Posts by Tim99 2141 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2008
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...
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
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...
"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%?
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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...
...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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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. >>=====>
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.
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"...
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.
"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
TheGuardian.com - Google’s Earth: how the tech giant is helping the state spy on us...
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
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
.
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...
They relied on foreign scientists who had developed the foreign technology during WW2: Wernher von Braun, Wikipedia.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
