Posts by Tim99

Smart TVs are spying on everyone

Re: IF YOU CAN'T BEAT THEM .... USE THEM :)

I have two. The standard HDHomeRun software is adequate, but a bit basic and fiddly. You can set up VLC to use the hardware, but without a programming guide. I went against my cheapskate principles and downloaded the Channels DVR recorder software from getchannels.com - It costs US$80 a year and I find it well worth it because of their version of comskip. Most adverts are skipped. I usually run it on a Raspberry Pi, but occasionally on an Apple iMac. The main TV has an AppleTV as the Channels client, but another (or even the same) Raspberry Pi can be connected to the TV's HDMI. If I could be bothered, it looks feasible to pay SiliconDust US$35/year for their recorder software, set up HDHomerun with ffmpeg and comskip - Probably easy if you use a Windows PC as the recorder (I'm retired and don't use Windows anymore), it looks as though comskip probably has to be downloaded and compiled from source for Linux.

Ubuntu turns 20: 'Oracular Oriole' shows this old bird's still got plenty of flight

Re: "the formidably hard-to-install Debian"

"Ubuntu: Swahili for "I failed to install Debian Devuan" - FTFY (I'm old, but I hope that I might still be helpful).

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

BBC weather glitch shows 13k mph winds in London, 404℃ in Nottingham

Re: Neptune is jealous

But hours are in a Standard (ISO 8601), and can be useful as UTC with a local offset... >>===>

Switching customers from Linux to BSD because boring is good

Re: No security updates

You certainly is possible, just don't connect it to anything else...

After we fix that, how about we also accidentally break something important?

In our small business, it happened so frequently that we called it an ”OBTW" happening.

Back in the day, 1st line support was the person who answered the help-line phone and read through choices on a menu. If they got to the end of the choices without resolving the problem they transferred you to a 2nd line support person - They had some knowledge of the system, and usually had access to the manuals and the "known problems" database. If they couldn't fix it, you were told that they were escalating your problem, and that somebody would phone you back. The "somebody" was the 3rd line support person - This could well be one of the people who had actually designed or written the system... In our small business I was often all of them. My calls ranged from "My computer thingy's disappeared" to obscure interaction problems (usually caused by Microsoft).

OS/2 expert channeled a higher power to dispel digital doom vortex

I can remember the number plates of my father's first 2 cars from the 1950s "NLU 372" and "368 BTO". I'm now on my 15th car and remember none of their numbers except the last one, which is "easy to remember" and was transferred from the previous vehicle...

Re: In the days before t’interweb…

Digital had a line of cut down PDP-11 type workstations called DEC Professional. I was issued with a PRO-350. As I recall, the OS was a version of RSX-11 called "Professional Operating System" or P/OS - Most of us thought that it was. They lasted less than 2 years before they were replaced by genuine IBM ATs.

Now Dell salespeople must be onsite five days a week

An unfortunate hybrid

Perhaps many/most middle management jobs are a fusion of David Graeber's "Bullshit jobs" and Sturgeon's Revelation "ninety percent of everything is crud"?

Back in the day there was an apocryphal revelation from a BOFH to a luser "Go away or I will replace you with a small shell script".

Did you hear the one about the help desk chap who abused privileges to prank his mate?

Re: RDP is still RDP

Confusing and ill-defined branding is a hallmark of MS's marketing department - In their efforts to cause confusion, they also tended give their products a name that could be confused with a 'real standard". MAPI for IMAP comes to mind, after an "accountant" company director told me that they were the same...

The future of software? Imagine a bot, stamping on a human face – forever

Re: Yes, but...

I'm retired now, but when I worked, If I was lucky "Oh by the way..." happened before what I had written went into production.

To patch this server, we need to get someone drunk

When I worked for MoD, PSO was thought to be between Lt Colonel and Colonel. The bits that I worked in always were run by a PSO, the main difference was the level and difficulty of the workload. Interestingly as I was responsible for ordering materials, I had two 'industrial" reports as an SO, the HSOs and two SSOs didn't have any direct reports. In the HO "forensic expert witness" eligibility was based on academic qualification; for science stuff "a good honours degree" was normally needed. For less academic work, experience was probably more important. When I left the public service at 41, I had just been offered SPSO.

Way back in the day, in an annual review, my PSO boss told me that the "career grade" (the one that you would spend much of your time in near the end of your career) was PSO. If you were considered to be a "high flyer" you would make PSO by the age of 32 and SPSO by 40. The longest scale was SO, and some poor unfortunates took 20 years to get to the top; as I recall the increment was ~3-4%, which wasn't particularly impressive when inflation was running at several times that. SSO was bit weird because that was the entry grade for some bright young PhDs, whilst many others were in their 50s, and were probably going to retire at that grade. To put this in perspective, there was a Military Rank equivalent where an SSO/SEO would be considered to be similar to a Wing Commander.

A nice cup of tea rewired the datacenter and got things working again

Re: There is a proper way to do most things

Er, because it is black tea that you add to milk? Not, say, white tea (China or Fujian White); or green tea, with milk (yuk).

Re: There is a proper way to do most things

Alternatively, the Royal Society of Chemistry may well have the definitive method for black tea with milk: archive.org, 2003.

It appears that adding the milk *first* allows the tea's bitter polyphenols to combine with the milk's proteins and fats; adding the milk last denatures it and prevents this reaction. You may prefer a more bitter brew, but the milk first method can avoid the need to add sucrose.

Hangover from messy Walmart tech divorce ongoing at Asda

Re: 2,500 systems?

"... 2,500 servers seems like far too many." Unless the senior IT staff like Windows?

Troll hat off for a moment. When I came back from extended leave from a not-for-profit, their preferred contractor had installed a PDC, SQL Server, Exchange Server, File Server, and a Backup Server for <10 staff. The excuse was to allow for growth - Unfortunately, to bung up their margins, they had cut down on disk space to be within the (extortionate) budget so nothing worked properly. At the time a single MS Small Business Server would have been more that adequate.

Sweet 16 and making mistakes: More of the computing industry's biggest fails

PART 1: 8 bits; Part 2: Sweet 16 and making mistakes; etc?

Assuming this is about PCs - Maybe seeing an anthropomorphic trend here?

• 32 BIT: Getting more done, in partnership, useful developments, spawning child processes?
• 64 BIT: Everything you thought would ever be needed; but bloated, resulting in many layers of management, and still slow?
• 128 BIT PCs: I wrote FORTRAN science stuff in 1970, ready for recycling?...

Tech support chap solved knotty disk failure problem by staring at the floor

Re: Trivector

Yes, I did some Dataflex stuff too. Our networked integration was initially Nelson data concentrators on a LAN loading into a PC. Nelson also did our first LIMS. Eventually, I wrote a new LIMS using the same R:Base database as Nelson, then I added Business Management Systems. Eventually we moved on from the Nelson to VG...

Trivector

Trivector used their computer with several of their chemical/physical analyzers, particularly for used oil analysis. I spent a fair bit of time getting data in and out and connecting them to PC LANS in the 1980s. A link to some more current kit is here.

Raspberry Pi 5 slims down for cut-price 2 GB RAM version

Re: Vision

Talking of 80s standards, I did SQL database stuff on a VAX 11-750 for a public utility. I'm retired now, and use Pi Zero 2Ws as LAN Web/SQL test beds for some pro bono stuff that I develop. Generally they are good for 10+ concurrent web users, each running up to 10+ SQL inserts/reads/updates per second, which would be generally similar to the VAX SQL performance that I needed. I think the VAX cost ~£150,000 - The 2W board is about 1/10,000 the price and works out ~~4,000 times the power in VAX MIPS

Apple is coming to take 30% cut of new Patreon subs on iOS

Re: It Just Works

As a volunteer, I taught "computing" to retirees, on average 1-2 afternoons a week. Our rough rule for Windows was that people needed about 12 weeks to be safe enough to do the basics without continuous support. When the iPad 2 came out, we realized that it was suitable for much of what seniors needed to do. The 12 week course was modified to 6 weeks, just covering the internet, Apple Mail and the App Store. Anyone who wanted to edit photographs could add on another 2 weeks. Android tablets were mostly Samsung, which a number of people found harder to learn (Samsungs own Apps in particular) and less 'intuitive". Typically they would spend 2-3 weeks longer.

When I helped workshop "computing for seniors" for our national government, they seemed to agree - Their basic "suggested recommendation" was for iPads. At the time smart phones where usually too small for people with impaired eyesight and limited dexterity; particularly as older people wanted the POTS that they were used to...

Re: nothing's changed in 30 years

"that the 30% cut might well have been acceptable when Apple first started their App store"

Why? Why is this shit acceptable?

Perhaps because back then; when I used to write and ship specialist shrink-wrap software; my cost of marketing, distribution, and sales were a lot more than 30%? OK you're talking about Patreon which is generally not the same thing, but I agree that these days 30% is too high, maybe 15%?

Microsoft whiz dishes the dirt on the Blue Screen Of Death's colorful past

White on Blue

My unreliable memory suggests that white on blue was a default colour scheme used by IBM in the 1980s after user screen optimizaton workshop experiments. The PC version of DisplayWrite with colour screens used it; bold, etc., was highlighted in yellow.

The secret to better weather forecasts may be a dash of AI

I'm not sure that we need "temperature" either...

CrowdStrike meets Murphy's Law: Anything that can go wrong will

Re: MBA culture replaced engineering culture

Global capital may be deciding that sourcing from India is now too expensive, and that South/East Asia or some African countries can come in at about 2/3rds of that...

Smartphone is already many folks' only computer – say hi to optional desktop mode in Android 15 beta

I'm not sure why you couldn't do what you needed with an iPhone. Since about iPhone 8 I had been successful using the Apple multimedia dongle with a

(small) bt keyboard. I could use the phone as a trackpad, but found that a bt mouse worked well for me. Software used included the standard Apple apps and Excel, Word, and a couple of ssh clients. When travelling light I would use the above with a longish HDMI cable to connect to hotel TVs, or a projector for demos (often Keynote with a VGA adapter instead of the HDMI). On one occasion another presenter had to borrow the setup as they couldn't get their Windows 7 laptop to connect to the projector.

Innocent techie jailed for taking hours to fix storage

Re: I Had Forgotten

In a UK police canteen, about 40+ years ago, it could have included chips - Or at least, fried potato.

Despite OS shields up, half of America opts for third-party antivirus – just in case

Re: Another layer, another source of trouble

A friend had a Dell all-in-one which had been upgraded to Windows 10. He also had one of the first large refillable ink tank Epson printers. We live in Australia so we get Patch Tuesday before many and, almost every month, it borked the printer. It would work with his iPhone 8, so definitely an MS problem. Sometimes removing and re-installing McAfee fixed it, generally it required reinstalling and setting up the printer drivers. After removing McAfee and using the MS native AV, he was "only" getting problems with paper sizes etc. He is in his late 80s and one of his hobbies is photography. I'm retired and have just spent an interesting couple of days looking through his large collection of JPG files (exiftools, etc.), then after writing a few shell scrips and using a couple of FOSS tools, removed the obvious duplicates - Followed by a bit of visual inspection based on dates and file sizes. We got it down to a manageable 20+ thousand images. He bought a new printer, and now has a new iPad 10. So far it has been much easier to help him become confident with the iPad than to work out and remind him which of the 5 ways he used to print and edit his photos. It probably helps that he has had the iPhone for a few years, but yesterday the Dell was consigned to the garage on its way to the local computer charity.

Windows: Insecure by design

Finally - Goodbye Microsoft?

I have an MS Hotmail account that I have had from the late 90s when my company was a MS "partner" and later for a (short) while had a customer MS reference site. Since I retired, my involvement with MS has reduced - A lot. Before Christmas I turned of my last VMs running Windows 2000, 7, and 10. My day-to-day running is on an iMac, iPad Pro, an iPhone 13, and a couple of Raspberry Pi's. I have noticed that over the last months that I have been regularly asked to input my MS credentials into my mail programs.

Yesterday I received an email from MS "Update your sign-in technology before September 16th, 2024 to maintain email access." Its contents include: "To help keep your account secure, Microsoft will no longer support the use of third-party email and calendar apps which ask you to sign in with only your Microsoft Account username and password. To keep you safe you will need to use a mail or calendar app which supports Microsoft’s modern authentication methods.

If you do not act, your third-party email apps will no longer be able to access your Outlook.com, Hotmail or Live.com email address on September 16th. To help keep your account secure, Microsoft will no longer support the use of third-party email and calendar apps which ask you to sign in with only your Microsoft Account username and password. To keep you safe you will need to use a mail or calendar app which supports Microsoft’s modern authentication methods. If you do not act, your third-party email apps will no longer be able to access your Outlook.com, Hotmail or Live.com email address on September 16th... ...Microsoft provides free versions of Outlook for your PC, Mac, iOS, and Android devices which can be easily downloaded and connect to your email account. How can you set up your Gmail, Apple Mail, or other third-party mail application?

Various non-Microsoft applications will have their own steps for connecting to your Outlook.com email account using modern authentication methods. See our help article - Modern Authentication Methods now needed to continue syncing Outlook Email in non-Microsoft email apps."

After an extended period of my mail programs generating two copies of outgoing messages from the MS account, and the persistent requests to input my credentials, I am finally considering removing MS from my life completely. At the moment if I use a Hotmail address if someone has an MS email address, or they are relatively low on my level of trust (e.g. large retailer, or an acquaintance). Gmail is for people on an even lower trust level. Various other addresses, including my own domain, are for more trusted or "work related" contacts. Inertia means that I will probably keep an eye on this for a month or two; but if it goes as badly as I suspect, it will finally be "Goodbye Microsoft".

American interest in electric vehicles short circuits for first time in four years

The principal of the local big chain dealership told a friend of mine that was on his sales training course "Remember that the car is just the vehicle to sell our finance packages" (pun intended).

systemd 256.1: Now slightly less likely to delete /home

Re: ...Boccassi is Poettering's colleague at Microsoft

I posted this about systemd on El Reg over 6 years ago before the Microsoft thing.... How can we make money?

A dilemma for a Really Enterprise Dependant Huge Applications Technology company - The technology they provide is open, so almost anyone could supply and support it. To continue growing, and maintain a healthy profit they could consider locking their existing customer base in; but they need to stop other suppliers moving in, who might offer a better and cheaper alternative, so they would like more control of the whole ecosystem. The scene: An imaginary high-level meeting somewhere - The agenda: Let's turn Linux into Windows - That makes a lot of money:-

Q: Windows is a monopoly, so how are we going to monopolise something that is free and open, because we will have to supply source code for anything that will do that? A: We make it convoluted and obtuse, then we will be the only people with the resources to offer it commercially; and to make certain, we keep changing it with dependencies to "our" stuff everywhere - Like Microsoft did with the Registry.

Q: How are we going to sell that idea? A: Well, we could create a problem and solve it - The script kiddies who like this stuff, keep fiddling with things and rebooting all of the time. They don't appear to understand the existing systems - Sell the idea they do not need to know why *NIX actually works.

Q: *NIX is designed to be dependable, and go for long periods without rebooting, How do we get around that. A: That is not the point, the kids don't know that; we can sell them the idea that a minute or two saved every time that they reboot is worth it, because they reboot lots of times in every session - They are mostly running single user laptops, and not big multi-user systems, so they might think that that is important - If there is somebody who realises that this is trivial, we sell them the idea of creating and destroying containers or stopping and starting VMs.

Q: OK, you have sold the concept, how are we going to make it happen? A: Well, you know that we contribute quite a lot to "open" stuff. Let's employ someone with a reputation for producing fragile, barely functioning stuff for desktop systems, and tell them that we need a "fast and agile" approach to create "more advanced" desktop style systems - They would lead a team that will spread this everywhere. I think I know someone who can do it - We can have almost all of the enterprise market.

Q: What about the other large players, surely they can foil our plan? A: No, they won't want to, they are all big companies and can see the benefit of keeping newer, efficient competitors out of the market. Some of them sell equipment and system-wide consulting, so they might just use our stuff with a suitable discount/mark-up structure anyway.

Re: Isn't systemd great?

Someone will beat this - but... My first proper "none-CPM/or/Apple" machine at work was a Data General with 2 (count them, 2!) disk drives - A fixed Phoenix drive with 5MB and a removable 5MB as a "temporary measure". It was replaced by a 25MB rack-mounted Winchester drive with a 1.2MB 8" floppy for install/backup/archiving/restore. Somebody from DG Sales came out to find out why we needed "such a large amount". I discovered that I could fill a 1.2MD disk with one days work. Eventually the large colour Tektronix monitor that came with system was helped when I got an ancillary screen that was actually a genuine IBM AT with a massive 30MB HDD and a VGA(?) screen running terminal emulation software, with the option of transferring data from the DG to the AT.

Techie installed 'user attitude readjustment tool' after getting hammered in a Police station

Re: User attitude readjustment tool

Luxury - Others will admit to having used lower "actual" speeds, but I started with a 110 baud line that could degrade to perhaps half of that if t was raining. Obviously in the UK this was a normal occurrence...

Version 256 of systemd boasts '42% less Unix philosophy'

Re: Is it just me...

Sorry Liam, I'm probably (very?) wrong. I believe Situation Publishing Ltd is still the publisher, with Drew Cullen as one of the owners?

What I should have said is "... Or has the reliability of the site has got worse since it changed to more of an American focus?"

Perhaps the servers have been relocated? I'm retired and spend most of my time in Australia. I know that we have Simon here, maybe he has noted a significant drop in the rendering performance, reliability, and generally poor responsiveness to input of the site as well? I use a Linux machine with Firefox (and reluctantly) Chrome; an M4 iMac with Safari, DuckDuckGo, and FF; and an iPad with Safari and DDG. After >40 years of writing professional-level software, initially for PC-MS-DOS, then Windows, I turned my last ever Microsoft machine off a few months ago - I noticed these issues with that too...

Is it just me...

...Or has the reliability of this site got worse under the new owners? I regularly have issues with lost connections, failure to post replies, and upvoting/downvoting requiring 3+ attempts.

I have tried to post a reply about avoiding systemd by using Devuan for about an hour. It showed up 23 minutes later.

Re: I only just got the hang of the sudoers file format

Maybe consider switching to something without systemd, like the Debian fork Devuan?

Apple finally adds RCS support after years of mixed messages

I haven't had my coffee yet. Perhaps you should have used the Joke icon? >>====>

Seething CEO shoulder surfed techie after mistaken takedown of production server

Re: Labelling production

^This^. Many years ago I saw that a colleague had set a Windows admin account screen background to a bright red. I thanked them, stole the idea, and have used it on everything "admin" ever since.

Sodium ion batteries: Yet another innovation poised to be dominated by China

Re: Na Ion Battery surely

Na S batteries have been around for a long time. British Rail did a lot of research on them in the 1970s. They showed "potential" :-) in spite of the engineering and technical challenges. Apparently some people weren't too happy at the thought of large amounts of molten sodium and sulfur/sulphur* travelling around at 100mph, so more effort was probably spent on stationary installations.

*Sulfur is preferred international IUPAC spelling (Wikipedia), sulphur tends to used be UK

Raspberry Pi unveils Hailo-powered AI Kit to make the model 5 smarter

Re: Please fix the fan.

I put a 4GB Pi5 in a standard black case in our retirement village library for basic internet and office work. It tended to run warm and was a bit noisy. Removing the standard fan and replacing it with the Active Cooler improved things considerably - The fan comes on less often, and when it does I can't hear it. If it is still too hot drill a couple of holes in the lid. Two somewhat more expensive solutions that I have for personal use are an Argon NEO 5 black case with built-in fan on a headless Pi for testing and development; and a similar Argon NEO 5 M.2 NVME PCIE case with an internal 2TB Kingston SSD on another headless Pi that I use as a file server and recorder for live TV.

Windows 11 24H2 might call time on that old NAS under the stairs

Re: OCR

That's why with went with plain single column ASCII, no italic, bold, or underlined text, with two lines between paragraphs. It almost always scanned OK. Scanning was the final fall-back position, in conjunction with the Mk1 human eyeball, as we normally moved and backed up these simple .TXT files to new systems as the technology changed.

Re: ....if the user is simply trying to access some holiday snaps on an old NAS...

Or fired cuneiform tablets? In the 1980s I had a project where we were asked to archive individuals' health/safety data for 70 years, "the possible length of their adult lifetime". IBM suggested their "new" WORM optical storage. A couple of years later they told us that the long term archival properties were "disappointing". We saved everything on disk as ASCII plain text and printed it out onto "unbleached" archive quality paper. Cheap chlorine bleached paper degrades badly and becomes friable and discoloured in a few years/decades. Documents from before the mid 19th century hand-written with tannic or carbon based inks are usually OK, a newspaper from the 1930s is likely to be very degraded.

Re: Get an update :)

Some "important" users should only be allowed something like the (text only) DEC VT320 for "important" work. Back then VMS had file version control. If they had stuffed one of their documents, you could get back a previous version - Assuming that they had saved it!

Re: Stop sigh.

Some of us fondly remember the old UK "T" HALT sign: Pre-Worboys Committee (Alamy.com image) whose shape was unique.

Which like the current octagonal one, could still be understood if the lettering was obscured by snow, bees, etc. >>=====>

Codd almighty! Has it been half a century of SQL already?

One of the reasons (apart from their appalling licencing) that I moved away from developing mostly with Oracle (After using them for about 10 years, along with Informix, Sybase, Rdb etc.,) was that I probably needed to iron only one shirt a fortnight. The only viable customer-base was large government infrastructures - We were a small company, and would only see crumbs. We found a niche by (professionally) prototyping things with MS Access and then upgrading it to a MS SQL Server backend.

This approach happened by accident. We were asked to put something together in a few days for a new customer, our existing tools were not going to work, and showing pretend screen-shots was not going to work either. I had some experience with the DOS relational database R:Base, some of whose developers wrote MS Access (R:Base was licensed to be sold in Europe by Microsoft). Windows/NT 3.11/3.1 had just come out, so I looked at Access. A few simple tables, forms and reports later I had something to show the customer. After a couple of days of on-site discussion and adding/removing things I told the customer that we were ready to port it to another system - "Why, that one does what we want, why should we pay to have something else"? I told them that it needed upgrading to be "more reliable on a network" and better inherent security. How long? they said. A couple of days (to split it into a front-end/back-end system and put in referential integrity). They went with it and it quickly grew such that I upsold them a SQL Server 4.2 version.

The customer eventually went with us for most of their IT. They told me that they had done the same scoping exercise with one of our larger competitors who was going to use Oracle/VB or Powerbuilder/Watcom/Sybase - They quoted 3 months to finish prototyping and another 6 for production, with much higher hardware and licencing costs. I retired and sold the company a few years back. The new owners tell me that most of the Access/SQL Server systems are still running, but upgraded to use the latest versions of Access and SQL Server - So that is over 30 years now.

Thanks for coming to help. No, we can't say why we called – it's classified

I worked at an MoD establishment whose entire purpose was to make things go boom. I believe that you may be correct as to searching for what people might take off the site - As well as going boom it was classified. We too had MoD police, many of whom had large imposing Webley revolvers. A exception to exit searches involved a service engineer on a routine maintenance visit. He turned up on the first day in a large estate car with a lot of kit in the back. Unusually he was pulled over and asked to open the tailgate for inspection and open a number of boxes and cases containing tools, test gear and components etc. I was called whilst this was going on to escort him to the job. It was a large establishment, so it was a 10 minute walk to the gate. When I got there the car was empty and the boxes were all on the tarmac. Another few minutes elapsed while we reloaded the car. The engineer said that he had to open everything. The next day he told me that when he had left, the same person flagged him down. He expected another rigorous search, but it was just to sign the paperwork. When he was asked if that was all, the reply was "That's fine, if there is anything in there we would never find it"...

Will Windows drive a PC refresh? Everyone's talking about AI

Betteridge's law of headlines

Suggests that the answer to "Will Windows drive a PC refresh?" is No (Wikipedia).

A thump with the pointy end of a screwdriver will fix this server! What could possibly go wrong?

Re: Technical Terminology

I worked in Birmingham for a while - I was told that theirs were bigger, so you didn't need to swing them as hard.