Posts by Tim99

Reg readers battle to claim 'my silicon's older than yours' crown

Cheating?

My Otis King I bought in 1969 has a discoloured scale but still works.

You've seen things people wouldn't believe – so tell us your programming horrors

Re: SQL*Forms 3.0 - Anyone else still drinking to forget that ?

I still have my Quick References and Introduction booklets (Copyright 1989). I still look at them occasionally, just to remind myself why I am enjoying being retired.

Re: update

Yep, I too have done a Dreadful Thing^TM (DT) with a SQL statement at the command line. Mine was:

DELETE FROM Jobs WHERE JobID = 100572;

I ran a SELECT statement to be sure it was OK, but was distracted and ran:

DELETE FROM Jobs;

It was an Oracle 6(?) database on a small shared server under my desk, so when the curser had not come back after a second or two, I realized I had done the DT and, in my panic, did a worse DT - I hit the big red switch.

Fortunately when I had had a cup of coffee and restarted the server, the database rebuilt itself back to just before the DT. Yes, I know I should have let it run and rolled back the log file, but sometimes you are just stupid...

Lincolnshire council shuts down all IT after alleged 0-day breach

Re: Has had a major impact on the council...

@BebopWeBop

No, that would be NFL. Those of us to whom NFN applies try to protect our status.

How to get root on a Linux box, step 1: Make four billion system calls

Re: typo

@Grikath

Bugger, I'm going to have to change mine now.

Perhaps p&55w0Rd will be OK.

Trump's new thought bubble: Make Apple manufacture in the USA

USA?

Don't Apple have some limited manufacturing in the USA with Flextronics and Quanta, and possibly their own facilities? I seem to remember that they were using these for the Mac Pro.

Zombie OS lurches through Royal Melbourne Hospital spreading virus

@Phil Kingston

When most of the rest of us were using Windows 2000, XP, or even 7, I was asked to install our specialist shrink-wrapped software on a couple of non-critical PCs on a network in one of the main WA hospitals. Our software would not install, as their SOE used Windows 95 with Netware, which we no longer supported. I was, as a special case concession, allowed to upgrade the OS to Windows 98SE.

A third of UK.gov big projects will fail in next five years, warns NAO

I'm surprised

Most measurements show that the typical failure rate for large projects is between 70% and 100%.

Who knew that HMG was so good?

Periodic table enjoys elemental engorgement

Re: I have a compromise deal for you Americans

Hi Steven,

I posted this in reply to a similar post a couple of years ago:-

Look, we're spelling sulphur sulfur now, the least you could do is reciprocate ;)

OK, what follows is nearly interesting. IUPAC (International Union of Pure And Applied Chemistry) decrees that the correct spellings are aluminium and sulfur. ...

Sulphur is sulfur as it comes from a Latin root rather than Greek, and early UK spellings used the "f". It was turned into the pseudo-posh "ph" later. There is a heated thread about it on The Royal Society of Chemistry website - Link: rsc.org

The definitive IUPAC periodic table is here: PDF file.

USAians are allowed ( but not encouraged by their education system) to use the correct aluminium.

Re: Unobtainium...

@roytrubshaw

This is the element that Dyson Spheres are probably built from

So that is why his vacuum cleaners are so expensive.

Mine's the heavy one with the CRC Handbook in the pocket >>======>

YouTube’s 10 years of hits: Global recognition at last for Rick Astley

OK, I'm shallow and sexist...

I can't believe that Steve Winwood/Eric Prydz did not make the list - A bit NSFW.

Or for something cool from 1965: Jaan Pehchan Ho - Mohammed Rafi, Gumnaam

Bookstore sells some data centre capacity, becomes Microsoft, Oracle's nemesis

Re: Since it wasn't mentioned by name in the article

@herman

Yup. The main problem with Linux (or any other kind of UNIX) is that so little support is required, that it is very hard to make a business out of it.

Don't worry, Red Hat will fix that by imposing systemd on the rest of us.

Mine's the one with a copy of "Unix Power Utilites" in the pocket >>======>

iiNet struggles through five-day outage to get thousands back online

For me, only a couple of hours

We have the NBN managed by iinet and were down for a couple of hours at the start of the outage.

Interestingly I could ping most of the sites I visit including El Reg (CloudFlare with a time of 57ms); and iinet's own DNS server (with a time of 20ms) but no web traffic. Web pages just timed out.

Incidentally, when I typed in "iinet" my browser's autocorrect changed it to inept. Perhaps it knows that when Mike Malone left inept, it became a bean-counter's company. I also have had some previous business dealings with TPG before the take-over, I don't expect that things will improve much...

Microsoft releases major PowerShell update after long preview

@Alister

I don't know about IiS but when I did Windows admin tasks for SQL Server and File Server, I used the CLI. Stuff like 'UPDATE table SET *' or 'net use *'.

BTW, I learnt UNIX first, which I still prefer...

Russian "Pawn Storm" expands, rains hell on NATO, air-gapped PCs

Lessons from the past

How about we all go back to green screens and plain text files? Or for the casual user a teletype terminal?

Mine's the one draped over the chair in front of the VT52 >>=========>

Microsoft takes PUPs behind the shed with gun in hand

More importantly

Does it block Windows 10?

BOFH: How long does it take to complete Friday's lager-related tasks?

Urban Legend?

I was told on a manglement course in the 1980s about an engineering workshop whose blank daily production and time sheets were Roneo'd copies of copies of copies. The manager was going to retire and his replacement was shown how to fill in the sheet. Near the top left of the sheet was an illegible box. The retiring manager said "We always put a zero in there". After a year or two the new manager found a file containing some dog-eared, yellowing, but original, World War II typewritten documents - Including the production and time sheet. The mystery box was for hours lost due to enemy action.

So why exactly are IT investors so utterly clueless?

Re: Made my morning.

To raise that level of investment it needs to be the "Apple" App Store...

Windows 8.1 exams kept alive six more months, Win 7 tests immortal

Windows 8

I suspect that in the near future the choice that businesses will make for Windows is between 7 and 10. Windows 8/8.1 will die fairly quickly.

Most larger businesses will stick with 7 until they work out WTF is happening with 10 and "The Cloud". Smaller businesses will go with 10; or look at OS X, as the SMB owner/Director seems quite happy thank you very much with their iOS fondle-things (personal anecdotes).

Remember Windows 1.0? It's been 30 years (and you're officially old)

Mouse tricks

Remember Windows 1.0? It's been 30 years (and you're officially old)

Yes, I do, and yes I am. It was bloody awful.

As I recall, it taught me to drive Windows without using the mouse. This was essential with Windows 3.11 as the mouse frequently stopped working completely as it used the same interrupt(?) as the network interface (particularly on 386-SX computers(?). This was a skill that has even come in useful with a new Windows 10 Dell that regularly "forgets" that it has a mouse after you have used its touch-screen.

iPad data entry errors caused plane to strike runway during takeoff

Re: Using toys as tools...

@Medixstiff

I suspect that most GPS units are now 'phones/tablets running Android or iOS...

PostgreSQL learns to walk and chew gum

PostgreSQL vs MySQL - Historical Post

This comes up regularly. I can remember a similar conversation to standardize our databases in the 1980s so that we could use a standard SQL everywhere. We looked at Ingres/Postgres and Oracle - One of the justifications for Oracle instead of PostgreSQL was that the proliferation of PCs would allow us to run Oracle 4 on MS-DOS for single users (Yes, we really did consider it).

Here is something I posted over 5 years ago:-

I think that the dominance of MySQL in its large niche is fairly simple to explain. In its early days MySQL had a native Windows Version (January 1998 for Windows 95 and NT), PostgreSQL did not.

MySQL had only been working on their product for only a few years before that. PostgreSQL's origins go back much further (to Ingres) from the 1970s, when it ran on minicomputers (including Unix on DEC). The only way of running PostgreSQL on Windows was with tools like Cygwin, it did not run as a native Windows Server until version 8 in 2005.

To get PostgreSQL running on Windows may have been quite challenging to the Windows based crowd who were starting to dominate the low end of the market when the Y2K and web boom accelerated in the late 1990s. Many of these projects were written and developed on a couple of Windows based PCs by people with little formal IT education. These projects had a couple of tables at most, and many of the people who wrote them had little understanding of the possible advantages of referential integrity - Sometimes all of the "logic" layer was written in the front end.

At this time (with the exception of the low end free Micrsoft SQL Server 7 product that could run under Windows 9x), most relational databases were expensive and required considerable expertise to set up. All of this meant that the "just good enough" MySQL free product dominated. Later many of the people who had this background moved to the easily deployed LAMP environment, so MySQL became even more entrenched.

What the Investigatory Powers Bill will mean for your internet use

If you use DuckDuckGo you can precede your search with !g to return an encrypted Google search. If you want to do a Wikipedia search use !w - Other "bang" searches are !a for Amazon and !yt for YouTube.

DC judge rips into the NSA over mass surveillance

Re: Circular Reasoning

@Jack of Shadows

The involvement of the USA on behalf of businesses in South America is described in "War is a Racket" by Major General Smedley Butler. An overview is here: Link - rationalrevolution.net.

The USA has been at war with someone for 222 out of 239 years since 1776. So it is business as usual.

Government Gateway online hack claims 'nonsense', say multiple folk in the know

Re: Evidense Based analysis anyone ?!?

This is my view. No go and find the evidence for it...

It's almost time for Australia's fibre fetishists to give up

Re: Ongoing Costs = Large elephant in little room on footpath.

<Smug Git> I have fibre NBN in my retirement village. </Smug Git >

It is a hybrid system with fibre to the comms room in the main premises and VDSL2 to our 120+ units. As a result, the maximum speed to each household is "only" 100Mb down and 50Mb up. The longest cable distance from a unit to the comms room is about 150 m (well within the 500m sec for >100Mb). The main reason for using a hybrid system was so that we could have copper for the telephone emergency call service to each unit as, at the time, there was no way of offering this service through fibre. There has been one system failure in 2 years - The copper wiring to several units in a service pit was found to be under 20cm of water. The cowboy who had installed it, had twisted a number of wires together and "sealed" them with siloxane.

I suspect that the LNPs real reasons for a hybrid system were:-

1. It looked as though it would be popular with the electorate, so the LNP needed to say that it was too expensive, and that it was a typical example of waste by the Labor party.

2. It was socialism, and we can't have taxpayers owning something and getting the benefits of having paid for it. This stops our corporate sponsors from being able to gouge you for ever.

3. Rupert Murdoch, who still seems to be able to control much of the media here through News Corp, needed a delayed and a marginalized service, so that his Foxtel satellite monopoly could continue to be highly profitable. Who would invest in satellite when you can have media streamed through the NBN? The price of the Foxtel services plummeted when Stan and Netflix became more generally available.

4. Many people who unwisely purchase Telstra shares are LNP supporters. Labor's agenda seemed to be that they would use the NBN to break up Telstra and effectively renationalize it - Telstra also are also joint owners of Foxtel (3).

What me cynical - No, I have just lived a long time.

We applied to Google's €150m journalism fund – here's what we sent in

Funding

If, for some reason, Google finds that they are unable to contribute, I could let you have €25. You only need 10,000 similar donations...

So just what is the third Great Invention of all time?

Re: Moveable Type

@Ole Juul

As you know, paper and papyrus existed for thousands of years before type. Anything that was written, or copied, was very expensive because it was all done by hand. You needed to be very rich to benefit from it.

Even paper was not much use without ink, reading, and writing which had to be invented first - The tools that were used before pen and ink, like chisels or cuneiform styli, would not have worked well on anything but stone or damp clay, although ink worked on the inside surface of tree-bark and skin.

Moveable Type

Allowed the detailed workings of many of the other ideas to be circulated cheaply...

Microsoft now awfully pushy with Windows 10 on Win 7, 8 PCs – Reg readers hit back

Re: some pretty good products

@Fehu

I think you misread what the original poster wrote .. it unlike MS Basic for CP/M and MS SQL 6.x was actually developed by MS and pretty good. Which I believe means that the poster meant that CP/M and MS SQL 6.x were not pretty good.

BTW - Microsoft did not actually buy SQL Server from Sybase. It was a "joint development" of the Sybase product by Microsoft, Ashton Tate (dBase) and Sybase initially for OS/2. Microsoft later negotiated exclusive rights to SQL Server written for Microsoft operating systems. As you say, it was not until V7 that the Sybase code started to be depreciated, although the products started to move apart with V6.0.

This time can be used as an illustration of why it might not have been wise for another company to engage in a joint ventures with Microsoft. History shows that Ashton Tate failed for a number of reasons including the appalling dBaseIV "upgrade"; staff changes; and the realisation that their original product was probably not copyrightable as it had been written at JPL and so was 'owned' by Congress and thus in the public domain. Sybase are still around as a subsidiary of SAP.

Microsoft was initially a small company with relatively few products and limited resources. They did not have their own database and sold, under joint branding, the excellent R:Base desktop SQL database as a competitor to dBase. After a couple of missteps by R:Base it seems that a number of their people were employed by MS, and worked on the early versions of what became MS Access.

Dry those eyes, ad blockers are unlikely to kill the internet

Re: Another flaw

I have found that DuckDuckGo works well for me for most of the time, and gives more reviews than advertisments. If Google is required !g SearchItems generally only gives two ads at the top of the page, and generally avoids tracking.

Top boffin Freeman Dyson on climate change, interstellar travel, fusion, and more

Citations

Could El Reg please mark amendments to articles after they have been published please?

Originally the link to the article by Indur Goklany referred to it being published by GWSP (Global Water System Project) instead of the corrected reference to GWPF (The Global Warming Policy Foundation). Although the article was locked for comments while the changes were reviewed, this is potentially confusing - Particularly in this case, as the two organizations have different purposes.

Pitchforks, torches, and awful quotes – we read what Cisco's CEO said

Fire Brigade Management...

...Or the art of being so busy putting out fires that you never have time to fireproof your system.

The following is almost certainly is not an original thought, but because I bear many scars from it, please allow me to call it "Tim's 25:75 Rule".

It is quite simple: If you stuff something up, it takes about 3 times as much effort/staff/time/cash to put it right, compared with getting it right the first time - Particularly if stuff-ups get out to customers. Simple arithmetic shows that If one job that takes 1 hour gets stuffed up, you lose an additional 3 hours - So in an 8 hour day, after you have put it right, you have lost 3 hours plus the original hour so you only have 4 hours left for other work. If your next job is stuffed up too, because of the stress of the first one, you have lost the rest of the 8 hour day. So you spend only 25% of the time actually earning money, and you have upset a customer twice.

Ubuntu 15.10: More kitten than beast – but beware the claws

Re: SystemD

Sorry John, I don't know if you are still hungover but udev was incorporated into the systemd source tree in 2012:-

Kay Sievers: game.org; cgit commit link; Linus Torvalds lkml.org

I think I will stop posting on this thread now...

Re: SystemD

Purest FUD. What "interrelated dependencies" are you talking about?

You like Systemd - I suspect that I will like it less as it develops. Some of my reasons are in an overview of the UNIX Philosophy" (Wikipedia link).

FUD (your opinion, not my intention) or not, my comment: "The use of interrelated dependencies of systems that should be kept separate encourages "standard" distributions... ...that will tend to limit user and developer choice; and encourages loading unnecessary insecure cruft", is based on, for example, having one daemon that dynamically handles device management, mount points partition discovery, and power management, which I agree could be useful on a desktop (where these things are likely to change as devices are added and removed) may not be useful on a SERVER (where I probably don't want the system to make these choices for me and, even if if I did, they are not likely to change often).

Goodnight.

Re: SystemD

@John Hughes

Don't try to get into an old fogey war with me - I started programming Fortran on 80 column punched cards. Yes, me too, happy days.

Ah, so libc is a bad thing because everyone depends on it. Sorry, I'm not with you here: libc is an ISO standard, systemd is not.

So just use Debian then. Trusting a commercial company to provide a free system has always seemed to be a mugs game to me -- you just end up as an unpaid beta tester. Before going back to BSD I used Debian, and I tend to agree with you about not trusting commercial companies. It seems that Fedora cannot now be run without systemd: Wikipedia link.

Edit: You started by asking two appropriate questions, but later in the thread appear to be angry about this. As this seems to be your deeply held opinion, I have not down-voted you. Have a beer instead >>=======>

Re: SystemD

@Steve Davies 3

Monetization, as such, is not necessarily bad, but I believe that it tends to lock you in. It may well be worthwhile for you, but I am uncomfortable with it. A quote from The Wikipedia entry on RHEL:-

Unusually, Red Hat took steps to obfuscate their changes to the Linux kernel for 6.0 by not publicly providing the patch files for their changes in the source tarball, and only releasing the finished product in source form. Speculation suggested that the move was made to affect Oracle's competing rebuild and support services, which further modifies the distribution. This practice however, still complies with the GNU GPL since source code is defined as "[the] preferred form of the work for making modifications to it", and the distribution still complies with this definition.[16] Red Hat's CTO Brian Stevens later confirmed the change, stating that certain information (such as patch information) would now only be provided to paying customers to make the Red Hat product more competitive against the growing number of companies offering support for products based on RHEL. CentOS developers had no objections to the change since they do not make any changes to the kernel beyond what is provided by Red Hat.[17] Their competitor Oracle announced in November 2012 that they were releasing a RedPatch service, which allows public view of the RHEL kernel changes, broken down by patch.

Re: SystemD

@John Hughes

1. It breaks one of the main strengths of UNIX - That every component stands by itself and can be managed separately.

2. The use of interrelated dependencies of systems that should be kept separate encourages "standard" distributions and, I suspect, will allow organizations like, say, Canonical to distribute a "premium" commercial product (like Red Hat) that will tend to limit user and developer choice; and encourages loading unnecessary insecure cruft.

I am so old that I remember the Berkely Distributions, and still use it. SystemD - Linux for grunt and click users who really like Windows?

SystemD

Do not want. Is it part of a conspiracy by Canonical et al to monetize Linux?

Michigan sues HP after 'botched' $49m upgrade leaves US state in 1960s mainframe hell

Re: Nooooo

You are at work, it's probably meant to be painful, otherwise we would call it leisure.

If I only had to do scraped screen terminal stuff, like most CRUD government applications - Instead of pretending that I really must have PowerPoint, Word and Excel - I would be grateful.

Radical idea

How about giving a couple of million to their own colleges to teach COBOL and mainframe systems and replace the old kit with newer mainframes? Add a bit more for screen scraper/terminal software licences for the users and it might keep going for another few decades.

Wanted alive: $1m for an iOS 9 bug to hijack, er, jailbreak iThings

TLAs

As it says on their website that their customers are governments (spooks) and corporations, the NSA probably knows exactly what to think.

Our cookies save you from TERRORISTS, Facebook thunders to Belgian judge

Facebook Connect

Ghostery shows that the article has a Facebook Connect tracker (Link here).

The Comments/Post Comment page does not show anything from Facebook - I'm not sure if this is irony, or not.

You want the poor to have more money? Well, doh! Splash the cash

Re: Excellent article

Tim,

Nasty cynical me (OK, I'm old so maybe I should call it life experience) suspects that governments don't want people to have an "excess" of leisure. Spare Time allows people to become politically active, educate themselves, and have time for reflection and critical analysis (or carry out petty crimes and riot on the streets). Governments, and the small fraction of people that effectively appoint governments, really don't like that idea.

I should declare that I may be biased, because I worked in a government department that worried about what the population at large might get up to. I do like your basic idea of taxation, but perhaps the rate should be more progressive and go to a higher rate - In my lifetime the top rate of income tax was dropped to "only" 90% from the wartime rate of 99.25%. It will be interesting to see what happens when the true rate of un(der)employment in the Developed West hits 40+% in the next generation.

Global warming stopped in 1998? No it didn't. If you say that, you're going to prison

Re: So if I understand this correctly...

you'll find those sciences to already have proper names... physics, chemistry, biology, geology etc.

My Chemistry tutor said the same thing over 40 years ago, and he was not too sure about anything other than physics and chemistry. There is a quote by Rutherford about only physics being science and everything else being stamp collecting, although that may be ironic because his Nobel Prize was in Chemistry (because what he did for the Prize, was).

I have come to a similar conclusion about engineering - Unless it involves big lumps of metal, engines, and hammers - That many professions with engineering in their names may not be.

Jeremy Corbyn wins Labour leadership election

Re: Labour... now unelectable

The fix for the Health Service is easy. Mandate that 90% of staff have to be customer facing or directly involved in treatment i.e. doctors, nurses, technicians, cleaners, receptionists etc. The other 10% can be administrators, IT support etc. To avoid the 10% costing the same in total as the 90% mandate like-for-like salaries - The senior administrator earns the same as the average of 9 consultants, senior IT person the same as a doctor etc. etc. Hospital management Boards to be similar to the early days of the HS - the senior administrator, the senior consultant, "Matron", a junior doctor, a nurse, a cleaner, a couple of community reps and the chair to be an outsider.

It will never happen of course, as the main purpose of the HS now seems to be to channel as much money as possible I nto the hands of whoever whispers into government's ear.

Re: So this is what the party of No Platform has become...

Are you sure you have not used one of your Daily Express or Daily Mail logins by mistake?