* Posts by Tim99

2002 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2008

Petition calls for Adobe Flash to survive as open source zombie

Tim99 Silver badge
Facepalm

Please, No!

If academics and researches need to access "orphaned" flash works, they could have an old PC running whatever version of Windows, or a virtualised instance just for this work. It really should not be attached to any other network, and when crap infects it, it could be rebuilt. Then use them to create a new instance of the media with something saner.

How about, as a last resort, playing it through a nice large screen with a decent audio output and recording it onto another device? Although one of the problems is that people, at the time, cannot always recognize what will be important in the future.

We are now in danger of trapping ourselves so that we lose access to older material. The idea that if something is on the internet it will be there forever is rubbish - We have already lost much of the content from more than 10 years ago.

In the early C19th using chlorine bleaching of wood pulp to make paper became common, and by the early C20th was ubiquitous. Unfortunately, the chlorine bleached paper was unstable and could crumble away over a few decades. Before this, most important "paper" documents were on vegetable/linen fibre paper. As a result, many documents since that time have disappeared from record, or are so fragile that they are not available to modern researchers. For important documents, archivists now have them printed onto "acid free" paper, which are expected to last 500-1000 years. This is one reason why old church records are often in good condition and can still be read, but many Victorian documents have disappeared.

In the early 1980s I was involved in having to archive workplace health records which needed to be kept for 60+ years - It was suggested by a major IT supplier that we use "Write Once, Read Many times"(WORM) optical disks as they used a similar technology to CDs which were initially advertised as "Perfect Sound Forever" - They came back to us only a couple of years later when they realised that some of the media was failing. They recommended that we keep multiple copies of the data on hard drives, and move it on to new devices every few years - We did, but made certain that we printed multiple copies of everything using decent ink onto acid-free paper and archived the copies at multiple sites...

No time for nap, update your QNAP: RAIDed NAS data corruption bug squashed

Tim99 Silver badge
Stop

Re: "There is never a case when RAID5 is the best choice, ever!"

If your data is that important to you, pay the price. For a small system use RAID1 - Bigger ones RAID10. What, that's too expensive? Then your data is not that important/time critical - Use normal backups.

Revealed: 779 cases of data misuse across 34 British police forces

Tim99 Silver badge
Terminator

Re: Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Even though (Baron) John Dalberg-Acton's quote refers to Vatican 1, a longer quotation is even more relevant: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority, still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.

The Reg chats to Ordnance Survey's chief data wrangler

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Disagree - GPS is the future

@David Harper 1

If you need GPS to tell you where you are when visibility is poor, you should probably stick to parts of the country that don't have footpaths adjacent to sheer drops that can kill you. I hear that Norfolk is nice and flat.
I knew this bit of Norfolk well. The weather can be foul, there are quicksands, dykes and dangerous tides, and there is a long section here with a nice drop that has killed and injured people.

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Top o' graphical

"At a minimum if they are going to go cloudy..." As their business is data, I'd go so far as to say ... "Use only your own in-house cloud."

TechnologyOne says City of Brisbane ignored its own reviews

Tim99 Silver badge
Facepalm

Reinvention?

The $120-million-plus contract at the centre of the dispute is to replace 13 of the council's systems with a single “Local Government Systems” project.

I know that we tend to think that we are special, but similar systems have been done many times - "Buy something that already works".

As an aside: My father was a Senior Local Government Officer - The Treasurer/CFO/Deputy Clerk for a UK rural district council, he put in one of the first "computer systems" in the 1960s to do "the rates" etc. It worked so well the supplier gave them an ANITA Calculator (about 15 weeks wages then) as a "thank you", and used them as a reference site. It was still working well when he grabbed the money and retired when the rolling disaster of the Redcliffe-Maud Commission/Local Government Act was enacted in 1973. He usually preferred to use a manual comptometer instead of the ANITA; but when he retired he gave them £5 for it, and continued to use it for the next 15 years or so.

Alphabet takes Euro antitrust fine in stride, spooks investors with rising Google ad costs

Tim99 Silver badge
Big Brother

Re: Google is in trouble

Maybe the European Commission could hit them with a large fine every quarter, until they get the message? I believe that the fine is limited to only 10% of the overall annual turnover of the company, but that should get their attention.

Expect the Note 8 to break the bank (and your wallet)

Tim99 Silver badge
Joke

Re: Note 7

You know that you have nearly described an iPhone SE?

They start at "only" £379.00...

User filed fake trouble tickets to take helpful sysadmin to lunches

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: A university education is wasted...

Many years ago I had a senior scientist colleague who told me that the only really useful things he learnt at Cambridge were how to eat with chopsticks, and how to take his trousers off without removing his desert boots first...

Q. What's today's top language? A. Python... no, wait, Java... no, C

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

Re: @Phil O'Sophical -- I suspect there are quite a few Java devs out there

@Someone Else

But to be really good/bad at it, it should be the first one that you used - Like me, unfortunately.

SQL Server 2017's first rc lands and – yes! – it runs on Linux

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Well they want to stay relevant

I was making decisions about this stuff then. The perception was, at the time, that Unix was not as secure, stable or as capable as VMS, and the "UNIX Wars" Had started, so Ken had a point. One of the things that derailed the company was the unappealing DEC Rainbow, which could run DOS, but often needed a special version of vendor software like Lotus 123, it could also run CP/M software and had VT100+ terminal emulation. They were expensive, and it's idiosyncrasies probably forced people into a PC environment. We also had the PDP-11/23 based DEC Professional for engineers/scientists and DECMates for clerical support workers. There was some similarity in software between the models, like they could all run varieties of the WPS word processor and linked to the functional but basic ALL-IN-1 suite.

I thought at the time that a better approach for DEC to sell to their mini customers, might have been to avoid the PC which was still in its infancy and sell MicroVAX Servers with standardized software. Clerical staff could be given terminals - Small office workgroup users were generally doing low level clerical tasks. Networking was easy with DECNet, and the relatively few "high level" engineers/scientists/data crunchers could be given their own networked MicroVAX.

In the end we went with NetWare and 286/386 PCs which could run terminal emulation software into our MicroVAX/PDP/DataGeneral minis, and later tried to replace proprietary mini OSs with Unix, but by that time a lot of our specialist software could run on PCs.

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Horror Movie?

Did somebody fight through the cobwebs and go into the necropolis to do incantations over the old Xenix/Data Server/Sybase codebases?

Yes, I am really that old >>===============>

Funnily enough, charging ££££s for trashy bling-phones wasn't a great idea

Tim99 Silver badge
Trollface

Android?

Well, there's your problem.

Want to kill your IT security team? Put the top hacker in charge

Tim99 Silver badge
Boffin

Re: Best advice

Many years ago, when I was a UK Scientific Civil Servant, there were "special merit" promotions. Normally by the time you had reached the level of Principal Scientific Officer, much of your work was management/administration. Special merit grades carried on doing science stuff, without having to get involved with administratum. As I recall, a couple of staff in our small establishment were special merit PSOs - With one a Senior Principal Scientific Officer (roughly equivalent to a Colonel or Brigadier then); just as well because although he was one of the brightest people I have met, his lack of management/interpersonal skills were obvious to me, even as a junior staff member.

Truck spills slimy load all over Oregon road – drivers slip in eel slick

Tim99 Silver badge

I don't suppose the hagfish were too pleased either...

BOFH: That's right. Turn it off. Turn it on

Tim99 Silver badge
Joke

Re: You could try this

@ Charles 9

Most of the people that I deal with who use Windows 7 are retirees, like me. They stayed with 7 because they don't see a reason to change, or they have heard about Windows 10 and don't want the hassle. In both cases, after the "forced upgrades to 10" stories, they would probably accept that a Windows 10 upgrade could cause a problem on their machine too....

If they are on a non-Windows machine, they don't have problems :-)

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

You could try this

If a user reports any real or imaginary changes, I tell them that this is because Microsoft has just updated Windows 10, sometimes it's a good a reason as anything else, and it may be true. They are usually happy about it, or if they aren't I commiserate with them and tell them that there is nothing that we can do.

Microsoft drops Office 365 for biz. Now it's just Microsoft 365. Word

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Welcome to Microsoft's "new", more obvious, rentier capitalist model...

nbn™ hits the half-way mark – but has more than half of the job left

Tim99 Silver badge

@CentralCoasty

The killer for mobile data is media streaming like Netflix at ~1GB an hour upwards. The young'uns (and pensioners like me) are not going to give that up unless 4G gets a lot cheaper

Tim99 Silver badge

Simon

You might be lucky, I think it depends more than anything on your ISP.

I live in a retirement village, with an nbn fibre line into our comms room, and VDSL into each house (max distance <200m). We each almost always get ~75Mbps down and 35Mbs up, this can drop occasionally to ~20Mbps down in the evening with a bit more latency. Doing the sums I reckon our wholesaler buys a $3-4000/month CVC - Which for $33/month, unlimited data, seems pretty good to me. As more houses are built (we have about 170 with another 60 to go) we can buy more connectivity, perhaps at the same cost/house.

Roland McGrath steps down as glibc maintainer after 30 years

Tim99 Silver badge
Thumb Up

Thank you Roland.

That is all.

PCs will get pricier and you're gonna like it, say Gartner market shamans

Tim99 Silver badge
Stop

Tea leaves

Cockney rhyming slang for "thieves" - Price: $6,995.0. Can anyone remember an accurate report from Gartner predicting the future two years out?

In after-hours trade on Monday, NYSE deployed test code to production

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

Re: Maths is hard

"In what universe does 123.456 get rounded to 123.47?"

The one where the NYSE keeps ~0.0113% on top of their other fees?

Mine's the one with this book by Guy Standing in the pocket >>===>

Google DeepMind trial failed to comply with data protection – ICO

Tim99 Silver badge

"What is the sound of a stable door not being closed?

Loud squealing and slamming sounds when the storm comes?

Java 9 release back on track, community votes 'yes'

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Community Process

I bear scars from Oracle starting from version 5. My default position is: When Oracle wants something the hostages that are their customers should check their contracts. I am certainly not inclined to trust a company that set a default install of the Ask toolbar when some unsuspecting user clicked on a link to install Java...

Who botched Oz cancer registry rollout? Pretty much everybody

Tim99 Silver badge
Mushroom

Again!

Stop outsourcing projects - How about we keep some very senior IT savvy staff in the public services, pay them a large crapload so they are not easily poached, and give them training and a career progression path to keep them? Let them outsource the hardware (and small bits of the rest if they really, really, have to) but keep the responsibility and authority in-house. Make certain that all of the software is open sourced, even if you have to pay the likes of IBM more in the short term, - The public who payed for this should own it, and be able to reuse it. Much of it comes down to generic databases, front ends, and appropriate user control/auditing/management tools.

Disclosure: I'm a muttering retired old fart: But since 1970, I have worked as a scientific civil servant; as a senior tech manager in a very large public utility; run a largish tech and scientific based business in the private sector; and then been the MD and major shareholder of a smaller company.

Another disclosure: Before spending a lot of time working on/in/managing and designing IT (from 1971 off and on) I worked as a scientist on rocket engines - OK, these IT projects often blow up leaving smoking holes, but they are not rocket science.

I look forward to your down-votes.

Hot news! Combustible Galaxy Note 7 to return as 'Galaxy Note FE'

Tim99 Silver badge
Flame

Flaming Excrement? Paper bag supplied.

Warning: Item self-ignites, use protective gear if inserting in letterbox.

A good time Woz had by all: We peeked our head into Primary Data and this is what we saw

Tim99 Silver badge
Paris Hilton

CEO - Lance Smith

The supplied picture looks as though he might have just inhaled Bolivian marching powder. I suppose that ensures that at least one person is awake at the end of the press conference.

Obviously, Paris has never done that >>====================>

Microsoft recommends you ignore Microsoft-recommended update

Tim99 Silver badge
Pint

Re: Anon to avoid flying cabbages.

Sir, have one of these >>============>

So far on this thread it's only the one of them..

So..

That'd be the entire team then?

Concise, and much funnier than my inadequate post.

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Re: Flailing Helplessly

Perhaps it's to encourage us to embrace the cloud? Maybe they haven't followed that idea through far enough. If everything is in the cloud, we might not need Windows (on "real" desktops) at all, cut everything back, fire more of the staff and sell lots of their own server based stuff - A bit like a mainframe, only shinier and not so reliable...

Capita flogs Asset Services division for £888m

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

Re: 888

Irony? The number 8 is auspicious in Chinese culture. "Lucky, lucky, lucky". Luck for so much crap, and so little profit (2.4% in 2015).

Apple, LG, Huawei, ZTE, HTC accused of pilfering 'find my phone' tech

Tim99 Silver badge
Black Helicopters

Interesting

Does El Reg, or any esteemed reader, know why Google who provide the "Google Maps, Android Device Manager, Find My Device, Google Messages, Android Messenger, Google Hangouts, Google Plus, and Google Latitude" software; and have their own line of branded devices using that software are not included? A quite word from the spooks perhaps? Who knows what might come out in a (even a patent plaintive friendly) court like East Texas District?

Debian 9 feels like home with security upgrades and a flaming vulpine warming your toes

Tim99 Silver badge
Linux

Re: Nice changes-

If Debian 8 works for you, it might be worth a look at Devuan: Link.

'OK, everyone. Stop typing, this software is DONE,' said no one ever

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: When was the last update for...

cat -n ?

cat -v ?

Tim99 Silver badge

Yes, some models relied on lead/additive combustion products to lubricate cylender head valve seals/seats. If damage was likely for these types of engine, the components could be replaced. Alternatively, different unleaded additives could be purchased to mix with standard unleaded fuel to protect the engine.

Microsoft's new Surface laptop defeats teardown – with glue

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Apple

Perhaps, I am an old fart who has used and written software for computing devices for 45+ years. I am on my second iPad - I use a 'real' computer for less than 2hrs a day now. The first iPad was the original model bought 7 years ago (on its first shipping day) as a plaything. My wife purchased an iPad Air to try out, and said she would pass it on to me if she didn't like it (I had to purchase my own a few weeks later as it became the only computer she uses). The original was passed on to a friend for light use - it's battery life is still about 4 hours of use, but this might be because it is often in sleep mode.

My 'new' one is down to about 7-8 hours (2.5 years ago it was 10+). I am trying to use the 'short' battery life to justify a new 10.5" iPad Pro...

Hotheaded Brussels civil servants issued with cool warning: Leak

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: That's not hot. This is hot.

Ex Pom in Oz - It's the middle of the winter here and 20C - It feels bloody cold.

Wanted: broadband crash-test dummies for ACCC's speed tests

Tim99 Silver badge

Abuse?

I hope that the ID of volunteers and the "reporting back" is randomized/anonymized, otherwise 2,000 lucky users may get the best performance that they have ever had. Whilst the rest of us don't.

US voter info stored on wide-open cloud box, thanks to bungling Republican contractor

Tim99 Silver badge
Joke

Re: Data mining?

To confirm their general incompetence, the GOP contractor initially copied an old DB schema onto a Linux cloud server, but had probably not heard of Unix/epoch time. The concept of null would have been beyond them, so they put a default of zero in the DOB field. Then after the database was initially set up, someone else said "We can't use this freetard system, you must upgrade to a real Windows system". The said contractor then looked for a data conversion tool, which replaced all of the zeros with the valid 1/1/1970 value...

FOIA documents show the Kafkaesque state of US mass surveillance

Tim99 Silver badge
Stop

Looking at the article, I knew I would be depressed.

Did someone at El Reg really have to use a digitally colorized image instead of the proper monochrome that $DIETY intended?

Fighter pilot shot down laptops with a flick of his copper-plated wrist

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: not necessarily

Placebo effect - Better results from ingestion of two sugar pills compared to one, and an even better response after a saline injection - It seems that more "treatment" tends to give a better clinical response.

Oh the irony: Government Digital Services can't pay staff because of tech problems

Tim99 Silver badge
Facepalm

WTF?

That is all.

Look who's joined the anti-encryption posse: Germany, come on down

Tim99 Silver badge
Trollface

Re: Short memories

Lining up to be the USA's new bestie in Europe after Brexit?

Specsavers embraces Azure and AWS, recoils at Oracle's 'wow' factor

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

Re: Oracle gun to the head

An old saw: Q: What do you call an Oracle customer? A: A Hostage.

Mine's the one with Codd and Date books in the pockets. >>=====>

Two leading ladies of Europe warn that internet regulation is coming

Tim99 Silver badge
Big Brother

Re: Logic Of Extra Monitoring

@bazza

I suspect that I am not missing the point. A very long time ago I was a minor technical functionary working in this area in the U.K. CIvil Service. The real point, I believe, is that governments are rightly concerned that their main threat is from their own populations, small numbers of people are not normally a significant real threat. A State's main purpose is to preserve itself and to forward the interests of whomsoever the State deems to be important. A Government's main concern is to keep itself in power and influence the population so that it can remain in power. Often the aims of the State and the Government are the same, sometimes they are not. Governments are concerned about "Events, dear boy, events" leading to loss of power. The State does not worry too much about who is in Government providing they do not threaten the structures that the State relies on to continue itself.

If we assume that a State threat is something like having more than 40% of its working population un(der)employed because of technological changes leading to the potential to have a widespread break down of social order; the functionaries of the State's desire to monitor the population makes sense. Governments and the politicians that comprise them (particularly those of a right-wing authoritarian persuasion) are happy to comply, as it is part of their "Bad people/things are out there, and you need a strong leader/government like us to protect you" agenda.

Tim99 Silver badge
Big Brother

Re: Logic Of Extra Monitoring

Following up on my post in a similar Australian El Reg Thread - About the False Positive Paradox, which is often used in medicine and the "real sciences". Roughly, this states that: When the target is a small proportion of a population, and there is a probability of misidentifying something that is not your target, the real targets can become lost in a larger amount of false positives.

In this case, let us make up some numbers - The number of potential active terrorists is 500 in a population of 50 million. Assuming Sturgeon's revelation (that 90% of everything is crap) our 500 terrorists have in their ranks 50 competent people; unfortunately, if they are competent you are less likely to identify them before they are an active threat. Now, let us assume that the mechanisms of the State are nearly faultless and only misidentify one in a million of the whole population as a threat (when they are not); you would then have an equal number of innocents to baddies, which is manageable. In the real world the number of false positives could be one in a thousand, so for every 50 baddies you are wasting your time looking at 50,000 innocents; or if it is one in a hundred that becomes half a million people... To be charitable (and I am not), this type of surveillance may be useful in tidying up after an incident, but is almost certainly counterproductive in its stated aim to protect the bulk of the population (from the threat posed from a very small number).

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

Re: But Angela has a working brain...

... Er,<Pedant Mode> a degree in Physics. Her PhD is in Chemistry </Pedant Mode>:-

"Merkel, Angela (1986). Untersuchung des Mechanismus von Zerfallsreaktionen mit einfachem Bindungsbruch und Berechnung ihrer Geschwindigkeitskonstanten auf der Grundlage quantenchemischer und statistischer Methoden (Investigation of the mechanism of decay reactions with single bond breaking and calculation of their velocity constants on the basis of quantum chemical and statistical methods): Academy of Sciences of the German Democratic Republic - Cited in Langguth, Gerd (August 2005, p. 109. ISBN 3-423-24485-2. Listed in the Catalogue of the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek under subject code 30 (Chemistry).

Oz government says UK's backdoor will be its not-a-backdoor model

Tim99 Silver badge
Big Brother

Paradox

Haven't these people heard of the false positive paradox? Of course they haven't, they are just politicians. Based on previous performance, anything that Brandis likes is probably taking several steps to far. The ability to filter through everybody's communications after an event might, just, help follow up investigations but will make initial prevention less likely. It seems that the perpetrators of the recent incidents were known/reported to the police/security forces, so blanket surveillance of all communication would not have done much to identify them.

By the way, this is not really about terrorism, it is the well established paranoia that governments have with their populations. Perhaps they are finally following advice on why this is necessary when most of their populations become un(der)employed. What if all the major platforms introduce end-to-end encryption with a new key for each item? Does that mean that all "relevant" devices will have to be individually compromised?