* Posts by Tim99

1999 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2008

China bans export of rare earth processing kit

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Oops!

It’s simple market price. Gold, which has relatively little practical use (jewellery [~50%], bullion, dentistry, plating, etc.,) can be mined and refined at sub-ppm levels (<g/tonne). Gold is ~$66/g - The cost of getting it is typically less than half of this price. I was told that one of the drivers of its price is the confidence of men in the Middle East and Asia who "put it on their wives to show how wealthy they are". In times of uncertainty it is a useful currency, so prices can go up in both good and bad times.

In contrast neodymium is quite abundant (~$0.12/g), and is mined in China, United States, Brazil, India, Sri Lanka, and Australia - As noted, its extraction can be relatively polluting. Current demand is roughly 10 times the production of gold. China is expected to become a net importer shortly, with countries like Australia being major exporters. It is unlikely that the world will "run out", as it is relatively easy to recycle.

Biden urged to do something about Europe 'unfairly' targeting American tech

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Shall we go back in History

Standing on the shoulders? It might well be argued that Bage significantly improved and extended existing technology: William Strutt, Wikipedia. Good quality, inexpensive steel on an industrial scale was made possible by Henry Bessemer, Wikipedia and others who were mostly Europeans...

Doom is 30, and so is Windows NT. How far we haven't come

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

Re: No imagination any more

Some of us find "man" (-k) more than adequate…

Mine’s the one with ”UNIX Power Utilities" in the pocket >>======>

CLIs are simply wizard at character building. Let’s not keep them to ourselves

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: NeXTSTEP

NeXTSTEP was good (and [one of?] the first OOP GUI development IDEs?). If you had the money - As a result, the main paying users were spooks and the military, with some academics (who may well have got a substantial discount).

Tim99 Silver badge
Gimp

For hours of entertainment

Where many would use a GUI based app, try ffmpeg on a *nix based OS CLI. I have learnt to like it. Most of the entertainment comes from fiddling with the program, and not from playing what you produced. Today I had hours of fun creating and adding chapters to a home movie: See ffmpeg.org:-

 ffmpeg -i INPUT -i FFMETADATAFILE -map_metadata 1 -codec copy OUTPUT 

The 15-inch MacBook Air just nails it

Tim99 Silver badge
Gimp

Re: Ok, I'll be down vote bait

Depending on your keyboard: Control-F2 or Fn-Control-F2 - Then use arrow keys to navigate menus.

Polish train maker denies claims its software bricked rolling stock maintained by competitor

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Disappointed

Unless this is stopped it will become a permanent way of doing business.

Swedish Tesla strike goes international as Norwegian and Danish unions join in

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Exactly what destroyed the UK car industry

Probably true. My first new car in the UK was a Mk1 VW Golf (an early 1.5 LS with the square chrome bumpers) - Its UK manufactured competitors included Allegros, Maxis, and Marinas. Choosing the Golf was not difficult. I’m obviously a stick-in-the-mud, the current car is a Golf 7.5 - My 4th Golf and 6th VW out of the 12 new cars I have owned.

Bank boss hated IT, loved the beach, was clueless about ports and politeness

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: speaking of usb

Some manufacturers used different colours, pink and light blue or light green as I recall (Pink/light green was not useful if you had Daltonism). But, not much use if they were at the back of the PC where you couldn't see them.

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Every single time

My house was built 11 years ago in our retirement village. Most rooms have two or more RJ45 sockets all going via Cat 5e cabling to a patch-port comms cabinet in the garage. A couple of the ports were dedicated to an emergency assistance phone. The rest are interchangeable between POTS and ethernet. Newer houses have only half the number of RJ45 sockets, as most of the stuff older people buy (like smart TVs) has WiFi. We have just had the emergency POTS line removed and replaced by 4G cellular devices, as the supplier no longer supports POTS - The line still is used for 100/40Mb VDSL traffic to a central on-site comms room.

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

Re: Every single time

Yeah, nah, but you finished up with a Chromebook...

No more staff budget for UK civil service, but worry not – here's an incubator for AI

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Ooh ... so could we have an AI in the cabinet ?

True, but much of Covid happened here in the Autumn/Winter. There is a higher proportion of indoor shopping centres in WA where many of us may have caught it. As you know, most of us live in the greater Perth and Peel areas where much of the lockdown happened. The population density for the State is indeed low, but interestingly its localized population density can be quite high: The area where I live has just over half the population density of Greater Manchester.

As an ex UK civil servant, I'm not at all surprised at some of the revelations of the current Covid enquiry...

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Ooh ... so could we have an AI in the cabinet ?

It’s the State of Western Australia. Australia as a whole had 594/million deaths - The UK is about 7.7 times higher. Obviously it is not directly equivalent, but if everything else was equal to Australian conditions, that implies that ~270,000 people out of 310,000 in the UK would not have died of Covid…

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Ooh ... so could we have an AI in the cabinet ?

Where I live we are going through another rise in cases, and masks are now mandated again in high risk areas like hospital intensive car and aged care. Different circumstances and different Governments, but the UK Covid death rates are 10 times higher than here at ~460/million here compared to ~4578/million in the UK (government figures).

We had a hard lock down immediately, that also prevented travellers arriving unless they went into isolation; followed by two more. After the lockdown there were mandates on number of people/m^2 in restaurants etc.; but after a short while, masks were not required in the wider community. There was plenty of criticism reported in the (mainly right wing) press, but the (centre-left) Premier's personal approval rating hit ~91%. The election that followed almost wiped out the "conservative" opposition giving them only ~10% of Parliamentary seats. Covid rates remained low until we opened up to external travellers, but by that time ~95% of the population was inoculated.

AWS plays with Fire TV Cube, turns it into a thin client for cloudy desktops

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: only 15 years ?

True, senility kicks in. We only bought XTs if the punter needed local storage and processing. Most of my installs were ATs. We had a Volume Workstation Agreement which allowed a significant discount (30%?). The policy continued at a low level with PS2s, but must of the systems were cheaper "built to specification" from companies like Arch. The diskless stuff was mainly for typing pools, and mainframe access...

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Re: only 15 years ?

...and we ran diskless XTs with Novell servers in the 1980s, and before that there were terminals that could do some limited local processing...

Leader of pro-Russia DDoS crew Killnet 'unmasked' by Russian state media

Tim99 Silver badge
Devil

Re: Killmilk

An unfortunate flood, resulting in accidental electrocution?

IT sent the intern to sort out the nasty VP who was too important to bother with backups

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Can't stand IT

Sturgeon's Revelation: 90% of everything is crud (or crap).

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

A key process…

Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer files

Tim99 Silver badge
Gimp

Re: Take responsibility

I'm retired, and in spite of a learned paranoia, I can't be bothered with some of this stuff. I've simplified my life; and now use an iMac, an iPad Pro, and a couple of Raspberry Pis. I managed to get all my important stuff down to ~500GB (including 20+ years of emails).

For me, I found that the iMac's 1 TB hard drive, an external 2TB drive for recording live TV, and 400GB of iCloud storage work well. The Pi stuff is copied over to the 2TB drive with rsync every night, all of the iCloud stuff is also stored locally on the iMac and everything is backed up nightly onto rotated Time Machine disks - Every month or so, one of the TM disk is rotated off-site. It took about a day to set up and has been running without problems since the start of Covid. The iMac has an UPS (Yes, I'm paranoid). Replacing the iMac a few days ago took less than a day for everything to be copied back and synchronized after a fresh OS install. I also took the opportunity to finally retire all my Windows stuff that had been in Several Parallels VMs - It's copied onto two local and an off site back-up disk; but I'm fairly sure I won't be looking at it again.

How to give Windows Hello the finger and login as someone on their stolen laptop

Tim99 Silver badge
Trollface

Re: fingerprint works <25% of time

BTW, does fingerprint login work reliably for anyone? - It works OK for passwords on websites etc., on my Apple iMac which requires a password for initial account login.

What's really going on with Chrome's June crackdown on extensions – and why your ad blocker may or may not work

Tim99 Silver badge
Big Brother

And…

… this is why my paranoia tells me not to use Chrome, or many other things from Google. If I really have to use Google search, a bang search in DuckDuckGo (my search terms with !g) works.

Lawyer guilty of arrogance after ignoring tech support

Tim99 Silver badge

I'm old and went to a UK school with "delusions" of grandeur. We learnt Oxford English where the "z" form was used.

I note that the OED (English UK) states: "anonymized | əˈnɒnɪmʌɪzd | (British English also anonymised)",

Inside Denmark’s hell week as critical infrastructure orgs faced cyberattacks

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Zyxel firewalls

"Is this a joke"? - Probably, but...

I live in a retirement village and the builder used Zyxel modems (bog standard VDSL with no WiFi) to attach each house to our central comms room about 10 years ago. Mine just kept running, with typical uptimes of about 3 months (external contractor remote upgrades?), with no problems at - Until it died last year. The supplied replacement is a cheapish TP-Link with WiFi. The standard installation is in a small metal comms box in the garage (As expected, WiFi Performance is "poor"; so normally turned off).

GhostBSD makes FreeBSD a little less frightening for the Linux loyal

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: No it isn’t

Probably as a result of “what you learn first is what you tend to like", I prefer BSD derived systems. In retirement my daily drive is an iMac - For play Raspberry Pi’s.

Shock horror – and there goes the network neighborhood

Tim99 Silver badge
Linux

Re: The last time I heard a loud noise and things were restarting...

Brother have a downloadableCUPS and Debian driver for the MFC-8860DN…

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: The last time I heard a loud noise and things were restarting...

When my UPS played up, it killed the power supply on a cheap and nasty HP printer (bought as a distress purchase during COVID). It was the only item affected. HP sent a (refurbished?) replacement a couple of weeks later. It failed 3 months later, just after I had bought new ink cartridges. I replaced it with a basic Brother inkjet which is fine - Unlike the HP, it works well without requiring an internet connection.

CompSci academic thought tech support was useless – until he needed it

Tim99 Silver badge
Childcatcher

Some truth there, but since we use metrics like "pass" rates, the system ensures that pupils pass exams. "Education" and critical thought are "unnecessary".

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Professional incompetence. Or was that incompetents?

In my (more) cynical old age I am comforted by Sturgeon's Revelation: "Ninety percent of everything is crud" Wikipedea.

Whilst that appears generally true, one of the good things about retirement is the ability to choose more of the other 10%...

Alphabet CEO testifies in Google Search trial: We pay billions to keep Apple at bay

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: So Apple...

It's a few years ago, and my memory is failing... I believe that some research said that Google made about US$32 for every search combined with Gmail user...

Apple swipes left on the last Touch Bar Mac, replaces it with a pricier 14″ model

Tim99 Silver badge
Linux

Re: Swapping Detection

My memory is probably going, but I think the vm_stat version goes back before Apple - Possibly to BSD (4.2?) via the Mach kernel in the early 1980s then via NeXT. Mac OS X has its origins in Next, Mach and Darwin and came out in 2001. The original vmstat probably goes back further to AT&T.

It would seem that Apple were not directly responsible for this at the macOS man page for vm_stat is dated August 13 1997…

Tim99 Silver badge
Gimp

Re: Swapping Detection

With macOS it’s $ vm_stat [Enter]

FBI boss: Taking away our Section 702 spying powers could be 'devastating'

Tim99 Silver badge
Big Brother

Won't someone think of the children!

Surely we need to think about the terrorists coming for them?

Apple lifts the sheet on a trio of 'scary fast' M3 SoCs built on a 3nm process

Tim99 Silver badge
Gimp

Re: Apple’s Problem?

Some of us are replacing old Intel machines…

Australian video-streamer lets users opt out of ads for burgers, booze, and betting

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Maybe finally a use for "AI"?

It ain’t AI, but comskip makes a reasonable job of skipping ads in recorded free-to-air TV.

Tenfold electric vehicles on 2030 roads could be a shock to the system

Tim99 Silver badge
Trollface

Re: Never going to happen in the UK

Yes, but with a worse public health service...

It is 20 years since the last commercial flight of Concorde

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Treasures from a 1991 flight

Similar to ours (see above), but ours had a propelling pencil or ball-point instead of the models. They came in a large grey vinyl folder, between us we had four (two people, return flights). We have just kept the one, as the others were passed on to young relatives etc.

Tim99 Silver badge

Different Days

On a trip from the UK to Australia on holiday in 1987, I won 2nd prize in a BA "Spot the Concorde" competition. It was a bit like "Spot the ball" as there was a grid; but instead of putting a cross where the ball was supposed to be, it was a map grid for the aircrafts position at a particular time. You were give its rate of acceleration to take off, its directions and acceleration to supersonic and its final speed - As I was stuck at Heathrow for 8 hours (terrorist alert) I sat down and did the necessary calculations long-hand, and put my three crosses in one small square. The prize was 12 days in the Doral Miami Beach Hotel, return flight on Concorde via Washington.

In those days there was a special Concorde Lounge at Heathrow which was entered after passing the hoi polloi who were stuck in the normal First Class lounge. The aircraft was small and fitted with low but comfortable grey leather seats. The cabin staff and food were excellent. Mrs Tim99 and I both had excellent Burgundies - A bottle of Nuits-Saint-Georges with the main courses and an un-oaked Chablis with the other courses.

After we landed at Washington, the aircraft was refuelled and we all had to get out. Some passengers disembarked onto a bus that could raise itself to the level of the door, we then got onto a similar raised bus that had seats and refreshments until the aircraft was serviced, and then were returned to the aircraft. Just before take off to Miami the pilot told us that because of the short distance, low fuel loading, and fewer passengers, the aircraft was expected to travel at its fasted scheduled speed over the Atlantic (it did). We were also warned that we would have an unusual take off (because of noise abatement?) and that we may experience some mild disorientation (He meant feeling that we we all going to crash and die). Total time including stop-over was 6 and a half hours. The next day the aircraft flew by the hotel and did a wing waggle - Unlikely, but maybe it was for us, as I didn't see it do it again. The noise was incredible.

For some people, the aircraft may have been an everyday experience. We were sat opposite Robin Gibb (and his wife?). The stewardess asked him if he would like lunch, he said "could they make him a plain chicken sandwich" (of course they could). Mrs Tim99 and I had everything that was going, I still have the silver and grey enamel Concorde propelling pencil that was in my goodie bag.

NASA just patched Voyager 2's software but spared Voyager 1 the risky rewrite

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

But Saturn Vs cost more than Intel i7 laptops. Then add the relative cost of their respective docking stations...

Windows 11: The number you have dialed has been disconnected

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Re: Look a little deeper

When XP came out, I immediately configured it to the "Windows Classic" interface (Windows 2000). It was a lot less "shouty".

I set up a customer's peer networked 6-user SQL "server" with it and noted that with its monochrome desktop background the PC used less resources. Lessoned learned, I still use it on a no-internet Parallels VM on an iMac for my old software.

Tim99 Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: So have we reached, forty years on...

Our last 3 washing machines were made by the same Scandinavian company >>===========>

The first one was good, and we liked it. Its spin speed 1400RPM and lasted >13 years. We replaced it with a similar model, spin speed 1800RPM, the user interface was now mostly electronic - It threw a bearing and lost a counterweight after 7 years. Both models were labelled 'Made in Scandinavia". The latest model has an entirely electronic controller, which when switched on displays "Inspired by Scandinavia" (Presumably made in China?), spin speed back to 1400RPM. The start button (Presumably inspired by U+23EF) worked for me about 95% of the time. Mrs Tim99 could successfully start it about 50% of the time. We called the service agent. They sent a child who waved his phone around near it and "did something" (Short range RF communication?). He suggested that if it did it again we should reset the firmware - I have, twice. Mrs Tim99 can now successfully start the washer about 90% of the time.

I am not optimistic about the machines reliability or longevity...

Excel Hell II: If the sickness can't be fixed, it must be contained

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Re: It it's not broke, we'll fix that come the next update!

Yes, I'm afraid that it has... Use a macro/VBA. For a clickable cell =HYPERLINK("mailto:my@email.com")

or =HYPERLINK("mailto:"&Cell1&"?cc="&Cell2&"&bcc="&Cell3&"&subject="&Cell4&"&body="&Cell5)

One door opens, another one closes, and this one kills a mainframe

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Little hamsters on wheels.

I bought a similar set (DG Nova 4c) for acquisition and processing data from a scientific instrument. The 25 MB disk was mounted in a desk rack and could be slid out for maintenance. It had a transparent plastic top and the head made a pleasant musical sound when working - One day I heard a very load screeching sound and then everything stopped. The head had crashed, gouged a furrow around the middle of the platter and oxide coating had covered the rest of the unit. It made a great conversation piece until the FE took it away, as you could see exactly how it should have worked.

From chaos to cadence: Celebrating two decades of Microsoft's Patch Tuesday

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Printing

I live in a retirement village in a part of the world where our Patch Tuesday happens about 8 hours before the UK’s. Many residents have gone with the Windows default download/install. I have managed the reduce the amount of "help" I give to Windows 10/11 users; but I can almost guarantee that within 2 days of the patches, somebody’s printer will stop have stopped working.

The good news is that when I finally upgrade my Intel Mac (that occasionally runs Windows in a VM) I can say "Sorry, I can’t help - I don’t use Windows"…

GNOME developer proposes removing the X11 session

Tim99 Silver badge
Trollface

Re: remove GNOME

The best solution would be if all distributions just removed the massive steaming pile that GNOME and systemd has become.

FTFY

Red Hat retires mailing list, leaving Linux loyalists to read between the lines

Tim99 Silver badge
WTF?

Really!?

That is all >>============>

Raspberry Pi 5 revealed, and it should satisfy your need for speed

Tim99 Silver badge
Linux

Re: Same Footprint

I prototyped an app I had compiled on a Pi W2 and compared it to running on 2GB 4B, it had about 40% of the performance of the 4B for a few concurrent web front-end connections to a SQLite database. I may have slipped a decimal point, but a quick Google lookup and a simple calculation suggested that the W2 has about 4,500 times the MIPS performance of a DEC VAX 11/750 that I used for similar work in the mid 1980s...

How is this problem mine, techie asked, while cleaning underground computer

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Computer Bugs

Nah, they had a trial run with pups

Power grids tremble as electric vehicle growth set to accelerate 19% next year

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: For many of us, hybrids make more sense than BEVs

Possibly the difference between US and imperial gallons? US 30mpg = 36 imperial mpg; and US 35mpg = 42 imperial mpg.

Apple races to patch the latest zero-day iPhone exploit

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Tim foil

I wouldn’t…