Posts by Tim99

New boss took charge of project code and sent two billion unwanted emails

I must stop posting to El Reg in my time zone ,when it is early in the morning BST. For a while I haven't been able to do/undo changes within the last 10 minutes for a post. The site only shows my stuff from (a few?) hours ago.

My Loadsamoney suggestion is probably not for the blue-blood types, as it seemed to be for one of Thatcher's new money Essex types? Having said that, I was a UK Scientific Civil Servant at the time, and most of the blue-bloods and Essex types that I met there were pretty bright.

"Loadsamoney" (Harry Enfield) - May not work for left pondians?

Apple's ultra-thin iPhone flops as foldable iPad hits a crease

Re: Wrong segment because margins

Had a 13 Mini (see posts above) would not go back to Touch ID (elderly fingers). The notch didn't bother me. YMMV.

See my post above? The Air is small/light enough to go in my trouser pocket, and is sufficiently "grippy" not to be at a particular risk of dropping.

Caveat: I've been carrying mobile phones around since the Ericsson EH238, Jane. As far as I can recall it was the only one that I've dropped (The aerial caught on my clothing) - It broke and the Telco swapped it out for a working one at minimal charge. Maybe that made me more careful...

Of my previous phones, the 12 & 13 Minis had a case that included a carrier for a credit and seniors cards, driving licence and a folded currency note. The air works fine with just a MagSafe card carrier that is just thick enough to protect the camera if the phone is laid flat - Although I normally detach it and put it another pocket when leaving the house. Being elderly, my hands fine-motor control is not as good as it was, but so far, I still haven't dropped it.

Re: Where's the MINI?!

Mrs Tim99 has inherited my 13 mini, replacing her previous inherited 12 mini. She uses it as a basic phone - also connected to her iPad in the house. The combination works well for her to send texts, FaceTime and email. I bought a 17 Air last month, mainly because a cataract operation didn’t go as well as I hoped. I don’t use a case for most of the time as it travels in my trouser-side pocket, but I did buy a bumper case which I have used a few times (it feels a bit slippery, and for a small thing appears quite heavy and bulky). The phone "feels nice" to handle without the case. Screen is very good. The camera and battery are both OK. Macro mode is so-so, and telephoto is "adequate" for my purposes. My iPad Pro works well enough for macro shots.

Lots of purchasers of the large 17 pro in the shop - almost all with the orange version (maybe the buyers "wanted others to know it was the top of the line"?). Its camera seemed excellent, but the phone felt heavy and a bit uncomfortable in the hand. I extended the tether and put one in my pocket to try (after checking with the salesperson!) - It felt like the extra weight was pulling my shorts down, the Air was fine.

Generally very pleased with the Air, and suspect that it *will* sell, after the first-adopter surge for the Pro has finished. Many of us don’t need the features of the Pro; and might well also buy the expected, cheaper, 17e.

Caveat: I may well be a fat, old (retired), rich, white man - normal expectations may not apply.

China?

Apparently poor sales do not apply to China (simply.com).

Excel is three sheets to the window on iOS as update borks everything

I posted this yesterday: Numbers & Pages (El Reg).

Microsoft puts Office Online Server on the chopping block

Numbers and Pages aren’t bad. Numbers has a few inconsistencies with Excel: No field locking (but you can have multiple tables on a sheet, and lock individual tables); the colours on conditional formatting don’t always match up; and the order/application of multiple rules can be different. Cell formulae are generally compatible, and I make a point of not using macros. These days I usually prototype with Numbers, and then export to Excel if it is needed in that format - typically takes a few minutes to tidy up. Still a lot faster for me than doing it in Excel.

Pages doesn’t like tables within tables, and the default fonts often won’t line up with what is du jour for Word. One thing to be aware of is that the Apple files are considerably larger, possibly because they contain within themselves everything needed to recreate them, zipping only gives a small size reduction.

Google porting all internal workloads to Arm, with help from GenAI

FTFY?

"Doing so will likely save money... Axion-powered machines deliver up to 65 percent better price-performance than x86 instances, and can be 60 percent more energy-efficient... the web giant will need fewer almost no x86 processors in years to come".

'Fax virus' panicked a manager and sparked job-killing Reply-All incident

A previous secretary of our retirement village had been taught to type on PMG telex machines. All of the village emails from him were, indeed, in UPPERCASE.

Re: Oh, the 1990s

I think Windows 3x had fax software. I wrote a couple of applications that sent faxes when some condition became true/false.

Apple goes all in on AI acceleration with M5 MacBook, iPad, and Vision Pros

Re: So in summary

I waited until the M3 to update from an Intel iMac. Yes, it is still very fast, particularly compiling, I don't see any reason to update for the foreseeable future, my only slight annoyance is it's the only kit we have that needs a lightening connector (keyboard + mouse).

I just preordered an M5 13" iPad to replace a previous model (I use it more than the iMac and my Raspberry Pi's).

Bose kills SoundTouch: Smart speakers go dumb in Feb

Re: BOSE

Passed it on - Much of it still working, but needs a new belt on cassette mechanism. Owner not happy that will be $1,300. When I passed it on (for free) everything was working, but told them that I couldn't help them after initial set up. I suspect that the service company is trying it on, as a new belt is ~$60. Overpriced - possibly/probably? At the time the complete set was ~$8,000 whereas the new price for my Linn/Naim stuff was ~$50,000?

Re: BOSE

Well I found the NAC of pairing stuff with my Linn LP12 - A few Snaps of the fingers and it worked. After a while I did have to take a NAP.

Caveat: Mrs Tim99 bought me one of the first neon switch LP12s in the early-mid 1970s. Spent 25 years buying stuff to match. Final systems based on upgraded LP12/Ittok/Asak/ 32s/NAP250 with assorted Naim power supplies and Sara speakers (Should have kept the Kans). Just got to where I wanted to be with it; then an RTA gave me hearing, brain, and coordination problems. Sold them all and bought a B&O all-in-one which was "OK". These days, hearing nearly completely shot, a pair of Apple HomePod Minis are fine.

Re: BOSE

Also, back in the day, when my hearing still worked: Bass Overwhelms Sound Experience...

Who gets a Mac at work? Here's how companies decide

I have a relative who has retired from IBM - he was responsible for significant parts of their infrastructure. The information is now about 4 years old but he said that the majority of people he saw at work had Apple laptops (and usually at home too), the next was Linux. The minority Windows users were a (distant?) third - mostly for people who were supporting Windows customers.

Space Shuttle war of words takes off as senator blasts 'woke Smithsonian'

Me too. Not so much sympathy for the fruit flies and various Alberts (rhesus monkeys) before Laika - Didn't do full orbit almost all died.

Before Laika, Dezik and Tsygan (Russian dogs) did, together, survive a suborbital trip - many of the subsequent Russian suborbital dogs also survived.

Some of us were adults who watched Apollo 11 - Feel *ancient* now...

BOFH: Recover a database from five years ago? It's as easy as flicking a switch

Re: Or just use the backup data?

I realized a long time ago that the metadata is as important as the data - I corresponded with PJ from Groklaw about it when a lot of emphasis was on FOSS. I, too, had seen projects that were put together over years with multiple bits of software cobbled together, often with a database storing everything.

It was fine to say that it was "Free" but if it relied on a mixture of Python, JavaScript, PostgreSQL, Linux/GNU, C, C++, Ruby, MS Excel, etc., etc., the chances of rebuilding it were very slim. If you had metadata "accurately" describing the data, and relevant design specs, it would be relatively easy to get something out; even if all you had was an SQL data dump and SQLite.

I wondered initially that this didn't happen because of time/budget constraints; but, now, suspect something more nefarious.

Re: 5 year old database?

I mentioned before that I still have R:Base 4.5 and all of its paperwork, manuals etc. I know I'll never use it again - I don't even run Windows anymore, but a previous version got me started as an independent contractor...

Techie found an error message so rude the CEO of IBM apologized for it

Re: Bah!

Thanks for making me feel my age - I saw it at the Strand Theatre when Linda Thorson was in it...

Dirty little Electron secret tanks macOS 26 performance

Re: Let's get back to some tried and trusted techniques

Tahoe is currently a little flaky. I have noticed several problems with Safari - Right-clicking on a link on a Mac which used to quickly open a new tab with the link-content either doesn't work, or is very slow - clicking the same link again quickly opens the tab (and obviously the first instance too). A change in function when downloading a zip file completely baffled me. It doesn't actually appear to save the file - it requires going to the download arrow in the URL bar, opening it and then choosing the box/up-arrow and choosing a save file location...

UK police caught slacking off by jamming their keyboards while working from home

Keyboard skills

I started typing in the 1960s - On a good day, I can use 2 fingers (and a thumb for the space bar) on the right hand, with an occasional second finger on the left. I sometimes worked with police officers just as they were installing computers - the average that I saw was an index finger with a 1-2 second gap between keys - They, like me, had started with a typewriter.

A typewriter was originally the person who operated the machine. As clerical work was usually done by men, and the machines were "technical" the majority of users were male. Many more women were employed in offices during WW1 to replace the absent men, so by the 1920's, typewriting was often considered "women's work". The (female) clerical staff that I worked with considered my efforts "hysterically funny/poor".

I suspect that somebody could set up a Raspberry Pi Zero loaded up with typical police reports, connect its serial port to the PC, have a couple of python scrips randomly choosing sentences, add a few errors and random delays between letters, with a number of gaps of a few minutes...

Hundreds of orgs urge Microsoft: don’t kill off free Windows 10 updates

Re: Windows 7 surge

I thought 2000 was one go the best looking (and functioning). No plug and pray. Fixed XP by setting it to the "Classic" 2000 desktop - It seemed to work faster too.

Re: Hanging on to 7 / 10 as long as possible

I was running Windows 10 and XP in VMs on an Apple Mac. After I looked inside Windows 11, about 2 years ago, I made the decision to turn them off and never use Windows. My life has probably improved now I use only MacOS, Raspberry Pi's, iPadOD and iOS.

Caveat - I go back to the before the days of MS/PC-DOS v2, so I'm probably senile too...

Re: I doubt it'll happen

Many UNIX commands that I use daily (in a macOS Tahoe 26 terminal) are from the 1970s (crnx.net) when I was first learning them...

Re: Nothing In The UK News About This

Flanders and Swann both lived at 1 Scarsdale Villas, Kensington. Swann moved out, after he married - according to Flanders, to "South Kensington" ("Battersea!"). Before that part of "South of the River" became more genteel.

Bored developers accidentally turned their watercooler into a bootleg brewery

Re: Many moons ago, when I was gone for a week ...

I'm not sure that she sold many stamps?

Re: Many moons ago, when I was gone for a week ...

Me too. A colleague described it as covering everybody from the nice lady who sold you stamps in the Post Office to James Bond.

Google is very sorry for pulling down COVID misinfo and pledges never to use outside fact-checkers

Re: Politicise Everything

My late father, a senior local government officer, said: Everything is politics - somebody wants something, even if it is just to keep what they already have - you have to deal with it (dealing with it is sometimes ignoring them).

British spreadsheet wizard will take mad skillz to Vegas after taking national Excel crown

Re: You did 'What !!!???'' with a spreadsheet !!!!

I wrote a couple of systems that were deployed on multiple LANs. Typically 5-30 concurrent users. They started to run out of steam at about 30,000 rows in a table with lots of inserts/updates - my solution was to archive data off to other tables/dbs and just have recent/important stuff active in the main tables. As expected, the performance improved if the client PCs had their own copies of the engine, and shared just the data files on the server.

In the UK/Europe it was sold under licence by Microsoft and was, I believe, the 2nd most popular db after dBase - which I never liked much, possibly because I was used to SQL. I think it stopped being a major player after Wayne Erickson put a lot of company resources into the DEC version (Vanguard?) just as DEC had their own problems. I heard that a number of the coders then went to work for Microsoft to build MS Access. I still have the manuals and floppies for R:Base 4.5, but never went to the Windows version, as I had moved on. Current versions are available for Windows (and DOS!).

Re: You did 'What !!!???'' with a spreadsheet !!!!

Have an upvote, I too remember VisiCalc, and later Multiplan and Lotus 1-2-3. Unfortunately Lotus was advertised with 3 functions (hence its name): Spreadsheet, database, and charts. Probably responsible for your 'Spreadsheets as databases etc ... Arrrgh !!!’. I had a colleague who used it to write letters and reports too (they definitely were not pretty). Around the time that Lotus was becoming popular, I was using DEC Rdb and R:Base, so I was "not impressed" by the spreadsheet-as-a-database; but almost everyone where I worked had one...

Microsoft thinks cloud PCs might be overkill, starts streaming just apps under Windows 365

Re: But why?

Rob Easterway's 2019 talk to the Royal Institution indicates that many (most?) spreadsheets are wrong (YouTube). I, certainly, have come across a number - Perhaps caused by the "evolution" of Excel, its resultant complexity, lack of suitable training, and the attitude of some of its users?

Over the last couple of years, I have prototyped mine with Apple Notes (Apple computer and iPad). For me, it is generally less complex (prettier?) and faster to produce what I need. Conversion to Excel is normally straightforward, with few incompatibilities - typically colours of conditional formatting, and the order of firing of rules. A potential problem is no field locking, but individual tables can be locked.

Microsoft weaves Oracle and BigQuery data mirroring into Fabric platform

Bingo!

Microsoft, Fabric, cloud-based, Oracle, Google, BigQuery data, mirroring capability, a new graph database, and in-house LinkedIn project?

I'm sure that will go well for everyone involved...

Warning: This post may contain irony and sarcasm.

Nano11 cuts Windows 11 down to size, grabbing just 2.8 GB of disk space

Re: What does Windows 11 normally weigh in at ?

Simpler times? When I bought a DG Nova 4 with a 25MB 19" rack mount "Winchester" a DG rep came out to find out why we had "bought such a big disk" (for data acquisition from an instrument).

Microsoft, Linode, warn of cloud latency spikes due to Middle East submarine cable problems

Superaddition

I'm a volunteer assessing a number of sites against an ISO standard. Several of them have Azure/Sharepoint hybrids. I'm not sure that any further slowing-down would be particularly noticeable for them. Maybe it is the products, or their implementation; but the rule seems to be "If the person knows where the document is, they can find it" - Otherwise, search times of minutes seem to be not infrequent. On a couple of occasions, the "document" has been emailed to me a few days after I have left the site...

Linux Lite relief: 7.6 keeps it simple, shiny, and mostly slim

Re: Good beginning

My thoughts exactly, have an upvote.

Looking at your up/down votes, maybe posting as an AC was a mistake :-)

Re: Modern bloat

I'm retired from paid work, and have standardized on 2 models of Pi5 - 2GB for headless servers, and 16GB for "development" GUI work. They both run cooler (and faster?) than my old 4 and 8 GB versions. The headless versions are in FLIRC fan-less cases, the TV recorder boots to a spare128GB Raspberry MicroSD with a 2TB Crucial SSD on USB for storage. One of the development 5's boots to an M2 SSD in a Perspex "case". The other is in a FLIRC and boots to another 128GB microSD.

For testing the JSON web servers I write, a couple of Pi Zero 2Ws - If my stuff works on them they'll probably work on anything, and they are great for finding bottlenecks.

Apple iOS 26 set to dump 75M iPhones on the e-waste pile

Re: utterly ludicrous clickbait.

I updated my original iPad (2010) as soon as the iPad 2 (2011) shipped because the newer model had a camera. The original was delivered on the first day of sale in Oz - I bought it as an experiment (toy?), and used it a lot - A number of my older (60+) retiree acquaintances saw it and bought iPads to avoid having to learn Windows. The Original did only have two years support, the iPad 2 had up to 8 years. It seems that ~7+ years of support is now what to expect.

I purchase my mobile phones, and pass my "old" one on to Mrs Tim99, who normally trades-in her "old" one with Apple. I'm not sure what happens with the next one, because she really likes the size of "her" iPhone 13 mini...

I find that I use my iPad more than my other kit (iPhone, 3 Raspberry Pi 5s, 2 Pi 2Ws, and an iMac-M3), so I upgrade about every 3 years (usually with an Apple trade-in). I suspect that If I was not still writing pro bono software in retirement, and volunteering - where I need to look at very large spreadsheets, my 13" Pro iPad would be all the "computing" I need. Mobile phones are just to small for elderly eyes and hands that have lost dexterity.

Microsoft open-sources the 6502 BASIC coded by Bill Gates himself

Re: Hmmm

It is a long time ago, and I may have "misremembered", but sometime in the late 1970s I thought that I heard that Gates and Allen had looked at DEC's RSTS-11 BASIC (possibly found by "searching waste-bins"?) before they wrote their Altair Basic interpreter. Obviously the architecture was different, but knowing how DEC's stuff worked would have been a big advantage...

GitHub engineer claims team was 'coerced' to put Grok into Copilot

Re: 'Microsoft’s Responsible AI' standards...

'Microsoft’s Responsible AI' standards...

or 'MicrOsoft’s Responsible AI' StandardS - MORASS:-

1. an area of muddy or boggy ground: in midwinter the track beneath this bridge became a muddy morass.

2. a complicated or confused situation: she would become lost in a morass of lies and explanations.

Thunderbird 142 lands with modest upgrades – plus talk of Pro service ahead

Perhaps

When they are able to ship the stable iOS version (after TestFlight)? Before smart phones, I liked the desktop versions a lot when I was only running different types of "computers". I'm experimenting with Proton, the paid version looks interesting.

Trump's gold-plated smartphone can't seem to decide which design to copy

Re: Yeah but...

Yes, and it checks on the purchaser?

Often heard opinions that Android techies just buy their very expensive phone as a status symbol?? >>====>

LibreOffice 25.8: Faster, leaner, and finally speaks PDF 2.0

Re: Still no...

I've been doing this stuff for >50 years now (Pause for 4 Yorkshiremen sketch). I think I can distill what works.

1) Use plain text emails with paragraph breaks only.

2) If the content needs to look the way you intend, attach it as a PDF.

3) If they really, really, need to play with a formatted document, consider using RTF; or

4) For a techie recipient, use plain text Markdown - It is still readable as text and, with a suitable reader, will display correctly.

Re: Still no usable database

My favourite was a government 30+ page .docx file that started life in Word 97. Two years ago I was asked to assess it. It wouldn't paginate correctly and some tables were broken - Possibly because it was >200MB in size and contained every comment and alteration since it was created. I checked with originator, he said it worked, but not for me. I tried the usual tricks like opening it with Apple Pages (failed), opening it with Google Docs (failed), saving it as a .doc or .odt (saved but with bits missing).

Libre Office on a Raspberry Pi opened it. I saved it back as a Word file with the Delete All Comments option. Compared to the PDF version that I asked for after these problems, it looked OK. Later, the originator said that if they saved it in Word, it broke...

I turned off my last VM of Windows 20 months ago. Apple Pages/Numbers seems to be fine, Libre Office on a Pi when I need it.

Google tries to trump iPhone launch with AI-powered Pixel 10 range

Re: Sooo

Definitely an upvote for DDG and Booleans. If the default (Bing) doesn't get what you want, using the "search item" !g option gives an anonymised Google search - or !w goes straight to Wikipedia without the cruft.

Oracle cuts cloud jobs with Seattle hit hard as AI spending soars

Re: In for a penny, in for a pound

I heard this on an Oracle course in ~1987, and have posted it before...

Q: What do you call Oracle customers? A: Hostages.

Pay attention, class: Today you’ll learn the wrong way to turn things off

exactly the same colours as my Windows 2000 desktop... A colleague had a **RED** desktop on a Windows Server from about that era. I thanked him, stole the idea,and have used it for admin accounts ever since.

Breathe easy: Apple Watch can read your oxygen levels again

Re: not presenting the blood oxygen measurement on the Watch

I'm not sure what good it is supposed to be, other than maybe people with specific conditions. I'm one of those people, but (fortunately) live outside the USA. It worked on my previous Watch, and works well with my current Series 10 (GPS + Cellular) so I can "keep an eye on things" if I'm out without my iPhone.