* Posts by Tim99

2003 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2008

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.

Tim99 Silver badge
Unhappy

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

What's the matter down-voter? Don't you like my relative good fortune (sorry about that), or does a real calculation using real numbers upset your view of the world?

Tim99 Silver badge

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

I'm at a bit of a loss here - Maybe I'm just fortunate where I live. I have a VW Golf 7.5, which for me averages about 6 litres/100km. PULP is AU$2.11 today, so to travel 100km it costs me AU$12.66. If I was to replace the VW with a similar size EV like a GWM ORA, I should get about 16 kWh/100km. My mains electricity costs AU$0.26 kWh so adding a bit for efficiency loss that should be ~AU$4:30 to travel 100km, or about one third the cost.

My house has solar panels connected to a local grid where I'm paid AU$0.12 kWh for what I export, so if I charged during the day (I'm retired) the charge cost is ~AU$2:00 for 100 km. If I used a public charger the average cost here seems to be about AU$.50/kWh. My local shopping centre is "free" for a Tesla...

Apple races to patch the latest zero-day iPhone exploit

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Tim foil

I wouldn’t…

Largest local government body in Europe goes under amid Oracle disaster

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Great job!

In WW2 the highest rate of UK Income Tax was between 19/6d and 19/10d in the Pound (~97.5% - 99.25%). In the 1950s it was "only" ~90%.

The rich and powerful have made damn sure that we have forgotten that.

2023 World Solar Challenge entrant welcomes clouds – not the fluffy white ones

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: "fuel costs are exorbitant"?

I've just noticed that Tennant Creek NT prices are similar to the WA "remotes"...

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: "fuel costs are exorbitant"?

Hi Simon, you might travel in the wrong States :-)

The current Perth urban diesel price is ~$1.98. WA has a Government mandated "Fuel Watch" daily fuel price where retailers must publish prices at 3:00pm and hold them at that for the next day. The worst WA prices I can find today for the State are in the Derby region at $2.50 for petrol and $2.53 for diesel. The major E-W routes (which may have similar traffic to Darwin-Alice Springs-Adelaide) are Highways 1 and 94. The furthest distance between stops is ~350km between Kellerberrin and Coolgardie on HW94 where the average petrol prices are $2.00 to $2.05 and diesel is $2.15 to $2.12. For HW1 the longest stretch is from Esperance (700 km from Perth) to Norseman (a further 200km) where petrol goes from $2.10 to $2.23 and diesel $2.20 to $2.33 - So our usual remote prices are typically 7-18% higher than for urban areas.

I'm retired now and don't travel as much, but the worst case in my VW Golf would be $100.60 (PULP) for filling up in Norseman and coming back 905 km to Perth without refuelling. Many of the people who would do that trip might be in a diesel Toyota HiLux which would cost ~$138.00.

Tim99 Silver badge
WTF?

"fuel costs are exorbitant"?

My current local Australian fuel price is AU$1.87 litre - Sainsbury’s price in the Midlands, where I lived, is £1.43 = AU$2.79 or nearly 50% more.

I'll see your data loss and raise you a security policy violation

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: What's in a name?

I own several items made (under licensing by a friend) of Tasmanian Huon pine (Wikipedia). The area it comes from is named after Jean-Michel Huon de Kermadec, a C18th French Naval Officer.

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: No local storage allowed ?

Email?

Want tech cred? Learn how to email like a pro

Tim99 Silver badge
Unhappy

My favourite</sarcasm> subject line reply is "Re: " - Often expanded in the thread to "Re: Re:"

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Re: And somehow….

It is possible that your are ignoring MS historic tendency to deliberate bastardry and their standard reply of "Why aren't you using our software? - It's what everybody else is using. These days it doesn't work as well for them with a widespread adoption of mobile phones and webmail.

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Which question did you answer ?

The apocryphal story about the posh elderly lady RR driver in a local village turning right without indicating and being struck by an oncoming vehicle saying to the local constable "But everybody knows I always turn right there.

Tim99 Silver badge
Linux

Re: Is there an email client out there that is *so* broken

If you think that, it is possible that you may not have RTFM. My iMac is set up to always reply in plain text and only quote what I choose. Composing mail on an iPad though, can be "challenging" - I sometimes use a plain text editor to copy/paste and tidy up before sending...

Tim99 Silver badge
Devil

Re: Its all about *efficient* communication...

Many, many, years ago on a public sector senior management course I was told that a prime purpose of paper in an organization (including emails) was as a weapon - It could be an offensive weapon, but often a defensive weapon (arse-covering).

For tricky cases (plausible deniability) use the phone...

Think International Space Station dust is obviously free of bad chemicals? Wrong

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Another good point for having built the ISS

In mass spectrometry, perhaps not as much as we might think. Large high resolution gas chromatography magnetic sector instruments were then capable of femtogram sensitivities, which is now achievable by popular quadrupole and time-of flight instruments. One version of the 1980s AEI/Kratos MS50 at medium mass resolution could determine a few hundred attograms of 2,3,7,8 TCDD. What has changed is how much easier to use, reliable and productive these instrument are. I thought that I had done well if I managed 5 samples a day, a modern GC-MS instrument can get 10-20 times that number done - They are much cheaper too, a mass spectrometer data system I purchased in 1982 was twice the cost of a nice 3 bedroom detached house in the Midlands that I bought at about the same time.

It might not have been common knowledge, but in the UK, PFAS compounds were certainly considered potentially undesirable or dangerous in the 1980s. I was asked to look at fluoride pyrolysis products from non-stick cookware in 1984, and then fluoridated aqueous film forming foam compounds as environmental contaminants in soils and surface waters.

Tim99 Silver badge

To follow on from my post above - Expect nasties like acrolein and formaldehyde.

Tim99 Silver badge
Boffin

Re: Another good point for having built the ISS

Perhaps because of the closed nature of many scientific publications, and that older information is not easily found by a simple internet search, some of the things that we knew have been forgotten. In 1985 we carried out a large number of experiments to determine what chemicals were emitted from surface coating and electrical/electronic materials. We were approached, via our mass spectrometer’s manufacturer, by the European Space Agency who published similar findings…

Have you ever suspected your colleague doesn't hope this email finds you well?*

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Or the really annoying

The best uncensored ( apocryphal? ) story I heard was a reply from an WW2 RAF ground crew sergeant to a Squadron Leader when asked why an aircraft had not been repaired for combat: " Fucking fucker's fucking fucked - Sir. "

RIP Bram Moolenaar: Coding world mourns Vim creator

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Thanks for Vim on a Fish Disk

You were better (or more confident) than I was. We used the same 4B pencil to write outline code as used with our issued optical mark cards - I used an eraser a lot...

Soon the most popular 'real' desktop will be the Linux desktop

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Soon the most popular 'real' desktop will be the Linux desktop

I should have mentioned that I now look after the "residents' computing" in my retirement village library. The last Windows computer (10 years old, running Widows 10) got upset after a recent Patch Tuesday. It was used mainly for Word, online Google, MS, etc., and printing. I replaced the tower with my spare 4GB Raspberry Pi 4. It now has a nice simple desktop showing the bowling green - I took most of the applications out except the Raspberry version of Chrome, the standard photo and PDF viewer/editor software and LibreOffice. The Pi is left on all of the time, compared with a few minutes startup of the old PC. The performance is entirely adequate, and like the previous Windows PC, everything a user did is reset when they log out.

It left a single A4 page of instructions, along with my name and phone number. Looking at the logs over the last few weeks, the usage has been about the same and nobody has contacted me to ask how to use it.

Tim99 Silver badge
Linux

Re: Soon the most popular 'real' desktop will be the Linux desktop

"OPINION If you count Android and Chrome OS as Linux, which I do...": Err, I don't.

Perhaps if the first sentence of the article was something like: "If you count Google's de facto proprietary operating systems as having come from Linux..." followed by something like "which are now mostly connected to on-line systems that use Linux..." it might be a better approximation.

I go back to about 1971 with this stuff and am now in my dotage; but, I do wonder if we have replaced the mainframe/terminal model with something that is functionally similar - More useful, and prettier - With most of the data now stored somewhere where we have no direct ownership of it.

Background: My goto systems these days are an iPad Pro; followed by an iMac; followed by a couple of Raspberry Pis; followed, distantly, by Windows 10 in a VM on the iMac. The Windows VM will be retired when I update the iMac.

Soft-reboot in systemd 254 sounds a lot like Windows' Fast Startup

Tim99 Silver badge
Linux

Re: LP - does it still mean Long Playing

Sigh, I wrote this here over 5 years ago (Primarily about inserting systemd into Linux). Warning: It has elements of "I told you so"...

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.

Nobody would ever work on the live server, right? Not intentionally, anyway

Tim99 Silver badge
Thumb Up

A life saver

Years ago a colleague used a red screen for live systems and a neutral one for tests. I thanked him, and have never turned the wrong one off since.

Want to live dangerously? Try running Windows XP in 2023

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Why? Really, why?

Yes, the people from DEC/VMS said something similar...

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

XP on VM

I'm retired and occasionally use XP on an Intel iMac with Parallels. The system is set up with 1.5 GB of memory with the networking disabled. It runs old software that I have written, mostly based on SQL Server 8.0, and the performance is fine. It uses "Windows Classic" mode so it looks like Windows 2000 (The last "decent" Windows?). Turning off the "Fisher- Price" XP interface and having a monochrome screen background seems to make everything run faster. File downloads and uploads are done with the parent iMac OS, the only sharing is with the iMac clipboard and dragging and dropping files between the WIndows and the iMac desktops. The VM has been running now for >12 years (including on a previous iMac). As well as running my old stuff, has been useful for checking and Excel & Word files with the MS Viewers and, if necessary, printing them to PDFs.

As might be expected, Windows 10 (in a 6GB VM) is noticeably slower. The later Windows 10 Patch Tuesday's incessant nagging about the machines inability to run Windows 11, and why I should use MS Edge instead of FireFox, has reinforced my intention to move away from Windows completely when the iMac is replaced...

Tesla to license Full Self-Driving stack to other automakers, says Musk

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Collapse of the Tesla dream

As one of our biggest local dealership groups teaches their salespeople, "The car is just a vehicle to sell a loan".

LG to offer subscriptions for appliances and televisions

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Rent seeking

Just before Covid I bought an HDHomeRun multi-head TV tuner ( https://www.silicondust.com/ ). It records to a Raspberry Pi. I also bought a Channels DVR subscription ( https://getchannels.com/live-tv/ ) at $80/year, which includes comskip - To me it was well worth the price as I hardly see an advert - Most of our "TV watching" is yesterday’s recordings. If you don’t like the idea of paying for a subscription, there are FOSS versions of software out there ( NEXTPVR? ) or you could roll-your-own with FFmpeg/VLC…

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: No LG Talkie Toaster subscription!

COBOL? I'm sorry, but as I started with FORTRAN IV and FORTRAN 77, Fortran 90 -2018 just look "Wrong"...

Microsoft kicks Calibri to the curb for Aptos as default font

Tim99 Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: I like serifs

Back in the day, it was considered (by IBM?) that Times was "authoritative", Arial/Helvetica were considered "friendly" and Courier was typewriter/techie. In digital correspondence I tend to use Arial, as it can be almost guaranteed to look the same on many devices. Interestingly it was thought that Times was easier for older people to read - Perhaps initially because it was thought that "they were used to it", but later (Anglophone) work suggested that the bottom serifs could make it easier for older readers to scan along baselines.

When did everything become harder? When presbyopia kicked in, or when kids started designing documents with darkish grey fonts on greyish pastel grounds?

Man who nearly killed physical media returns with $60,000 vinyl turntable

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: It's not a Thorens Reference

Both the Thorens and the Linn (and the Ariston) came from the Acoustic Research XA from 1961…

Tim99 Silver badge

Probably "Not a good investment"

But, back in 1975, Mrs Tim99 bought us one of the first LP12s wth a neon mains switch. Including the arm and cartridge, it was expensive at about £250. We listened to it a lot. For some of the time we didn't have a TV - Partly because we were "too busy". I had to sell it 25 years later after a serious car accident meant that I couldn't drive it properly (After spending an insane amount, trying to get everything else that was audio related up to a similar "standard"). The good news was it still sounded more pleasant to us than an upmarket CD player; and the better news was that we managed to sell it for quite a lot of money.

These days our hearing is shot - The "HiFi" is a AU$300 stereo pair of Apple HomePod minis, which are fine...

The AI arms race could give us the cool without the cruel

Tim99 Silver badge

"Surgeon's Law" == Sturgeon's Law?

Australia's 'great example of government using technology' found to be 'crude and cruel'. And literally lethal to citizens

Tim99 Silver badge
Happy

Re: Oz just like UK

They have form. That mob are called the Liberal Party with the National Party known as the LNP Coalition (note they have "Coal" in their name). Some of the locals call the first the "Lying Party" and the second the "Nasty Party" giving a coalition of the "Lying Nasty Party".

For more information and some wonderfully sweary videos: The Juice Media - Honest Government Ads. If they might be thought too biased when referring to the LNP as "The Shit Party", the current mob are "The Shit Lite Party"...

Let's have a chat about Java licensing, says unsolicited Oracle email

Tim99 Silver badge
Facepalm

A saw from the "early days" - V6?

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

Rocky Linux claims to have found 'path forward' from CentOS source purge

Tim99 Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: If only they had done this a few years earlier

Sigh, I wrote this here over 5 years ago (Primarily about inserting systemd into Linux). Warning: It has elements of "I told you so"...

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.

Tim99 Silver badge
Linux

Re: What they've achieved

I thought it apt to upgrade to that a long time ago...

Microsoft's Activision fight with FTC turned up a Blizzard of docs: Here's your summary

Tim99 Silver badge
Tim99 Silver badge
Gimp

Re: Same old Microsoft

As I recall Xerox were initially limited by a consent decree from using their photocopier business to expand into other Tech areas, so they were not able to take full advantage of the PARC Alto work. When their computer was commercially available it cost $60-100,000.

Apple were granted access to the GUI by Xerox in exchange for (the offer to buy?) $1,000,000 of pre IPO shares. I believe that Xerox sold them before the stock hit the big time. A very rough calculation is that Xerox's original investment would be worth over $1 billion today (if gains and dividends not reinvested). The shares are now worth about 300 times that original price allowing for inflation - In addition the yearly dividend is now >$3 million, or roughly the value allowing for inflation of the original investment.

Techie wasn't being paid, until he taught HR a lesson

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Unique keys

Maybe not, but I was at school with a Maltese pupil whose first name was the same as his father's and then he had an additional 12 middle names (including Walter Winterbottom?). He dreaded official forms that asked for ALL of your names. His father chose them to honour the 1949 England national football team who beat France in a "Friendly". Apparently the French were not much liked by the Maltese after their occupation by Napoleon.

Tim99 Silver badge
Big Brother

Re: Unique keys

A QR code surely?

Japan unleashes regulation Kaiju on Apple's and Google's app store monopolies

Tim99 Silver badge
Pirate

A genuine question, not a troll: If you could do that, would you be prepared to let the manufacturer disallow warranty claims?

They wouldn't necessarily know if what you installed caused or contributed to any failure.

Beams from brightest gamma ray burst ever seen were pointed directly at Earth

Tim99 Silver badge
Mushroom

Re: Hendrik van Eerten

I think you meant a Uranium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator: silvescreenings.com?. >>===========>

Germans beat Tesla to autonomous L3 driving in the Golden State

Tim99 Silver badge

When I lived in Derby people who worked at R-R did indeed call it "Royce's" - Probably because Royce was the engineer and Rolls was the distributer/salesman.

Google veep calls out Microsoft's cloud software licensing 'tax'

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Re: Would it not be cheaper for Google, AWS, Alibaba

I'm retired but still do some pro bono volunteer work for a national accreditation authority. I typically have to assess Excel spreadsheets containing thousand of data points. A particular problem is having to find outliers which can skew the result set, usually for the worse. Most organizations use visual inspection to find each likely problem datum, and then use statistical analysis on that point to see if it is an outlier. Typically there will be about 0.3% that are outliers, and many organizations miss about a third of them. My initial thought was to publish a spreadsheet that could be used to find, check and flag outliers. An easy way would be to produce a number of (convoluted) macros.

The problems were: They are convoluted and, even with "adequate" documentation, I might be the only person who understands them. Most organizations are (rightly) suspicious of downloading and running a document with macros. The solution was to use only cell formulae. The formulae are normally protected by being "hidden", but can be easily unhidden for inspection; and each was adequately documented as to its purpose and expected outcome with an adjacent linked cell. The only significant issue turned out to be that several large organizations are still using Excel 2013 (the last version that doesn't use the subscription model) so a couple of functions were missing (like XLOOKUP) which required replacing.

Metaverse? Apple thinks $3,500 AR ski goggles are the betterverse

Tim99 Silver badge

and gambling? Along with pr0n, a major driver of the early internet…

Samsung's screens will check your blood pressure if the movie's too scary

Tim99 Silver badge
WTF?

Really?

take your blood pressure and measure your heart rate, after first identifying you with a fingerprint - I can’t wait to let Samsung have access to this data….

AI is great at one thing: Driving next waves of layoffs

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: So what exactly were all these laid off employees doing?

In the 1980s many men had skilled "traditional" jobs like machinists. CNC replaced (most?) of them. Where I worked the younger were retrained, the older were pensioned off.

Jobs that are rapidly disappearing are low and middle level administration. A lot of this work is taking information from somewhere and transforming it - Machines can be good at some of this - An example would be the old BOFH comment to a luser "Go away, or I'll replace you with a 12 line script".

I'm retired, but have seen typical SME back-office payroll, admin, and support either being outsourced to the cloud; or the owner (or owner's significant other) managing much of the business on an iPhone/iPad - About 44% of Australian jobs are in small business...