Posts by Tim99

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

Re: 486 DX/50

Our SOP with (genuine IBM) XTs that didn't boot was to power them off and lift them 2" above the desk then drop them. It often fixed them - If it didn't we sent them off for repair. We postulated that it reseated components.

Microsoft smartens up Edge for Business with screenshot blocking, logo branding, more

Re: Disingenuous and untrustworthy to the very last gasp

Many of us have a phone with a pretty good camera, the included software for which may well be able to do OCR...

So you've built the best tablet, Apple. Show us why it matters

Re: Shiny for fanboys with too much disposable income

Probably not quite what you might want, but I have two Apps on my older iPod Pro 12.9 that work for me: "Terminal Emulator" which I can use for awk, python etc., that allows copy/paste to and from the native iPad Files App; and the "$ iSH" App that has a version of Alpine Linux with the apk package manager which I used to install Midnight Commander for SSH Shell links etc.

Aghast iOS users report long-deleted photos back from the dead after update

"She changed to Android shortly after that" - Perhaps you forgot to use the joke icon? Wikipedia - Android Leverage - A "StartPage" Search: cia startup funding for google -google.com -google.co.uk - Gave many results - Here are 3 from the first pages:-

Medium.com - How the CIA made Google

Quartz, qz.com - Google’s true origin partly lies in CIA and NSA research grants for mass surveillance

TheGuardian.com - Google’s Earth: how the tech giant is helping the state spy on us...

Raspberry Pi M.2 HAT+ here at last with a $12 price tag

Re: But still only 8 GiB RAM maximum!

My 4GB Pi5 and KINGSTON SNV2S2000G 2.00 TB SBM02103 in an Argon NEO 5 M.2 works well:-

Bookworm Light: Linux 6.6.28+rpt-rpi-2712 - Bootloader: Sat 20 Apr 2024 10:53:30 UTC (1713610410)

With pciex1_gen=3: dd if=/dev/zero of=./speedTestFile bs=20M count=5 oflag=direct - 104857600 bytes copied, 0.154623 s, 678 MB/s

CISA boss: Secure code is the 'only way to make ransomware a shocking anomaly'

Re: Mint and capabilities

Perhaps they've spelt OpenBSD wrong :-)

BOFH: The greatest victory is that which requires no battle

Re: not trolling

Hmmm...

trolled 1: to fish with a hook and line that you pull through the water - They were trolling the ocean floor- They trolled for fish.

2a : to search for or try to get (something) - often: troll for answers/comments/responses- Politicians trolling for votes.

2b: to search through (something) - She loves to troll flea markets looking for bargains.

trawled 1: to pull a large, cone-shaped net through the sea at a deep level behind a special boat in order to catch fish.

2: to search among a large number or many different places in order to find people or information you want: The software is used to trawl for information on the internet - You need to trawl through a lot of data to get results that are valid.

Oracle ULA audits are a license to bill

I've posted this before...

I heard this at the bar when on an Oracle course in the 1980s.

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

Palantir's CEO calls 'woke' a 'central risk to Palantir, America and the world'

I'd do something much worse: Prosecute them and, if guilty, imprison them for a year. Then whilst they are imprisoned investigate them using "proceeds of crime" legislation and, if there is evidence, confiscate all of their assets; including all wealth transferred to pensions, other businesses, and family members. Then release them to live with the rest of us.

Florida man gets 6 years behind bars for flogging fake Cisco kit to US military

Re: Wrong place

No. More likely a peerage, so that they can vote to continue the gravy train.

Oracle Fusion rollout costs 15 times council's estimates in SAP rip-'n-replace

Reality

My late father was the Treasurer of a UK local authority in the late 1960s. They set up a system (Sperry??) that managed the Council Rates, payroll, and purchases. It worked. Specialist training was required for a couple of staff, and the population served was relatively small (in the 10s of thousands), but I don't think the basic requirements have become much more complicated since then.

Throwflame launches fire-spitting robo-dog from Hell

Re: Nice headline grabber

ACME small print: "Does not work on Road Runners"

Rarest, strangest, form of Windows saved techie from moment of security madness

Simpler times

In the mid-to-late-80s a service engineer doing routine maintenance on one of our analytical instrument told the operator that his previous customer in the US had let him copy "Leisure Suit Larry", and he had the disk with him. After they had installed it, people noticed that other networked PC based instruments were "running funny". A couple of days later, after I had got everything cleared and working, "keeping viruses off the computers" was added to my job specification...

Qt Ubuntu 24.04 betas show that there's room to innovate

The Urban Dictionary has several relevant definitions

1. An African phrase meaning "humanity towards others"

2. Ubuntu is an ancient African word, meaning "I can't configure Debian"

I like the first, the second has more than a little truth. I like Devuan, but in retirement tend to use Raspberry Pi OS light and Mac OS.

.

Why do IT projects like the UK's scandal-hit Post Office Horizon end in disaster?

Re: Building software is hard...

My late father was a senior local government officer. He said that the worst NIMBYs were often the last people to move into the village/town. Their attitude was "I have moved in because I like what I saw, now nothing must change". This applied even if their house was new - Now, no one else should be allowed to build a new house. They were always the ones campaigning against the new bypass, in-spite of the fact that most of the rest of the village/town had been pleading for one for years...

Engine cover flies from Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 during takeoff

Re: Bolts for Boeing

They relied on foreign scientists who had developed the foreign technology during WW2: Wernher von Braun, Wikipedia.

Puppies, kittens, data at risk after 'cyber incident' at veterinary giant

Yes, I don't want to be dog-matic; but this could have been cat-a-strophic, or even cat-a-clysmic.

How a single buck bought bragging rights in the battle to port Windows 95 to NT

Re: Nah.

Genuinely - I'd had a traffic accident and was coping well on a longish road to recovery. I looked at Vista and then decided to break up and sell bits of our software/consulting business so that I could semi-retire and not have to deal with the crap that I found there.

Yes, I did just crash that critical app. And you should thank me for having done so

Script 2>&1 /dev/null ?

Ad agency boss owned two Ferraris but wouldn't buy a real server

Maybe a typical Oz thing?

In 1998/9 I was asked by a customer what was needed to update the 6 PC LAN that ran our software. I suggested Pentiums with Windows NT4 Workstation running peer-to peer with one of the PCs running the "new" SQL Server 7. A few weeks later I was asked to install the new equipment that the owner had bought. It was one Pentium for himself, with the instruction to use his 2 year old desktop PC as the "server". I noticed that he had leased a brand new Holden Commodore 5.3 litre V8, and suspect that he had gone to the bank for a loan based on my specs and used the money for the car lease...

Caffeine makes fuel cells more efficient, cuts cost of energy storage

Re: Nope, not sharing

You mentioned Starbucks, and said that you needed your morning cup of coffee - They aren't really the same, are they?

Mine's the one with the bag of artisan freshly roasted coffee beans in the pocket >>====>

'We had to educate Oracle about our contract,' CIO says after Big Red audit

Re: As the old saying goes......

I've posted this before - I heard this at the bar on a UK Oracle training course in the 1980s...

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

They call me 'Growler'. I don't like you. Let's discuss your pay cut

I was tempted to give him a whatever-the-opposite-of-a-discount-is - I had a customer who asked if it was possible to give a "negative discount" - They wanted to charge some of their customers extra for the hassle of dealing with them/getting paid (At the time Local Governments were particularly bad). I told them that all they had to do was put in a negative number into the customers table discount field; but warned them not to do it until I had rewritten the relevant reports to "hide" the field if it was zero or negative...

Hands up if you want to volunteer for layoffs, IBM tells staff

A close contact at IBM UK has had more than half of their Indian based team laid off. Needless to say times have blown out, and they think that some stuff will not be delivered. Maybe India is looking expensive? I might have stuffed up the currency conversion, but it looks as though a senior IBM engineer in India is paid roughly twice that of a similar position in Thailand...

That home router botnet the Feds took down? Moscow's probably going to try again

A word from Wednesday Addams: "Wait"...

Gelsinger splits Intel in two to advance foundry vision

Shareholder value?

Split, strip, and dump?

Australian supercomputer 'Taingiwilta' comes online this year with [REDACTED] inside

Re: What can be inferred?

Nobody over here drinks XXXX or Fosters, except a few Queenslanders or Victorians respectively. A cheapish beer (lager) that many drink is VB (Victoria Bitter), but as some in the other States don't really like Victorians, we pretend that we don't like it much.

Europe's data protection laws cut data storage by making information-wrangling pricier

What do they set loose?

A visa to fill Australia's empty tech jobs is getting more expensive, but maybe better value

Re: Left the country.

When I migrated 30+ ago, a banker told me that Australia shipped iron ore out at ~AU$30/ton. It was imported back at ~AU30,000/ton as a Honda Accord.

Apple Vision Pro units returned as folks just can't see themselves using it

Re: $3,499 x 200,000

What I remember from the days when I bought extremely expensive kit (to get real work done) was that the "profit" was high so that the manufacturer would probably still be there when you needed to upgrade or replace the kit...

Re: I like the watch

Said someone who might be using Android and Windows?

Unit4 software's budget bungle leaves schools counting the cost

Re: Really?

Yeah, but I would have specced it with 1 or 2 GB of memory, so I could have "saved" £10-20 on each one; and as they run cooler, I could have bought cheaper cases...

Really?

I'm retired, but I think I could have restarted the company and come in at about £1 million. My proposal:-

Consultancy and Software Design (me), £950,000; two junior contracted programmers, £50,000; software licences (SQLite and Python) £0;

Hardware: 1 Raspberry Pi 5 with case, power supply, USB SSD, UPS and cabling, £300. Obviously, this is meant to be a professional and reliable system with guaranteed uptime - So my hardware proposal might need upgrading...

I'd consider adding a backup/failover system, so another £300 to duplicate the hardware - See icon >>=====>

Curious tale of broken VPNs, the Year 2038, and certs that expired 100 years ago

Which OS? I missed some versions, but mine have been OK back to the RP 1 B (2012) which I still have - I must see if it will still boot...

Chinese Coathanger malware hung out to dry by Dutch defense department

Re: Timezone?

It wasn't me, honest. I know I live in the same Timezone, but so do others.

You could have heard a pin drop: Virgin Galactic reports itself to the FAA

It could be worse

The front fell off: Clarke and Dawe, YouTube.

It took Taylor Swift deepfake nudes to focus Uncle Sam, Microsoft on AI safety

Re: Why now?

Well obviously, it's because a Taylor Swift is a "Pentagon asset": The Guardian.|

Windows 3.11 trundles on as job site pleads for 'driver updates' on German trains

History?

Around the time of Windows 3 a number of simple but "important" applications were written with early versions of QuickBASIC AND VB. QB was handy for opening up a (serial) network port and reading/writing something from/to expensive machinery: e.g. download results, write them into a file, check that they were OK, and then clear the results from the machine...

Raspberry Pi on IPO plans: 'We want to be ready when the markets are ready'

Pi 4 vs 5

Perhaps the user base is splitting as well as expanding? Maybe an IP will cause further splitting, and marginalisation of (the volunteer) support? Pi's up to 5 seem mainly to be used in "projects", dedicated server type systems, and hardware controllers. As a desktop the 4 was "adequate". The 5 seems to be aimed more at desktop users (I have found the performance and functionality quite acceptable, but it needs additional [fan] cooling and the 27W power supply).

We put salt in our tea so you don't have to

Re: Pointless if potless

As for microwaves... Don't the Colonials have kettles? - They do have kettles, but they are limited to 110-120V and >15A, unlike the "proper" UK/AU 230/240V and 10/13A so they take about half as long again to boil. A 1kW microwave probably is not much longer, but would have significant safety issues from superheating and manual handling - The superheating issue can be reduced by placing a wooden stirrer in the vessel (or, heaven forbid!) a teabag...

Someone working in our local "Environmentally Friendly" show-house told me that they had found that a traditional wide-bottomed steel based kettle on an induction hob was quicker and used less power than a conventional kettle.

The dreadful tea from bags can be ameliorated by purchasing better quality "pot" bags (without the string), or cutting the string off and using a pre-warmed teapot. If a teapot is not available, an approximation can be made by using a mug that has been heated with boiling water from a kettle. Then add the teabag, pour boiling water onto the bag and fill to within a centimetre (5 mOsman) of the rim. Place a saucer or small plate on top of the mug. Wait 4-5 mins and remove the teabag. If you prefer to add milk take another empty mug and add the required (small) amount of milk, then carefully decant the prepared tea into the mug - This avoids a bitter taste, as the milk will not be denatured as it would be by adding it directly to the first mug (the extra heat interferes with the binding of bitter tannins/polyphenols in the tea). See also: How to make a perfect cup of tea (Royal Society of Chemistry).

HPE joins the 'our executive email was hacked by Russia' club

HPE is not a purveyor of coloured water...

...but, perhaps, they were looking for the (HP Inc.) printer firmware that doesn't require an internet connection and subscription?

Microsoft admits issues with Windows 10 patch almost 2 months after release

Re: kneecapping the OS

It may well not have helped in your case, but I find that a forced restart after any update is often a fix.

US cities are going to struggle to green up their act by 2050

Re: As for the fascist greenshirts...

A wood burner is, perhaps, not as green as you think: Medical Xpress - ACT deaths (more than from RTAs).

Re: An "easy" fix

It definitely depends on where you live. Last year my 3kW solar panels generated 5.2 MWh, peaking at 0.69 MWh/month in summer; and troughing at 0.22 MWh/month in winter. We are retired, and have found that our power use; including running the reverse-cycle air conditioner at 25-26C in summer, and 23-24C in winter; has given us a buy-back period of <4 years. We paid <AU$4,000 for a relatively expensive system connected to a local micro-grid - The current federal government rebate for a similar system is AU$1,160.

University chops students' Microsoft 365 storage to 20GB

The Empire Strikes Back

Darth VaderNadella-McGill: "I Am Altering the Deal, Pray I Don’t Alter It Any Further."

For a moment there, Lotus Notes appeared to do everything a company needed

Beaten by "Just good enough"

I stayed away from Lotus Notes - In the 1980s we used DECs ALL-IN-1 suite. It had WP, email, personal/business management tools. and could be used to create custom applications.

On a VAX, with connected terminals and minis/workstations, I found it (quite) pleasant to use and program. It seems to have been swept away by Windows; we ran the DOS version for a while; but DECs "failure with PCs" probably killed it (and DEC)...

Microsoft braces for automatic AI takeover with Copilot at Windows startup

Re: HELL F**K NOOOOOOO...

I recently replaced on Intel iMac with a shiny M3. I made the decision to do a clean install and just load the software I was actually using; with my mail, calendar, and documents. I've been retired for a while, so I realized that I no longer needed Parallels VMs for all the Windows stuff I had written. The new disk drive's contents were 170GB smaller than the old one.

The 'nothing-happened' Y2K bug – how the IT industry worked overtime to save world's computers

After Y2K

We were busy up until the end of December 1999. I had written a lot of stuff that ran under Windows, some of it was not compliant, either because the hardware it ran on wasn't; or because it needed to talk to MS Office components, that weren't. We had a couple of *NIX products that ran on older hardware that were going to fail, so they got moved to Debian on new Intel boxes.

I made the decision to go away to a really nice hotel with no mobile phone coverage on the 30th (just in case). All of our customers were OK, so when I was back at work, I heard a bit of "Nothing happened!" - I reminded them about how much effort and cash was spent over the previous 2 years.

It went a little quiet with our existing customers, but we did mostly bespoke software so we were OK as we picked up new business. A number of the hardware and bog-standard software business suppliers really struggled until ~2003 as "everything was replaced".