* Posts by Tim99

1999 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2008

Official: Fandroids are smarter/tighter* than iPhone fanbois

Tim99 Silver badge
WTF?

Isn't that fascinating?

People who spend more on a phone may spend more on phone calls/data downloads.

BBC: What YOU spent on our lawyers in Secret Climate 28 debacle

Tim99 Silver badge
IT Angle

Has Andrew a long spoon?

Irrespective of the argument, it is probably a good idea for the rest of us to default to a position opposite to that of Murdoch's...

Lotus 1-2-3 rebooted: My trip back to the old (named) range

Tim99 Silver badge
Linux

It's called a slash

From the article: "Type a forward slash and all the available menus show up..."

It's called a slash. There are slashes and backslashes. Microsoft needed to call it a forward slash when they had confused everything by using a backslash in directory paths.

The only reason to use a backslash Is as an escape character on a proper computer :-)

Lotus 1-2-3 turns 30: Mitch Kapor on the Google before Google

Tim99 Silver badge
Meh

Re: I always thought...

It was called 1-2-3 because it could be used as:-

A spreadsheet (OK, that is why most people bought it);

A database (Shudder, I still find people with thousands of rows of business critical information stuffed into a spreadsheet);

A wordprocessor (Yes, really. I had several colleagues who used it to write letters).

Climate shocker: Carry on as we are until 2050, planet will be fine

Tim99 Silver badge
Flame

Interesting threads in the Independent

It is odd that many of the people who comment on this debate are convinced that it is a conspiracy by badly paid scientists to unlock the keys to research funding and personal wealth when you have people like the Koch brothers spending hundreds of millions of dollars to persuade us that nothing is happening and it is business as usual - Or, that something might be happening; but that we should all wait until more research is done - Or, that something is happening and it will to be to expensive to fix - Or, that something is happening; and it is too late to fix it....

Link - Billionaires secretly fund attacks on climate science

Link - How the Kochtopus stifled green debate

Link - Top climate scientist denounces billionaires over funding for climate-sceptic organisations

I live in Western Australia and only need to go outside to see how the climate has changed in the last 20 years across an area about 3X the size of the UK (For Americans, that's bigger than Texas, the whole state is about 1.5x bigger than Alaska).

I chose the icon because we get a lot of bush fires. Now let the flaming begin...

Boeing 787 fleet grounded indefinitely as investigators stumped

Tim99 Silver badge
Boffin

Re: flame on

More likely, as with most other giant project cock ups, to be down to older Gen X "managers".

These are the people with MBAs and a qualification in a soft subject, who took over the management of engineering and development from the older baby boomer and pre-war generation engineers and scientists.

Their main motivation tends to be short-term stock gains to obtain massive bonuses for themselves and their sociopathic C-level bosses at the expense of the longer-term future.

Facebook's sexy pick 'n' mix OCP model is great... for Facebook

Tim99 Silver badge
Headmaster

Breaking/Braking

"transmission, the suspension, the breaking"

I think the author meant a device to slow a vehicle, rather than damage it.

Former CEO John Sculley: Apple must adapt or die

Tim99 Silver badge
WTF?

Re: This is the same guy

Yes, we could all still be using floppy disks...

Bad news: PC slump worse than feared. Good news: It's Friday

Tim99 Silver badge
Happy

My Favourite Little Spiel

Yay. Time for some unnecessary self-praise here. For the last couple of years I have been boring the crap out of everybody who expresses even a slight interest in computing by saying: -

"Most computers will have no keyboard, or will have no screen".

Most people will have an Android/iOS/similar thing that will talk to some *NIX thing.

US, UK probe HP claims of accounting mischief at Autonomy

Tim99 Silver badge
Meh

Re: Angling to get another Brit into a US Court?

@AC 14:57

"Bill and Dave's life's work has not been squandered; HP may be going through tough times at present but it will survive."

Much of Bill and Dave's life's work was split of into Agilent Technologies in 1999, which seems to be doing OK. Maybe the Board thought that they would screw up the newer computing stuff?

CSIRO mine safety tech becomes archaeological tool

Tim99 Silver badge
Boffin

Re: Bouncy

No, Zebedee is mounted on a large spring:-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_JQDfuMZi0

http://wallpapers.free-review.net/16__The_Magic_Roundabout_-_Zebedee.htm

Kickstarted mobe charger 'kicked to death by Apple'

Tim99 Silver badge
Meh

@AC 14:20

When I looked a few minutes ago AAPL was -1.4%; and MSFT -1.6%; and HP -1.3%; and DELL -1.9%.

AAPL are now down 0.9%; and GOOG are down 0.7% - So your point was?

Microsoft licence cops kick in TWICE as many customers' doors as rivals

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Re: How does this "audit" even work...?

"The Microsoft guys kick down your door and demand your licenses, or else? (Obviously not, but I also can't imagine the companies inviting them willingly.) How is that legally possible? Isn't anyone else unnerved that such a thing even exists...?"

Microsoft's secret weapon is: 'Volume Licensing'.

Once you have signed up, you have basically agreed that at anytime Microsoft can send somebody to rape your cat.

I used to recommend to small businesses that they should consider OEM distributions on new kit to avoid this, and avoid buying any additional products. The cost was sometimes close enough that any extra 'savings' that they made would be negated by the difference in administration costs.

BOFH: Cannot terminate PFY instance... ACCESS DENIED

Tim99 Silver badge
Happy

Re: There is another fun assumption floating around..

".. some people really think that a PDF is immutable."

*NIX command: pdfclean LockedFile.pdf UnlockedFile.pdf

Global warming still stalled since 1998, WMO Doha figures show

Tim99 Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: "...the levels seen in the 1980s and early 1990s."

"Ah! So the real underlying cause of Global Warming is shoulder pads and bouffant hair then?"

Yes, probably caused by the propellent from aerosol hairsprays...

Apple manufacturers: ARRGH, pesky iThings are impossible to make

Tim99 Silver badge
Headmaster

Re: The manufactures are loosing money on every unit

Down-vote for "loosing".

"Usage: The verb lose is sometimes mistakenly written as loose, as in this would cause them to loose 20 to 50 per cent (correct form is … to lose 20 to 50 per cent). There is a word loose, but it is very different—normally an adjective, meaning ‘untethered; not held in place; detached’, as in loose cobbles; the handle was loose ; set loose."

‘Anonymous’ takes down Texan RFID-tracking school

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

Re: Smash the schools. Like the Taliban is doing.

Robert,

I don't know if you were being sarcastic, or not, but many educated people write the abbreviated form of "do not" with an apostrophe.

Evildoers can now turn all sites on a Linux server into silent hell-pits

Tim99 Silver badge
Pint

@Vic

I agree. Hopefully we would only see this in the wild on a system that an amateur had exposed to the Internet, so that his buds can see their party photos.

A sound driver on a web server, sigh - Beer, because you would have had to have a few before this looked like a good idea.

Steady Antarctic ice growth 'limits confidence in climate predictions'

Tim99 Silver badge
Trollface

It was called infrared, when I was chemistry undergraduate, 43 years ago.

The Sinofsky Letters: Defenestrated Windows overlord corresponds

Tim99 Silver badge
Happy

Re: Norton Commander

I started managing DOS networks with Norton Commander. Now I am retired I use Midnight Commander on Debian or OS X, because it still works well. I can use one window on a local drive, and the other on FTP.

No increase in droughts since 1950, say boffins

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: politics

@david 12

Depends on where you live. The drought (Spelling, unless you meant a cold draft/beer) is very real in Western Australia, and the Perth dams have not been full for a long time.

The other side of the issue, the increase in flooding, has a higher probability in some areas corresponding to measured increases in ocean temperature. Eastern Australia is particularly influenced by the El Niño and La Niña Pacific Ocean climate patterns -They cycle every 5 years or so - Dorothea Mackellar's poem "My Country", first published over 100 years ago, describes Australia's extremes.

"I love a sunburnt country,

A land of sweeping plains,

Of ragged mountain ranges,

Of droughts and flooding rains.

....

Her beauty and her terror -

The wide brown land for me!

.....

Core of my heart, my country!

Her pitiless blue sky,

When sick at heart, around us,

We see the cattle die -

But then the grey clouds gather,

And we can bless again

The drumming of an army,

The steady, soaking rain.

......"

Since then, we know that the average temperature over the Continent has gone up by ~1C; and the ocean temperatures are even warmer...

Tim99 Silver badge
Pint

Re: Can someone help me here?

@mathew42

I have lived in Western Australia for 20+ years. The rainfall has diminished dramatically in the SW. The area concerned is ~4 X the size of England. Our government has put 2 desalination plants on-line, and is discussing building more. The dams are hardly ever at more than 35% capacity - Some of this may be due to our population doubling (to 2+ million), but it is mostly caused by a decrease in rainfall, an increase in evaporation, and a reduction in run-off into water capture areas.

This weeks edition of the ABC TV program "Catalyst" was devoted to the impact of warming across nearly all of the Continent - WA was particularly mentioned as having more than 1C warming in the last century, with a dramatic warming of the coastal oceans.

Link (available until November 29): http://www.abc.net.au/iview/#/view/28262

Beer, because that might be all of us sandgropers have to drink.

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Can someone help me here?

@Frederic Bloggs

The worst of the Australian East Coast flooding is further away from the South West of Western Australia than London is from Moscow.

A CSIRO article on Australasian Ocean Currents, and how they help shape the climate around Australia can be found here: http://www.csiro.au/en/Outcomes/Climate/Understanding/AustralasianOceanCurrents.aspx

Easy to use, virus free, secure: Aaah, how I miss my MAINFRAME

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Re: As you said it

Many large organizations, have effectively already done this.

In an effort to keep the nasties out, most Windows desktops are so locked down so much that the user might just as well be using Chrome - No possibility of loading anything unauthorised, but still they are not really secure.

I don't remember much of a problem with VAX/UNIX and VT220/VT241s...

Steelie Neelie admits laptop hack during IGF

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

Coo - A really hard choice

Now who do I believe - Azerbaijani Presidential Administration Social and Political Department, Ali Hasanov, or Neelie?

Apple, HTC kiss and make up

Tim99 Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: I'm probably wrong but...

You do know that Samsung also manufactures in China with their own factories employing more than 20,000 people?

It would seem that their conditions are not up to a high standard too: http://www.chinalaborwatch.org/pro/proshow-177.html

Microsoft to biz: Just so you get off XP, we don't mind if you go Win 7

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Upgrade, not for me

I am so pleased that I have retired, and do not have to get involved in this anymore.

I went from PDPs and Novas, *NIX, and through DOS, Windows 286 - 7 to retirement. As a rough rule, it seems that every other version of Windows has been something to avoid - Windows 3.1, and the original 95 and 98, NT 3.1, the original XP and Vista come to mind as "unfortunate". Windows 3.11, SPs of 95, 98SE, NT 3.5/4.0, and later versions of 2000 and XP were pretty fair; and 7 seems to be reasonable.

After some Pro Bono evaluation of Windows 8 for a couple of organizations, my recommendation is: If you are going to stay with Windows, wait until the second or third iteration of Windows 8 - Or hope that any rushed-out Windows 9 version has more input from the GUI team. Pretty much anything that you have that runs on the traditional desktop will be sub-par. I suspect that Windows 8 will be very successful in driving the change to apps and HTML5 on tablets (but unfortunately for Microsoft, not necessarily Windows tablets).

Much of the *NIX that I had learned 30 years before still works, even on Terminal on the shiny Apple OS X stuff. Fiddling around keeping Windows working was great when I was getting paid principal consultant rates, but I REALLY do not want to do it now in retirement just for myself and my wife. So we got rid of all of the Windows stuff, except for a couple of (hardly used) virtual machines on our other kit.

Apple iPad 4 Wi-Fi only tablet review

Tim99 Silver badge
Boffin

Re: It is truly amazing...

@dotslash - "good luck getting all that content back when Apple inevitably tank..."

Considering what your username is, you appear to be a shill or a bit of an idiot.

OS X conforms to the Open Group UNIX 2003 Specification, so I would probably mount another volume, then cp or rsync the files I needed onto it.

Smartphone biz shocker: Nokia sells fewer devices than Lenovo

Tim99 Silver badge
Big Brother

Re: A friend got a Lumia 800 yesterday

@Jess: "I want my N8 back."

I want my 8210 back. An almost perfect device for an old fart who just wanted to make and take 'phone calls...

Apple's anti-Googorola patent lawsuit tossed by US court

Tim99 Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Corrections

IMHO FRAND abuse is when "intellectual property" is incorporated into an "essential" international Standard.

If it relies on a patent, it should not be a Standard - Or, if it is accepted by the standards body, the licence must be Free (it is the Reasonable and non-discriminatory) part that causes problems.

Apple iPad Mini 8in tablet review

Tim99 Silver badge
Happy

Re: The screen

Er, no. Not unless you really, really, need to be trendy.

Written on my first generation iPad, which still gets 10hrs+ battery life - Running iOS 5.1.1, so the Maps application still shows public transport directions...

I just LOVE Server 2012, but count me out on Windows 8 for now

Tim99 Silver badge
Big Brother

Re: The issue

I have spent a working lifetime around this stuff, and have reluctantly come to a conclusion about 'dumbing down'. I suspect that Microsoft, Apple, Google and Canonical have research data that suggests that many of their potential new users are incapable of using their traditional products - It is all too hard for them. We are, perhaps, insulated from this because we tend to like this stuff, and are prepared to put in the effort to use it.

It is also in the interests of these companies to attempt to roll back the whole free Internet thing - It is much better for them if they can lock a user-base into a propriatory locked-down network - A modern version of AOL, or the MicroSoft Network. There may be a trillion dollars riding on the choices that new users make, we are on the edge of a technological and societal change as big as those that came from movable type and broadcast radio.

NURSES' natural DESIRES to be SATISFIED, by technology

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: More time to spend...@ Great Bu

My wife qualified as a Registered Nurse in 1969, and rose through the ranks of Staff Nurse and Sister in the NHS, and eventually, as a Matron in local government aged care. She makes the point that in the bad old days when she started, juniors (aged 16) sterilized bandages, made beds, cleaned dentures, and were directly supervised by qualified staff in day to day patient care activities. The nursing course was heavily practical and you were surrounded by patients.

I understand that since those days, one becomes a nurse by taking a degree. Apparently one does not have to have much to do with sick people until near the end of the course. Some people who take the courses may be far too important to get their hands dirty, and consider that management is where they rightfully belong.

40,000 sign petition to oust Rep. Paul 'pit of hell' Broun

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: @Flocke Kroes: Religious truth depends on faith

@sabroni

A number of Buddhists would argue that Buddhism is not a religion:-

(It is neither a religion in the sense in which that word is commonly understood, for it is not "a system of faith and worship owing any allegiance to a supernatural being." - www.buddhanet.net )

US trounces UK in climate scepticism jibber-jabber

Tim99 Silver badge
Boffin

Re: They are only less balanced

I have been on the planet longer than you, and am, possibly, more cynical even than you. You wrote:-

"These "scientists" aren't any smarter than me, just have different disciplines"

Many scientists are aware of the motto of The Royal Society: "Nullius in verba " (Latin for "Take nobody's word for it"). The Royal Society chose this as its motto as this signified that they would establish facts via experiments and only disseminate  objective science ignoring the influence of politics or religion.

One thing that us science types (who are trained to try and be always questioning) are made aware of is the Dunning-Kruger effect -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect

(The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than average. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their mistakes....

Actual competence may weaken self-confidence, as competent individuals may falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. As Kruger and Dunning conclude, "the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others")

Google spikes old MS file formats

Tim99 Silver badge
Linux

Re: Download =/= upload

Oh dear, I expect you use Windows, *NIX command: pdfclean LockedFile.pdf UnlockedFile.pdf

Apple Mac OS X Server for Mountain Lion review

Tim99 Silver badge
Meh

Re: ok...

@AC Thursday 30th August 2012 09:47 GMT

I thought I was going to stay out of these comments, until I read yours...

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

"No front to back air cooling" - True, but it only runs at 12W idle and 85W max (41BTU/h 290BTU/h) with 2 two 500GB/7200 RPM HDDs.

"No proper rack mounting" - Several manufacturers make rack kits. You can even have them built into 1U racks with cooling etc. http://www.sonnettech.com/product/xmacminiserver.html

"External 'brick' power supply (IIRC)" - False, the Mac mini has had an internal power supply for the last 2 years.

"Single power supply" - True, although how many power supplies have you had fail in the last few years?

"No lights out management" - True, but there are 3rd party fixes (I have no personal experience here).

"Consumer grade disk" - True, but of a reasonable quality - I have had many "enterprise" grade disks fail too.

"Only a single disk" - False, Dual 500GB/750GB (7200-rpm) hard drives, and SSDs if you want.

"No expandabillity" - So? How about Thunderbolt?

"Only a single Ethernet port (don't suggest adding a USB Ethernet port) meaning no nic teaming, iSCSI, dedicated backup LAN or heartbeat network for clustering." - Instead of USB Ethernet I would suggest a Thunderbolt to Thunderbolt connector - Or even a Thunderbolt to Gigabit Ethernet Adapter @$29:00.

"No Fibrechannel" - If you need fibre channel to link to a SAN you could use the Promise SANLink Fibre Channel adapter. Or for a faster connection than standard Fibre Channel, you could use their 12TB 6 disk RAID with 2 x 10Gb/s channels to give you >800MB/s.

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

From "The Apple Xserve Transition Guide, November 2010" http://www.apple.com/xserve/pdf/L422277A_Xserve_Guide.pdf

"Perfect for small business and workgroups of up to 50 people, a single Mac mini can run the full suite of services that Mac OS X Server has to offer. For a larger number of users in a business or education environment, a single Mac mini can provide a single service. " It suggests that a Mac Mini should support up to:

File sharing - 100 concurrent uses

Mail - 100 concurrent users

Web - 800 concurrent users

Calendar - 800 concurrent users

Directory Services - Up to 10,000 user records in database, Up to 10,000 authorizations/minute.

These figures were based on the old Mac Mini with 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB of 1066MHz DDR3,Two 500GB 7200 HDDs - The new ones have a 2.0GHz quad-core Intel Core i7, and can be specified with 8GB 1333MHz DDR3 SDRAM. Apple claim that the new ones are significantly faster (Java Server SPECjbb2005 - 3.2x faster;

AFP Server AFPBench - 2.8x faster).

I have many years of scars from this stuff including running, managing and writing software for VMS, PDPs, DG-Nova/Eclipse, SPARC/Solaris, HP-UX, DOS, Novell, Windows NT from 3.1 & Windows Server /applications (and SBS), Linux and OS X. I have some enterprise experience, having been directly responsible for all of the IT needs of a group of 450 scientists and engineers; and was also charged with technical/scientific input to another 50,000+ seats in that business. I have also written shrink-wrap software; and managed, sold and configured systems to many small businesses. What is your real hands-on experience, or are your comments based on bias?

My take is that several Mac minis would be OK for up to, say, a hundred users - Although I would recommend that you have a couple of spares. Bigger than a few hundred users could be a problem...

Heartbroken app-maker Qt sneaks into Android's bed

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

No, this is not the way it was meant to be

When all of the fAndroid kiddies and iFondle hipsters have moved over to HTML5, I shall still be using the CLI to talk to my compiled C programs - The way computing was meant to be.

Qt is OK, I suppose - If you have lusers who won't use the CLI, and you can't manage to write what they need with ncurses.

Telstra to extend reach of 4G network

Tim99 Silver badge
Headmaster

Your grammar checker is not enabled

"... into places were population densities..."

It's "where".

Thank you.

MoD to become even more top-heavy as a result of personnel cuts

Tim99 Silver badge
Boffin

Civil Servant's

"Uniformed commissioned officers of the armed services generally consider the civil servants' idea of their equivalent military rank to be comically inflated - even quite minor bureaucrats, if their military rank equivalent were true, would be at a level where they might command major combat units. That said, the value of the military officers' own titles has been continually cheapened for a long time by reorganisations like this one."

Lewis - A two edged sword this one. As someone who was a Scientific Civil Servant in MOD many years ago, the administrative civil service and the pongos were both highly rank conscious - Rodneys a little less so. Fly-boys (except penguins), scientists, and engineers really did not care.

In those days the equivalents were: Scientific Officer (SO) == Lieutenant; Higher SO == Captain (army); Senior SO == Major; Principal SO == Lieutenant Colonel; Senior Principal SO == Colonel; Deputy Chief SO A/B = Brigadier/Major General; Chief SO == General.

The grade structures were quite rigid, except that the military type had seniority when at a military establishment; and the civil servant had seniority at a civilian establishment. Rumour had it that the relative seniority of two equal officers switched in the car between the two different types of establishment.

I myself, reached the dizzying heights of being equivalent to a colonel; but I only had 10 staff. It was said that civil service engineers and scientists had to be given relatively high grades compared to clerical types to keep them happy and reasonably well paid, so that they did not leave for the private sector...

Burglar steals $60,000 of computers from Steve Jobs' home

Tim99 Silver badge
Headmaster

Re: Nope

Petit from the French for small/little (petite: feminine).

Grande is large...

Apple blacklisted by Chinese consumer watchdog

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Short termism?

You were unlucky. Apple batteries are expected to last 300+ cycles. They replaced mine from a MacBook Pro that had <100 cycles (it was well outside the Applecare Warranty) with a new one. Early MacBook Pro batteries can have a short life if you leave them on charge all of the time (they also run hot) - Apparently you are meant to let them discharge regularly. The same MacBook Pro also failed with a black screen when it was nearly 5 years old, due to a bad NVIDEA chip - Apple replaced the logic board free of charge. Similarly my 6 year old iPod Nano was replaced for free with the current version because of potential safety problems with the battery.

So all up, no cause for complaint here.

Build a bonkers hi-fi

Tim99 Silver badge
Megaphone

Re: Nice kit, but...

Nice anecdote Angus. My experience differs.

I used to listen to a lot of live music, from Gregorian chants in small churches to the Who in large halls.

In 1975 my wife bought me an LP12, complete with an SME arm and a Shure V15, which we played through a cheapish amp and speakers. I then spent the next 20 years saving up to buy stuff to match the LP12 - Fortunately my wife reigned in any golden ear traits that I might have had. The final system had Naim amplification, and a Linn Ittok/Asak and speakers. After a "Hi-Fi" demonstration that sounded impressive, I bought a medium price CD player. When I got it home and listened to it, we were appalled at how bad everything sounded, Yes the odd crackle and pop from vinyl had gone, but so had most of what made the music enjoyable. I took the CD player back. Eventually I bought a Naim CD player which we thought sounded Pretty good.

Now comes the vaguely interesting bit, I had a serious car accident which resulted in minor brain damage. Afterwards the LP12 still sounded reasonable, but the CD was uncomfortable to listen to. Unfortunately, although the LP12 was still good to listen to, I no longer had the mechanical skill to drive it without damaging records. I sold the entire system to a nice junior doctor for a fair price and bought a simple B&O all-in-one that sounded OK, not much musical enjoyment but OK for social and background listening.

So it would seem that the brain is at least as responsible for what we hear and enjoy as the equipment that we use...

Shouty Shouty, because that is what most Hi-Fi now sounds like to me.