004 - But this, really? >>=========>

IT peeps, be warned: You'll soon be a museum exhibit

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: What job will last forever

Fluffer: Apparently, not since Viagra.

Farewell, Android Pay. We hardly tapped you

Tim99 Silver badge
Trollface

Barclays have their own Android payment app. Bloody minded bastards. My Barclays VISA debit card is loaded into my iPhone wallet (ducks). No, that is not an endorsement of them - Generally they are bloody minded bastards.

A print button? Mmkay. Let's explore WHY you need me to add that

Tim99 Silver badge
Trollface

Re: And despite all this users telemetry...

What is this "Acrobat" of which you write? A spawn of Satan?

Mueller bombshell: 13 Russian 'troll factory' staffers charged with allegedly meddling in US presidential election

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: I'm Confused Still

Years ago I heard a commentator say "Half of Americans vole Republican, half vote Democrat, and half don't vote". This seems to be nearly "true".

In democracies with two main parties the outcome of elections tends to be determined by a few people who can be swayed. This is why politicians target them with electoral sweeteners like tax breaks, funding for local projects and unrealistic "promises".

A computer file system shouldn't lose data, right? Tell that to Apple

Tim99 Silver badge
Gimp

Re: Cutting back on features? Not exactly.

MacOs is a certified Unix: Wikipedia. I've been around *NIX stuff since the 70s, and a fair bit of what I have used since then works in their bash CLI: ss64.com link.

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

Re: Photo

See the happy married couple - She looks happy, he looks married?

The one with the 45th anniversary gift for my wife in the pocket. >>==>

BOFH: Turn your server rack hotspot to a server rack notspot

Tim99 Silver badge

Silent treatment

Our rep from a Huge Peripherals and Equipment supplier liked doing final closures on the phone (That's the bit where they pile on the very expensive extra stuff onto a basic proposal that you had already discussed with them in previous meetings, and send you a "final contract" to approve). His technique was to go silent on a sticking point - The theory was that you (the punter) would fill the silence by agreeing the extras. It took me a couple of calls before I realised what he was doing, so I started doing the silent treatment back to him. My best call was after about 30 seconds of silence when his nerve cracked and I heard "Hello, Hello!, HELLO!!". I apologized and said. "Sorry, I had to cover the mouthpiece - My colleague wondered if I could take an urgent call on the other line from Some Unbelievably Nice supplier, as he thought I was on hold". After that his phone calls were just to arrange meetings, or "courtesy calls" to check that the kit had been delivered and installed.

Roses are red, Windows error screens are blue. It's 2018, and an email can still pwn you

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Re: "...a total of 50 CVE-listed vulnerabilities..."

Mighty magnet? Many of the needles have been in the haystack for years and are still like new, so they are probably made from Austenitic steel (non magnetic).

Microsoft working to scale Blockchain for grand distributed ID scheme

Tim99 Silver badge
Big Brother

Microsoft

...personal privacy, security and control. What could possibly go wrong?

Oracle: We've stuffed automation in 'pretty much' all our services

Tim99 Silver badge

I read the headline differently

Oracle: We've stuffed the automation in 'pretty much' all our services...

Disclaimer: I started bearing scars from Oracle with V5.

MPs: Lack of technical skills for Brexit could create 'damaging, unmanageable muddle'

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: But it will be worth it

We're British, so Black Shorts (Saviours of Britain) surely.

Ghost in the DCL shell: OpenVMS, touted as ultra reliable, had a local root hole for 30 years

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Re: Wasn't VMS...

Of course this explains Windows problems, etc...

One of the stories that I heard was that the original NT prototype from Dave (VMS) Cutler was designed to be reliable and allegedly "more secure" than VMS, but BIll told him to strip some of the reliable and secure stuff out so it would run adequately on lower-end kit (as a lot of it was written in C instead of assembler for portability between Intel and Alpha chips).

Tim99 Silver badge

Back in the day

The word around was that we should stick with VMS instead of BSD (particularly) from those with a PDP background. We certainly thought a MicroVAX was a nice piece of kit back in the 1980s.

Long haul flights on a one-aisle plane? Airbus thinks you’re up for it

Tim99 Silver badge

When I travelled on Concorde it reallly did not feel cramped and uncomfortable. There was no headroom when standing (I'm 5'8") but lots of legroom, and you were only on the aircraft for ~3.5hrs.

‘I crashed a rack full of servers with my butt’

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Just finger trouble

I was doing some development on a test server and had not saved my work. An associated program would only run if "Turbo Mode" was turned off (this dropped the CPU clock rate down to match an original 8088 chip). Some tower PCs had the turbo button next to their push-button power switch. I pressed the turbo button to start the other program, but hit the power button by mistake, immediately experiencing the well known "How stupid am I?" feeling. I managed to keep the button in, so the power stayed on. Unfortunately, I had used my dominant right hand when I had bent down to touch the switch. Unable to see they keyboard, I managed to find the keys I needed to save my work, and then type in the shutdown command. Then I drank coffee and taped a cardboard flap over the power switch to stop the stupid person doing it again.

Edit: That is one reason why I really liked the large red power switch at the back of original IBM PCs, it was almost impossible to turn it off by mistake.

No Windows 10, no Office 2019, says Microsoft

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

Re: What's a

Bombasic Bob?

An even more unstable than usual UI assistant to VisualBasic 4?

Red Hat tries CoreOS on for size – and buys

Tim99 Silver badge
Pint

Trevor

I can only upvote you once. Have one of these too >>=====>

Ubuntu reverting to Xorg in Bionic Beaver

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

Yes

But they're keeping systemd? - Mine's got K&R in the pocket >>===>

Sysadmin crashed computer recording data from active space probe

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Hmmm ...

You could just about moor a boat with Token Ring cable. We had a small temporary working TR network in our lab that had cabling taped around the walls, back of desks etc. Our company telecoms engineers came in one weekend to "make a proper job" of the cabling by running it in the wall panels and connecting it to wall pattresses. We came in on Monday and admired the new pattresses etc., then we connected the server to the IBM PS2 clients on the ring and nothing worked. We fiddled about for a bit before taking a wall panel off and found that our new network was cabled with standard POTS twisted-pair wire. When we called the installer in, he explained that the IBM TR cabling was "just twisted-pair" and that the POTS wire was the same, so they had used that because the IBM stuff didn't bend around corners easily and needed large holes drilling through the walls. After taping everything back like before, the engineers came back a few weeks later and wired it properly. Less than a year later it was all ripped out and replaced by a new building-wide system using 10-5 and 10-2 Ethernet.

Apple whispers farewell to macOS Server

Tim99 Silver badge
Gimp

I can see why they are saying goodbye

The product was actually a lot more capable than people gave it credit for, in the right environment - i.e. to deploy iOS or manage a small business. For places that had Macs, it filled a gap left in the market by products like Microsoft's original Small Business Server which could be managed by someone in the business; or by small/medium business outside contractors and software developers (including my company). Microsoft gutted SBS (partly because of pressure from the larger contractors) when they decided that everything, that they could force, was going into Microsoft's cloud to give them a reliable income stream.

I guess that Apple looked at the revenue and decided that it was not worth continuing with the amount of resources that it needed. A fair bit of the "server" can be replaced by a NAS, but the integration of Mail, Calendar, website, etc for up to 50 users was more than feasable on a Mac mini (until they cut the number of cores down to 2).

Maverick internet cop Chrome 64 breaks rules to thwart malvert scum

Tim99 Silver badge
Big Brother

This El Reg page.

I have been using DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials (and their search engine as a default) and find it works well for me. This article shows an "Enhanced B" Privacy Grade and the following trackers:-

Google: googletagservices.com; google-analytics.com - Analytics: Twitter - platform.twitter.com - Microsoft: atdmt.com - Tracker network unknown: s.dpmsrv.com (Whois shows this as VeriSign Global Registry Services)

This Comments page only shows googletagservices.com; google-analytics.com; and s.dpmsrv.com

Looking at the Extension in Safari, it is described as: "DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials" can red, modify and transmit content from all webpages. This could include sensitive information like passwords, phone numbers, and credit cards.

What, me paranoid? Certainly not! Even if I am, it does not mean that they are not after me. I always ensure that I am not logged in to any Google product (and check that I am not); funnily enough I see no targeted website and email advertising and only a very small amount of random crap. A couple of small simple text ads on a page is OK; and, If I find that I get value from a site, I do actually try and pay them...

Larry's steely grip on Oracle led to 'conflicts of interest' in NetSuite buy-out, court told

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Shock and horror!

One Real Arsehole Called Larry Ellison... Allegedly.

Biker nerfed by robo Chevy in San Francisco now lobs sueball at GM

Tim99 Silver badge

It is only USA which has the grand idiocy of everyone driving in any lane at any speed they please and overtaking on both sides. You can do this in Western Australia. I was "surprised" the first time it happened to me as I was used to checking the offside lane for overtaking traffic...

NASA is sniffing jet fuel over Germany

Tim99 Silver badge
Black Helicopters

Re: The real reason for biofuels.

Mine's the one with the tinfoil hat in the pocket. You do know that it should be on your head at all times, because they can get you when you take it off? Unless the one in your pocket is a spare, just in case someone takes the one you are wearing? You can't be too careful!

Tim99 Silver badge
Boffin

Re: call me crazy, but...

Yes, but on the ground you don't get to do cool experiments in an aeroplane (and the products of combustion and particle sizes will probably be different).

It's 2018 and your Macs, iPhones can be pwned by playing evil music

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

Re: "....HomePod, a $349 smart speaker...."

So the Google Home fandroids got their kit for free?

Microsoft gives backup software vendors 30 days of pain

Tim99 Silver badge
Big Brother

Of course

It also gives "them" longer to slurp your data after it was deleted...

'The capacitors exploded, showering the lab in flaming confetti'

Tim99 Silver badge

MOSFETs

In the 1980s I was in charge of an expensive instrument that had a DAC controlling a large electromagnet. It cycled from a high current to a low current every second or so. The controller had very large MOSFET power transistors switching about 40A Occasionally when the power wobbled the circuit would become unstable and the MOSFETs would explode. The sound was similar to a large calibre revolver report. As that happened every few weeks, until we sorted out the mains supply, that may be one reason why in old age my hearing is crap.

All aboard the Vomit Comet: Not the last train to Essex, but a modded 727 for weightless flight

Tim99 Silver badge

Purely academic research

Kate Upton YouTube Link.

IBM kills Global Technology and Global Business Services: It's all ‘IBM Services’ now

Tim99 Silver badge

Who writes this crap? A sociopath of average intelligence and ability who was fortunate to develop from the right gametes, and attended the right schools and university?

Remember those holy tech wars we used to have? Heh, good times

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: S**t!

My wife tells me that I'm deeply cynical because it saves time. She may not be correct, it is probably because I am old - I can give an organization or person the benefit of the doubt (once, only).

PowerShell comes to MacOS and Linux. Oh and Windows too

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

PowerShell?

If God had meant us to use PowerShell, He'd never have given us bash (Apologies to Flanders and Swann) - Having used both, I think I will continue to use a *NIX shell, thank you.

What do we want? Consensual fun times. How do we get it? Via an app with blockchain...

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: What kind of sick f**k

Doesn't want tea? - Do you put the milk in before or after? Potential relationships have foundered on less.

Apple, quit milking tech-addicted fruit of our loins – shareholders

Tim99 Silver badge
Gimp

Definitely not perfect, but has basic parental controls

"Use parental controls on your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch": Apple link.

Parliamentary 'puters made 30k tries to procure pr0nz last year

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

It doesn't surprise me that they are looking at people f*cking it's what they do best.

I think you might have meant "...looking at f*cking up, it's what they do best"...