* Posts by Tim99

1999 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2008

BA IT systems failure: Uninterruptible Power Supply was interrupted

Tim99 Silver badge
FAIL

Mandy Rice-Davis Applies*

"Although various people have speculated that operations and jobs outsourced to India's Tata Consulting Services (TCS) contributed to the cockup, both the airline and TCS vehemently deny it."

*He (They) would, wouldn't he (they)? Wikipedia Link.

Toyota's entertaining the idea of Linux in cars

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Trollface

Ah but,

does it need systemd...

BT considers scrapping 'gold-plated' pensions in bid to plug £14bn deficit

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Re: Who should pay?

@Aladdin Sane

That is true, but the people who tell you that, don't tell you when Bismark introduced the aged pension many people started work at 13, and you had to get to 65 before it paid out. You worked for 52 years - The average life expectancy was also influenced by the statistic that perhaps 20% of the population had died before they reached 13. These days a number of people are not in the full time workforce until they are over 21, so that only gives 44 years of potential contributions. A realistic pension contribution to give people a comfortable retirement could be >20%. The discussion about putting up the retirement age seems to ignore the projection that, within a decade, 40% of the potential workforce will be un(der)employed.

WebAssembly fandom kills Google's Portable Native Client

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Unhappy

Why

would you try and base a business on Google's own platform du jour? You would have thought that we would have learnt by now...

MySQL devs take cache behind shed, shot heard

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Trollface

An old saw

Fast, reliable, cheap - Pick two. Reliable Referential Integrity is apparently not required by some users. So we can't have fast too?

Twice-crashed HPE SANs at Oz Tax Office built for speed, not strength, and turned off error reporting

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Alert

Settlement?

“We have reached a commercial settlement with HPE, the detailed terms of which are subject to contractual confidentiality. The settlement recoups key costs incurred by the ATO, and provides additional and higher grade IT equipment giving the ATO a world-class storage network.”

So does that mean that HPE just discounted their service visit bill, replaced the disks and the connectors, and gave them another shelf so that proper fault tolerance could be used? Or did they replace the whole steaming pile with kit that was fit for purpose, at no cost, and pay for downtime etc?

Life is... pushing all the right buttons on the wrong remote control

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Gimp

Apple TV

The Apple TV remote is pretty good - Shame that the content often isn't.

Init freedom declared as systemd-free Devuan hits stable 1.0.0 status

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Linux

Re: ARM, pretty please!

If you have a Pi, installation instructions are here: install link.

Distro build instructions for rasp11,2 & 3 are here: git.devuan.org link.

Distro watch for Ubuntu lovers: What's ahead in Linux land

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Linux

Wot no Devuan?

RC2 without systemd - Too soon? Link.

Dodge this: Fiat-Chrysler gets diesel-fuelled sueball from DoJ

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Re: Eco?

"The realisation and understanding that NOx is worse than CO2 is beginning to be understood better by the general populace now, not sure how long the scientists have known." - Known since at least the early 1980s when I was working in that area. If you are interested, look up "peroxyacyl nitrates" and air pollution ( famously cited as a nasty in LA smog).

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: It's not just diesels

I have a VW Polo 4 cylinder turbo, for which the manufacturer figures are 59mpg. I get about 55 but this drops to about 45 with the air conditioning on and the engine stop/start turned off (Otherwise the aircon turns itself off when the engine turns itself off when stationary at traffic lights etc.). YMMV - I am an old fart, and I drive like one.

Britain's on the brink of a small-scale nuclear reactor revolution

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Global temps have been static for nearly 20 years.

Cherry picked data with a large axis from an antiwarmist site? The original graphed data is here: GISS NASA website. This shows a rise of ~1C The lump in the 1940s may be due to the increased production and devastation of WWll?

Java Daddy James Gosling goes to work for Amazon Web Services

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His description -

An "Adventure" - Really?

It's just 'Pro' now, guys: Microsoft gives Surface a subtle resurfacing

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Re: I want to telephone people

Skype?

Hi! I’m Foxy! It looks like you want to run Flash. Do you need help?

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Dear BBC,

@Dave Bell

At the moment whois shows bbci.co.uk as registered to the BBC.

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Dear BBC,

Dear Charlie,

Why should I be careful? I don't live on the Isle of Wight.

It must be time for my SCAN (Senior Citizen's Afternoon Nap).

Tim99 Silver badge

Dear BBC,

Can we expect that this will finally kill Flash on your site?

Yours faithfully,

Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells

You think your day was bad? OS X malware hackers just swiped a Mac dev's app source

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Re: Deathly silence

"About the only thing truly idiot proof is a Chromebook."

Yes, I can see that. However the popular Chrome Browser (particularly on Windows) seems to be where most of crap lurks on the machines of the retirees that I help (I'm retired too, so any help is pro bono). My personal record is an elderly gentleman who complained that browsing on his 1 year old Windows 10 laptop was slow and unreliable - MalwareBytes found 704 PUPs.

I don't necessarily recommend MalwareBytes (not with real-time protection turned on) but occasionally running it manually is quite instructive. Generally Microsoft's in-built protection seems to be as good as anything at the download/file level, but can let many unsavoury trackers through. I am surprised that Google does not clean it up, as their business model relies on THEM tracking you in exchange for an easy and "efficient" user experience.

Warning - Potential Bias Alert: After I retired from writing software for many platforms, I thought "sod it", got rid of my 5 Windows machines, and now use an Apple Mac - My life is much easier - If I really have to run Windows for a couple of ex-colleagues I run it in a simple window in a Parallels VM.

Bye bye MP3: You sucked the life out of music. But vinyl is just as warped

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Rather than like buying a BMW

Peter - Perhaps, we had a Naim CD player that sounded good with the rest of the Naim kit. My wife preferred the sound of the LP12 though (I agreed with her, obviously).

Tim99 Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: Quality of vinyl

I had 2 copies of the Sheffield Labs LP 'I've Got The Music In Me' by Thelma Houston and Pressure Cooker, one was for playing and the other was unplayed for keeping. It sounded amazing with no discernible pops/clicks/artifacts. After I had to get rid of our LP12/Naim, I got £10 for one and £200 for the other. The digital "lossless album" version that I now have is really not the same...

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: "You can even physically see how the music is happening."

@DJV

Truth will out?: Arthur Lintgen, the Groove Reader.

nbn™ needs copper to build FTTN: another 15,000 km of it

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FAIL

@mathew42

I may have not explained this adequately All of our neighbors in private housing in our suburb have FTTP, it was started under the Labor government. Our internet is bulk billed through a single FTTP connection to the comms room in our retirement village. It was planned that way, so that we could all have an adequate and inexpensive service.

We currently have 140+ seniors units on our one site. Our wholesaler sells the access to the whole site, each unit pays $33 per month - Hence my calculation, indicating that for most of the time we are not all consuming 100 Mbps. On the very rare occasion that we are all running NetFlix etc at the same time, the wholesaler throttles the site to ~140 x 18 Mbps or roughly 2,500 Mbps (2.5 Gbps). We have discussed pushing up our individual monthly fee, but at the moment, for a few hours a month, it is not worth it. The village is still expanding to its planned 250 houses and the comms has been designed to cope with 250 x 100 Mbps (25 Gbps). I would be surprised if we have to pay more than $50/month as our site's traffic continues to increase. As more people move into apartments and self-managed/strata estates our wholesale model makes more sense. Our $33 also includes a friendly local support person.

The biggest problem that we had locally was that our Telstra mobile local phone coverage was awful "because you have the NBN so you have less need for it". Our local Telstra mobile performance improved dramatically when Vodaphone offered a better local service, funny that.

Anecdotally, many of our private neighbors are with Telstra or Optus; their typical FTTP plans include streaming entertainment, unlimited national VOIP, 1000+GB of data @50Mbs for about $120/month. To get something similar we would have to add our $18 VOIP (Includes a monitored personal alarm, but has a 9 cent flagfall for non-local calls - My bill is typically $23), and $12 for Netflix to our $33 giving a total monthly fee of ~$68, which I think is pretty reasonable.

Tim99 Silver badge
FAIL

@mathew42

Yes, I am sure. We have fibre to our central comms room (which also houses all of the VIOP traffic) and VDSL2 from the comms room to each of our homes (typically 30-150 meters) so far we have about 140 homes connected. The VOIP with a compulsory monitored personal alarm is another $18.

I am pretty certain that the drop is not down to just our wholesaler but is probably their supplier iiNet, who seem to have gone downmarket since their takeover by TPG. I am not sure what wholesale arrangements iiNet have, but I remember there were problems with Internode a while back.

I am fairly confident that the residents of our 140 units are not all streaming HD on Stan/NetFlix to multiple TVs and playing WoW at the same time, so I would imagine that our wholesaler has purchase capacity at normal contention ratios. - At most we are talking about 140 @ 100Mbps x $38 divided by their contention ratio. I have only seen the 18Mbps figure a few times for perhaps half an hour, so that might indicate that they are working on a ratio of (at most) 5:1 which is much better than industry standards.

I suspect that the Labor plan was not ideal, but the Liberals could not bear the thought of all of that money not going to Malcolm's mates, as well as (perhaps) instructions from Murdoch to delay/reduce the rollout to protect NewsCorp and Foxtel revenues...

Tim99 Silver badge

@Pompous Git

As outlined in out previous correspondence, our normally works fine. We live in a retirement complex which has just changed wholesalers. The only problem with the previous lot was that they very occasionally did not spend enough on CVC capacity and cut us down to <1Mbps in the last 3 days or so of the month and then would ask for more money, which restored full speed; so it looks like their business model/usage was incorrect. The company was very small and folded when another of the MD's businesses was involved in a reverse take-over.

The new supplier is better, offering unlimited "unthrottled" data at $33/month - Currently Speedtest is showing 86Mbps down and 38Mbs up, which seems to be their typical performance. I have occasionally seen it as low as 18Mbps down in the evening, but still with 30+Mbps up - Perhaps that implies that performance drops may be caused by lack of capacity (CVC pricing at peak times?)

Comey was loathed by the left, reviled by the right – must have been doing something right

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Comey was a coward for not throwing Hilldog under the bus

"If you are going to spout shyte at least have the balls to use your own account. Or are you the Donald?"

Probably not. The post does not appear to have unintentional spelling errors, and lacks the usual unnecessary upper-case letters.

Realistic Brits want at least 3 security steps on bank accounts

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IT Angle

Re: Like Razors ...

OneBlade - Alternatively you could buy a safety razor and use a Feather blade (the same make blade maker as the OneBlade). The Feather razor and blades are cheaper, ~$50 for 200. I have a coarse beard and have been shaving for the last 55+ years, each blade lasts me a week, and so far I have bought >400 blades. Warning: They are very sharp and take a couple of weeks to get used to them.

systemd-free Devuan Linux hits RC2

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Linux

"The question I keep asking myself is if systemd is so bad, why have all the major distos except Slackware and Gentoo adopted it?"

Dreams of riches? It seems to be a way of locking users into a "Big Company Distribution" - Even If the distribution is open source, but becomes becomes convoluted and opaque, only the anointed "Big Company" people will be able to support it; and the user will be locked into that particular distribution. Are we revisiting the Unix Wars?

Uber cloaked its spying and all it got from Apple was a slap on the wrist

Tim99 Silver badge
Gimp

A different take

More than a slap on the wrist from Apple according to 9to5mac.com?

"As you might expect, however, it didn’t take long for Apple and its engineers to catch on to Uber’s tactics and the issues went straight to the top. Tim Cook called Uber CEO Travis Kalanick to come meet with him on Apple’s campus. Cook reportedly opened the meeting with a simple, “So I’ve heard you’ve been breaking some of our rules.”

He went on to demand that Uber stop the fingerprinting and put the app back in compliance with Apple’s privacy guidelines. The consequence for refusing this demand from Cook, was that Uber would be removed from the App Store.

For Mr. Kalanick, the moment was fraught with tension. If Uber’s app was yanked from the App Store, it would lose access to millions of iPhone customers — essentially destroying the ride-hailing company’s business. So Mr. Kalanick acceded."

Shooting org demands answers from Met Police over gun owner blab

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FAIL

Smartwater and security?

^It confirmed that YDM (website here, requires Flash)...^

Consumers go off PCs as global shipments continue their decline

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Big Brother

Re: Consumers

@DropBear

The Bang is your friend: Link - DuckDuckGo

If you type in !g "your search" you will get an encrypted Google Search. It can be misleading (a good thing?). I typed in "VW Polo" directly into Google which came back with adverts for my country of residence - !g "VW Polo" in DuckDuckGo came back with a Google Search with fewer adverts which were for another country...

Apple’s premium TV plans – the hobby doomed to stay that way

Tim99 Silver badge
Gimp

Re: Apple TV poor in the UK

I had an AppleTV, and bought a smart TV 4 months ago. They are both substandard, but the smart TV interface is so appallingly bad that I find that I prefer to use the Apple when I can (It's a pity that their content is so poor though). It might be easier for Apple to improve their content than the various smart TV suppliers to produce decent interfaces.

Who really gives a toss if it's agile or not?

Tim99 Silver badge
IT Angle

Re: The lot in charge might change, but sir humphrey still runs the country

But they do achieve something. We might think that the purpose of a publicly funded project is to produce a working system. Their real purpose is to funnel extremely large amounts of public money into the pockets of the anointed few. If the project is inexpensive and produces something that works, it has failed. A perfect project has an exorbitant cost, and does not produce a working solution - Failure is expected, otherwise you can't keep respeccing and redoing it over years at high daily rates.

Utility company picks NB-IoT, actively spurns rival techs' USPs

Tim99 Silver badge
Trollface

Re: Security?

Or is that a bad word?

Not a bad word, but it has first been translated from English into Mandarin, then Hindi and Tiếng Việt by people who are not native speakers of the previous language. Then converted back, via Chinglish for the poor sods who are tasked with creating this. The hardware engineers will have one translation, and the software developers will have another. The whole thing will be driven by a team who's original ideas were copied from a manglement PowerPoint presentation by a marketing drone.

Head of US military kit-testing slams F-35, says it's scarcely fit to fly

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: de Havilland Mosquito?

@Peter Clarke 1

The Mosquito also shares a failing with the F35- tropical temperatures and humidity caused the glue holding it together to fail

Possibly a manufacturing fault, and not the glue: Wikipedia Link.

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: There have been planes like this before.

@Ledswinger

De Havilland Mosquito - Successful fast fighter, bomber, ground-attack, anti-shipping, photo-reconnaissance, and carrier-borne variants: Wikipedia link

'Windows 10 destroyed our data!' Microsoft hauled into US court

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

"I'm just so glad I'm retired."

That's the prime requirement for being expected to support friends and family.

I'm excused - I tell them a truth, "I retired before Windows 10 came out, and I don't use it."

As I have posted before, I was horrified and started to plan retirement when I looked at beta versions of Vista.

'Clearance sale' shows Apple's iPad is over. It's done

Tim99 Silver badge

@sitta_europea

I'm a Chartered Chemist, and started writing software in 1971. I now use an iPad more than a conventional computer.

If you actually threw the iPad in the bin, I hope the satisfaction that you got was worth the money that you lost - You could have asked Apple for a refund, or sold it...

Why do GUIs jump around like a demented terrier while starting up? Am I on my own?

Tim99 Silver badge
Meh

Re: Microsoft time

I gave up using a browser to actually download stuff; and now copy "whatever" to the paste buffer and use curl -O http:/www.whatever... in a terminal window. I get a nice restful screen that shows how big the file is, how quickly it is downloading, how much has downloaded, and a reasonable estimation of how long the rest will take.

Tools like curl and wget are roughly 20 years old. Why can't the GUI/Web people get something as basic as this right?

Microsoft cloud TITSUP: Skype, Outlook, Xbox, OneDrive, Hotmail down

Tim99 Silver badge
Joke

@Iain

So it sounds like someone broke something within Microsoft's account authentication systems...

How would you be able to tell?

Microsoft kills Windows Vista on April 11: No security patches, no hot fixes, no support, nada

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

I look back at it fondly.

I can thank Vista. I used to write software for XP, amongst other OSs. I looked at Vista when it came out, was appalled, and started to look at at structuring my life for retirement. I had stopped paid work, and gone back to using mostly *NIX based systems, well before Windows 8...

Microsoft really wants those MongoDB devs to move to DocumentDB

Tim99 Silver badge

Hmm

Microsoft, MongDB, and Java, my flabber is ghasted...

Did your in-flight entertainment widget suck? It's Panasonic's fault, claims software biz

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: How do you make hardware that runs certain software slower?

@DougS

True, what I meant was that unless favoured software was used, the hardware would add the interrupt. Maybe by setting an undocumented hardware switch? Although in this case, according to the plaintiff's statement: ...among other things, deliberately refusing to distribute source code for its open-source Linux-based operating system and intertwined “core” software, which controls access to the basic functions of Panasonic IFE hardware systems... Panasonic controls the OS as well as the hardware, hence my comment about Microsoft.

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: How do you make hardware that runs certain software slower?

Easily. Microsoft's MSDE versions of SQL had programmed delays that got longer as more concurrent users were added. I believe that initially it was controlled by a registry key. If you control the hardware, someone else's software might generate additional wait states that favoured software did not see.

Tim99 Silver badge
Gimp

QANTAS

The last time I was in the back, they handed out an iPad mini to everyone who wanted one. The headrest could also hold a larger fondlePad. Everything worked.

YouTube TV will be huge. Apple must respond

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: UK based so not affecting us yet but....

I suspect that the major sports organizations will eventually realize that they have what everyone is scrambling for: "Content". Do they really need to tie up with a third party when they can stream it themselves? Would you pay a smallish weekly subscription directly to the League?

Java? Nah, I do JavaScript, man. Wise up, hipster, to the money

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

I'm old and past it, but...

... the only important thing is the data. Learn SQL.

These days, most of the rest is just a presentation to a web client. I suspect that the trend of using 93 different untyped key-value storage sets to hold "data" that is manipulated with the web framework du jour will do exactly what the "designer" intended - A guarantee of billable time.

As I started with FORTRAN, my mind is probably broken anyway, so please feel free to ignore this. Mine's the one with the Codd & Date notes in the pocket >>======>

Nokia’s big comeback: Watches, bathroom scales, a 3310 PR gimmick, Snake, erm...

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: No 3G and lack of quad band support

Yes, 3G is a minimum. If battery life suffers, how about making it with a monochrome LCD screen with a backlight when needed? Get rid of the camera and make the phone a bit thicker so it can have a larger battery?

Ah, the Raspberry Pi 3. So much love. So much power ... So turn it into a Windows thin client

Tim99 Silver badge
Linux

Re: Why?

For a similar reason to Citrix packaging the Pi as a virtual desktop in a nice box (Citrix Link)?