* Posts by Tim99

2003 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2008

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)?

Dying for Windows 10 Creators Update? But wait, there's more!

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: ugh

@Planty

You're right. I don't own a Chrome device.

Last year I did a preliminary investigation of ChromeOS for a seniors community centre where I volunteer. We were looking for a cheap/simple system to complement (or replace) the 6 PCs that we had upgraded to Windows 10 (not a happy experience). I loaded up ChromeOS in a Parallels VM on my Mac, and Little Snitch showed a hell of a lot more network traffic than I had expected compared to a VM running Debian - I appreciate that it was not a vanilla ChromeOS on a standard device; but it was, I thought, interesting.

I did eventually track down a Chromebit Stick which also seemed to be busy on the network. Their network has an ADSL2+ connection to the Internet which had a variable connection speed - After resetting the connection we could get ~14Mbps but it could drop to ~1Mbps in a day or so (ISP contention/IPv4 shared pool problems?). So as a result of this, and after considering the cost of us having to purchase HDMI monitors to replace our old ones, we thought that it was not viable.

The Chromebit was passed on to a non-technical fellow retiree friend who has a VDSL connection. He was doing most of his computing using Google stuff on a clapped-out Windows machine. He now seems happy enough and, as I don't have to fix the mess that he could get into with Windows, that is OK.

As I have wrestled with Microsoft since their PC/MS-DOS systems in 1981, including writing scientific, business and commercial software for every OS from them up to Windows 7, I am certainly not a fan of theirs either...

Tim99 Silver badge
Big Brother

Re: ugh

"Chrome OS has it right" It would be nice if it did not route everything you used it for through Google.

Microsoft makes cheeky bid for MongoDB devs on Azure security grounds

Tim99 Silver badge
Trollface

Re: Meh

Have an up vote for the webscale reference. For anybody who has not seen it (NSFW): YouTube Link

HPE blames solid state drive failure for outages at Australian Tax Office

Tim99 Silver badge

"We'll know more in March, when the PwC report into the incident emerges"

Really? Did you forget the sarcasm flag Simon?

Google claims ‘massive’ Stagefright Android bug had 'sod all effect'

Tim99 Silver badge
Big Brother

MRDA

"He would, wouldn't he?" (Mandy Rice-Davies Applies).

If you need an in-mem analytics cruncher – and, hey, who doesn't? – Microsoft Graph Engine is now open source

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

I feel really old now.

It was 1971. Writing a (chemistry) graphing program in FORTRAN was my first realization that learning "computing" was something that I really needed to do for my career.

Munich may dump Linux for Windows

Tim99 Silver badge
Pint

Re: The company I work for went through this

@John H Woods

For a long time now, I have been convinced that a corporate that has managed to have Windows locked down enough to be safe, has reinvented the 3270 or VT220 terminal. Many of the users that I saw did not know basic skills like drag and drop, or copy and paste - A simple browser front end would be OK for much of their work tasks.

Have a beer and an upvote >>=============>

ISIS videos, adtech, and the 'smartest guys in the room' (Google)

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: My flabber is agast

"Money <--- root of all evil" Not necessarily, money is just a means of keeping score. “For the love of money is the root of all evil..." (Timothy 6:10) is unambiguous.

Samsung's Chromebook Pro: Overpriced vanilla PC with a stylus. 'Wow'

Tim99 Silver badge
Trollface

Samsung and TPM - Extra security

So it could set itself on fire before Google slurps all of your data?

Last Concorde completes last journey, at maybe Mach 0.02

Tim99 Silver badge

We were lucky

I won second prize in a competition run by BA in 1987. The prize was a return flight for myself and wife on Concorde to Miami. The aircraft stopped and refueled at Washington, when it took off again - The acceleration was truly impressive - Apparently it was the fastest commercial leg that it flew. The prize included 12 nights at a luxury hotel on Miami Beach. On our first morning (lounging by the pool) Concorde flew very low just past the hotel, and the noise was almost deafening; so I can understand why the locals might have objected.

The aircraft and the service were unlike anything I have experienced. I feel really fortunate.

RAF pilot sent jet into 4,000ft plummet by playing with camera, court martial hears

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: The joy of shutterstock...

Not much change here. My father had a couple of photos of the summit of Mt Kilimanjaro he took from a medium bomber in WWll, although he was the observer and not the driver...

Police drones, robo surgeons and chatbot civil servants. What could go wrong?

Tim99 Silver badge
Big Brother

Really?

What are we going to do with all of these people? As automation increases, many private sector jobs will disappear too. You can't have everyone running custom skinny mochas micro businesses.

During the 1970s-1980s "traditional men's skilled jobs" like turners and fitters were reduced by the introduction of CNC equipment. We were told that we would all have a lot more leisure, and many older men were "retired early". We thought that the changes meant a 2-3 day working week with lots of nice leisure time, but they actually meant "unemployment". We now have societies that have significant levels of un(der)employment, and a relatively small number of skilled people.

I was involved, in a minor way, with some relevant bits of the State. It seems to me that we should not expect governments to help (unless they are forced) - They know that with a majority of the population spending long hours at work and commuting, there is less possibility of trouble from them. The unemployed can be contained by poor access to transport, an oppressive "benefits" scheme, and distracted by crap TV.

So what are they going to do when 40% are out of productive work by 2025 (western intelligence projections)?

Boeing's 747 to fly off the production line for the foreseeable future

Tim99 Silver badge
Pint

Re: even if its role has changed to a cargo-hauler.

@Dazed and Confused

A few years ago on the Australia run, I found that the upper deck business class had a bar. From that time on that's why I always tried to book upstairs. The newer marks just don't quite cut it, even though the beds may be better.

Microsoft's Cloud UI brings Windows full circle

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

"Users are so familiar with overlapping windows"

Not around here. Many older newbies and youngsters run a single "Window 10". If you take a sized window and move it, it usually goes into full screen mode (where it stays). Two windows to drag-and-drop files between them is magic, even copy-and-paste is unusual. Right-click is an arcane procedure.

If we gave these users a single modal screen, they probably would not complain...

Naughty sysadmins use dark magic to fix PCs for clueless users

Tim99 Silver badge
Boffin

Re: No quite wizadry but.../ Percussive Maintenance

@TheNeonSpirit

When our IBM XT PCs played up, the standard first-line support "fix" was to turn them off (I miss the "Big Red Switch") lift them about 2cm off the desk, make sure they were level and then allow them to drop. It often worked, the theory was that it would reseat the chips and cards.

It worked on IBM ATs too, but often didn't work on "lesser" machines. We speculated that they did not have the necessary gravitas.

Britain collects new naval tanker a mere 18 months late

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Maggy what have we done...

@boltar

So management had nothing to do with it?

Smart bombs, smart bullets – now guided smart artillery shells, thanks to DARPA dosh

Tim99 Silver badge
Terminator

Re: The USA way of doing things

The most important objective of almost all major western weapons programs is that large amounts of the taxpayers' money is funneled to a small number of the right (already very wealthy) people.

Stanford boffins find 'correlation between caffeine consumption and longevity'

Tim99 Silver badge
Joke

Re: confused

@Alister

...trimethylxanthine may be what it's friends call it.

Its posh name is 1,3,7-trimethylpurine-2,6-dione

Google nukes ad-blocker AdNauseam, sweeps remains out of Chrome Web Store

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: No free ride

@Tannin

I volunteer to keep the equipment running at a retiree community centre with about 1500 members. What some users leave behind is sometimes private or "interesting". The full code deletes stray stuff from Downloads, the Desktop, etc, and gives them a message at logon. It takes about 3 seconds to run.

Yes you could use a BAT/CMD file, but in this case you may not know the names of subfolders. I have never been able to reliably delete unknown subfolders from a folder that you want to keep when using wildcards, particularly when you don't know what their contents permissions are. So the easiest thing for me was to use filesystem objects with VBS.

Tim99 Silver badge
Big Brother

No free ride

I have not understood why Google is sometimes excused behaviour that many commentards would think was unacceptable if carried out by Sony, Microsoft, Apple etc. Unless you pay them money you are not a Google "customer", you are just their harvest. I suspect that if you do pay them money you are probably just a more valuable crop, but they do seem to filter out the obvious spam that a freetard using their products normally sees. A tip for Windows users of Chrome - Delete the local Google Appdata folder to get rid of crap and don't log in to your Google Acc.

' A simple vbs script that you can run at logon

Dim delFolderPath(1)

delFolderPath(0)="C\:SomeOtherFolderThatYouWantGone"

delFolderPath(1)="C:\Users\Your_Account\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome"

Dim fso

Dim objFolder

Dim objFile

Dim objSubfolder

For Each x In delFolderPath

'Set objects & error catching

On Error Resume Next

Set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")

Set objFolder = fso.GetFolder(x)

'DELETE files in path unless they are ReadOnly, or set to True for All

For Each objFile In objFolder.files

objFile.Delete False

Next

'DELETE all subfolders in delFolder Path even if they are ReadOnly

For Each objSubfolder In objFolder.Subfolders

objSubfolder.Delete True

Next

Next

Set objSubfolder = Nothing

Set objFile = Nothing

Set objFolder = Nothing

Set fso = Nothing

' The usual warnings apply if you run some VBS file you copied from the Internet!

Fedora 25: You've got that Wayland feelin', oh, that Wayland feelin'

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

I'd be more excited

If RH admitted that Poettering's spawn was a leg-pull, and not a plan to lock us out.

Mine's the one with K&R in the pocket >>========>

Vinyl and streaming sales offset CD decline in UK music sales

Tim99 Silver badge

Original Sound?

Back in the day, swimbo and I were Tiefenbrun/Vereker "flat earthers" with a Linn LP12/Naim 250 based system with most of the fruit. Swimbo kept my more rabid audio fantasies on a fairly tight leash. Tiefenbrun said "The best route to quality music at home is a live stereo FM broadcast. After listening to a Naim tuner we realized that Tiefenbrun was probably right and bought it.

As for the vinyl/CD thing: we hated the first CDs and players - I described them as 'having all of the notes, but not much of the music". We later bought a Naim CD player which was OK. The Linn/Naim ideal was based upon rhythm, pace, "musicality" and the ability to play transients rather than an obsession with a flat frequency response.

Interestingly I had a serious RTA which resulted in brain damage. That meant that I had difficulties in playing the equipment and much of the "music" was gone, even though my hearing was apparently unaffected - So it seems that brain processing has a significant effect on how music is perceived, perhaps even more so than frequency imperfections and companding effects.

We sold the equipment to a nice doctor who still has it, and these days my listening is usually to digital media through a TV connected to a small pair of active B&O speakers which I find to be not too tiring to listen to. What I don't fully understand is why music that was originally on LP, or taped, when I transferred to digital files still often sounds better than a file from a CD. Generally neither of us seem to notice the odd hiss or pop.

Support chap's Sonic Screwdriver fixes PC as user fumes in disbelief

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Overheard conversation about a new server

@JulieM

A long time ago, when a 25-50MB rack mountable Winchester disk had a "voice coil" when I was running routine data jobs, I didn't need to look at the screen, the gentle melody of read/writes told me that everything was good. I did have a couple of spectacularly loud hard disk crashes which gouged the oxide off the platter though...

It's round and wobbles, but madam, it's a mouse pad, not a floppy disk

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Not Snopes

I looked after the IT needs of 450 scientists, admin and clerical staff in the 1980s.

I have seen an 8" floppy cut with scissors because it would not fit in the 5.25" drive; a 3.5" disk hammered into a 5.25'' drive; a 5.25" disk folded to try and fit it into a 3.5" drive; a letter with an enclosed copy of a backup disk, which we had requested from a remote site (yes it was a photocopy); and, my personal favourite, a 5.25" disk that was the only electronic copy of a department's year-end financial data, stapled (twice) to the covering letter, explaining why they were late submitting it.

Those are some of the reasons why I now look like this >>============>

Meg Whitman: HPE software's new owner? Kill a product? Never!

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: WebOS, how I morn for thee...

WebOS: "It's alive, it's alive.": Not bad TVs, if you like that sort of thing...

Confirmation of who constitutes average whisky consumer helps resolve dispute

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Simpler choices

After 50 years of drinking whisk(e)y, I think I have just about got it sorted, but I might be wrong: For a special occasion( my birthday?); or Smith's (to share with friends); and a good everyday blend found in many pubs.

The Internet Society is unhappy about security – pretty much all of it

Tim99 Silver badge
Headmaster

Re: There was never an era where all hats were white

"Power corrupts - absolute power corrupts absolutely". Not quite. The relevant section of Lord Acton's letter; which was about the doctrine of papal infallibility in the First Vatican Council was, perhaps, even more damning:-

"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... ...and the end learns to justify the means."

SQL Server on Linux: Runs well in spite of internal quirks. Why?

Tim99 Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: I can hakz micro$haft deebee

The scott/tiger reference bought back suppressed memories from my Oracle 5/6/7 development days. I gave you an upvote anyway...

Microsoft's cmd.exe deposed by PowerShell in Windows 10 preview

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Re: feedback?

@Ledswinger

Anecdotally, around here the predator is a 'phone - At least in the SMB/Director/CEO/Business Owner workspace. The Big Boys seem to have reinvented the mainframe - It is not necessarily zOS at the back end, but the display layer is a web browser or App instead of a 3270.

I have been around this stuff for 45 years now. I saw most of the changes, and even predicted a couple (like the rise of the PC). The next thing that is happening (very quickly) is the disappearance of many traditional middle-level jobs, like administration (Mostly taking data from one place, reformatting and reducing, it and spewing it out somewhere else), and management (Tracking and enabling assets and processes). The old saw "Go away, or I will replace you with a shell script" is becoming a reality.

You may have noticed that many jobs have become systematized and simplified, so that the individual can be easily replaced; and initiative and a true education (rather than the ability to pass a spoon-fed exam) are punished.

Yes. I do look like this: >>=================>

CERN also has a particle decelerator – and it’s trying to break physics

Tim99 Silver badge
Boffin

@herman

In the early eighties I ran a high(ish) resolution Mass Spectrometry lab. Most of the equipment looked neat and tidy - Until you removed the panelling. Then it looked like the article's photo - That's how real science tends to look. >>====>

We're going to have to start making changes or the adults will do it for us

Tim99 Silver badge
Joke

@Filippo

Use an IDE? The work of Satan! If you write a program the way that $deities intended; you type:

*****************

echo /* Put comment in a file by echoing from the CLI. */ >somefile.txt

echo #include <stdio.h> >>somefile.txt

echo printf( "Hello\n" ); /* Writes Hello to stnd output */ >>somefile.txt

*****************

or cat > somefile.txt

/* Put comment in a file by echoing from the CLI. */

#include <stdio.h>

printf( "Hello\n" ); /* Writes Hello to stnd output */

^D

*****************

Then cat somefile.txt - You now realize that [Tab] should not be used...

No spin zone: Samsung recalls 3M EXPLODING washing machines

Tim99 Silver badge
FAIL

I don't buy Samsung

Personal experience has led to me not buying their equipment for a while now. I have had several of their monitors which were excellent; at the time they offered a zero dead pixel guarantee. One of them is 12 years old and still works well.

The rot started to set in when we bought two different Samsung mobile phones (before Android). The first one failed within a year and was replaced by the supplier with a later model which generally ran hot. The second one worked until we got rid of it, but the battery life was short, and the operating system was terrible - Three menu levels down to get the screen to dial in the number of someone who was not in the contacts list.

Four years ago our friends had a new fitted kitchen. They bought a Samsung oven and an induction hob. The oven required 3 visits from an service engineer, but the hob only required one in the first few months after it stopped working completely. After threatening legal action they had both appliances replaced by Samsung. A few weeks later they had an unexpected delivery of a Samsung point-and-shoot digital camera, with a nice letter of apology about the cooker, explaining that the camera was a gift to help compensate them for their inconvenience - The camera stopped working 3 months later.

What will happen when I'm too old to push? (buttons, that is)

Tim99 Silver badge

"And microwave ovens need only beep once, please."

I was genuinely impressed with one of swmbo's recent purchases, a washing machine that signals that it has finished by opening the door. A discreet click that can be heard from the next room; and if we missed that, we can see that the door is open. The only problem that I have with it is trying to remember whether it is open because it has finished a washing cycle - Or, if I had just left it open for ventilation...

Lessons from the Mini: Before revamping or rebooting anything, please read this

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Are you saying the mini revamp was a success?

I bought a new Mk1 VW Golf in 1978, possibly the nicest car I have owned. It was smallish, handled well, seated 4 comfortable;,and for its time fast and economical.

I'm retired now and don't travel far. My current car is a Polo, and is almost the same size as the Golf was. It's performance is similar, although it is heavier, its handling is a bit better and the fuel economy is better. One of the main differences is that, in real terms, it is a lot cheaper...

Kids today are so stupid they fall for security scams more often than greybeards

Tim99 Silver badge
Childcatcher

Re: Yes, the younger "adult" set seems to have become over sheltered as a whole.

A friend believes that "adolescence" is the ages between 9 and 29.

How a chunk of the web disappeared this week: GlobalSign's global HTTPS snafu explained

Tim99 Silver badge

Surprise?

The guardian.com HTTPS site died on me - Whoops, I have admitted that I look at the Guardian - Funnily enough it is one of the better sites for Australian news in Australia.

The one that surprised me was Microsoft's Outlook mail hosts falling over with my mail client.

First look at Windows Server 2016: 'Cloud for the masses'? We'll be the judge of that

Tim99 Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: But probably...

I suspect that the SBS products were deliberately killed off. The big MS integrators hated them - Not enough ways to gouge unnecessary profit from SMBs - Why sell a simple reliable system with a single server to 10-40 seats when you could spec a separate domain controller, SQL server, Exchange server, file server, and back-up server? I have personal experience of an integrator supplying all of that equipment to a 15 seat not-for-profit, that I volunteered with, while I was on extended leave. Needless to say the system never worked properly because they had spent much of the budget on licences, so the hardware supplied was totally inadequate...

Now MS really want all their SMBs to use their cloud products, so don't expect any significant SBS products in the future.

Good God, we've found a Google thing we like – the Pixel iPhone killer

Tim99 Silver badge
Gimp

Re: How long until Google decides ...

@Tom 64

Not sure if you were serious, or not; but if you were:-

iTunes =>Purchased =>Select All Tracks => Copy All; New Folder => Paste All.

EU turns screws on Android – report

Tim99 Silver badge
Gimp

Re: And Apple?

Er, you can download an app from Apple without giving them your credit card details...

Lean in and pivot: Even Steve Jobs didn't work alone, startup boy

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Re: @LDS - marketing guy gets rich

"You list Gates in there, but he's a software guy." Yes, but not so much as you might think - Paul Allen was the geekier, going back before MS, and before Traf-O-Data (their first company) when they were at Lakeside School. Bill was more the fortunate son of a wealthy and prominent lawyer; and a woman who was on the right not-for-profit boards with the right connections (like IBM's CEO John Opel). If you want to see how the world might have been, look up QDOS and Tim Paterson...

Bill was a very competitive, bright guy, who was in the right place at the right time, with the right contacts (which is often how successful people get ahead).

@Lars "Yes, but that is just because he refused to sell his shares in Apple Computer when Jobs desperately tried to buy them. As far as I have understood Woz was rather pissed off with Jobs efforts then." If you want to see a better example of how the business guy wanted to screw over the technical guy, a good summary is here: Business Insider Australia - Paul Allen and Bill Gates.

Writing this, I realized that I was around computing before most of this happened. So:-

An appropriate icon for an old fart with many Microsoft scars >>========> ^

Pains us to run an Apple article without the words 'fined', 'guilty' or 'on fire' in it, but here we are

Tim99 Silver badge
Gimp

Re: Stupid headphone adapter...

@J. R. Hartley

I use DuckDuckGo with Safari, and find it's generally OK. If I need something better I use the it with a bang search (for an encrypted Google search type in !g "search terms" in the search/address bar).

Microsoft thought of the children and decided to ban some browsers

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Microsoft Indoctrination?

"Give me a child and I'll shape him into anything." B.F. Skinner: Wikipedia.

Windows 10 now rules the weekend, taking over from Windows 7

Tim99 Silver badge
Pint

Re: I'll be tipping Win 7 back

'it's just a teardrop in the sea..."; or "will be lost in time, like tears in rain". Time (for Windows 10) to die?

Linux turns 25, with corporate contributors now key to its future

Tim99 Silver badge
Linux

I'm surprised...

...that there is not a post about the potential evils of corporatism hijacking the direction of kernel development - Red Hat and the evils of systemd comes straight to mind. Please don't suggest that forking will solve this; because it won't. "Big Company" can put sufficient money into projects that most other developers will just go with the flow, then when you have a mess of binary blob crap that has so many interdependencies that only "Big Company" can support it everyone will wonder how it happened.

"This is the UNIX philosophy: Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface." Quarter-Century of Unix (1994) - Peter H. Salus

MySQL daddy Widenius: Open-source religion won't feed MariaDB

Tim99 Silver badge
Unhappy

I would not give Monty any more money

An article in El Reg in Jan 2010 - "Monty's 'Save MySQL' mudsling... "after he asked for money then.

"A petition to stop Oracle taking over MySQL has garnered support from more than 15,000 people, after Michael ‘Monty’ Widenius launched his last gasp web campaign in December. The MySQL co-creator, who walked away from the database just seven months after Sun Microsystems bought it in September 2008 for $1bn, cobbled together a …" Here is my reply - I had hoped that Monty may have made enough money out of this by now.

#Censusfail Australia: Not an attack, data safe, no heads to roll

Tim99 Silver badge
Joke

Re: 260 submissions per second?!?

Yes, indeed. That is <0.94 Million/hour. Before I retired, I would use SQLite, a simple serverless database engine, to prototype systems - According to their website sqlite.org: "Situations Where SQLite Works Well" "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. Each dynamic page does roughly 200 SQL statements. 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."

Perhaps the Census could have run two bare metal powerful servers to get a similar result, and saved >$8 Million?