Posts by Doctor Syntax

Codd almighty! Has it been half a century of SQL already?

Everybody forgets Informix

Informix, originally Marathon, was there in the early days alongside Oracle. In fact I heard of it and used it well before I heard of Oracle. You may guess at some of the ways in which Oracle came to dominance although it has to be said that Informix also made some pretty silly errors in buying up other businesses which didn't fit and presumably took money and management attention away from the main product.

Marathon was a relational wrapper around C-ISAM access (pairs of data files and B-tree index files) with the choice of access via a C library and command-line tools very much oriented to teletype including the report generator ACE plus, IIRC, a rudimentary TUI program called, IIRC, Informer. With the change of name from Marathon to Informix (could have been worse!) there was a TUI replacement for the main query tool and the original Informer replaced with a much better product, Perform. Perform providing some high-level programmability and a good deal more with the ability to enhance the run-time interpreter with C functions callable from the higher level Perform code.

Informix 2 introduced SQL, the ESQLC pre-processor to embed SQL into C and 4GL. 4GL was vaguely like structured BASIC with embedded SQL and event-driven menu handling which compiled down into ESQLC. 4GL programs could replace ACE or Perform. The consequence was that for a considerable period the combination of SCO and Informix was the backbone of many small businesses and the likes of HP-UX, AIX or Solaris and Informix ran larger businesses. They also supported the development of packaged applications.

In the end they lost out to Oracle and were bought up by IBM, probably because IBM wanted some aspects of their technology. If they hadn't fumbled as few times would they have remained competitive? Would we have seen all these Birmingham type situations? Who knows. It would have been a different and perhaps better alternative reality. As it was it supported me for most of the second half of my working life.

Recycling old copper wires could be worth billions for telcos

That's reasonable because you'd have to factor in the costs of recovering the copper not to mention all the overhead of BT manglement costs.

I'm lucky in that my telephone lines pre-date that stuff. However the 3-phas in the road must have been an aluminium era replacement. Not the main conductors, just the sheaf which carries neutral. The failures are getting more recent. A few have affected the entire cable, the rest just individual households' connections.

The latest, a couple of weeks ago was fun. A more recent gas main replacement had been laid over the top of the cable. In places the road is built up over solid rock and nobody wants to dig it up. The replaced gas main had been fun too. Contrary to all the records it turned out that the original had been brought across what had been fields from a parallel road. Because nobody knew it was there it had acquired someone's conservatory built over it. GIS is great but only when it's correct.

Somebody's going to be awfully disappointed when they come across the aluminium stuff.

Re: "should they take the trouble to recycle them"

If the lines are powered it's to be hoped that a few of the thieves are getting recycled as well.

IT infrastructure scared away potential buyers of struggling e-commerce site

Would it not be possible for the administrator to sell the trading side without the infrastructure? I suppose Oracle must have a contract that entitles them to an arm and a leg and the first-born of any buyer.

Oracle sold a large installation? For them it was a success.

Endless OS 6: How desktop Linux may look, one day

I think this is the first time I've grokked the point of Endless OS. For that it appears to be a good solution, much better than Windows. However if that was what desktop Linux as a whole was like I'd be using something else.

Re: Yet another distro

Which products are those? And be careful to identify the problem correctly.

See corb's post below.

Re: Wayland?

Or is it the other way about?

Thanks for coming to help. No, we can't say why we called – it's classified

Re: what we're they thinking?

"My gun with the magic bullet is at home."

That would get you into more trouble.

"arrange for a new HD to be shipped for the department's own team to install and configure"

Given suitable levels of paranoia would a new disk be trusted enough to be installed or even allowed into the building?

Re: "Or struggled to serve a classified client?"

"I thought you were going to say that someone ran a French 1500v train onto the Italian 3kv rail."

You're not the only one. How disappointing.

Tesla slams advisors for not loving Musk's $44.9B payout

"how racist it is that only the ceo gets a bonus"

I'm confused here. Please fill out your logic a bit more. Is the CEO of a different race to everyone else in the company? If not, what are you saying?

Re: Time to go Elon

"he'll pardon himself"

Only if he picks up some federal convictions on the way. Everything I've read says that he's been convicted of state felonies which the US President can't pardon.

Re: Honestly don't think Tesla will be around much longer in its current form

"others have better autonomous vehicles"

Tesla make autonomous vehicles?

US Treasury says NFTs 'highly susceptible' to fraud, but ignored by high-tier criminals

There's no intrinsic value unlike the usual purchases of expensive watches and cars.

There's little point in trying to sell fast-depreciating stuff to the public.

There's no point in using then to launder money if they can't be easily converted to cash.

So no surprise if they're being ignored.

Pretty much all the headaches at MSPs stem from cybersecurity

Re: Obvious question:

I'd hope their employers don't expect them to sign on with their private email addresses as IDs which is what is likely to be harvested along with the password. Also require a minimum password complexity greater than what they'd use elsewhere.

Also an easily guessed users ID such as initial and name is not good for more than one reason http://www.bloodwolf.org/~rulnak/jdr/jokes/Dilbert/Dilbert_pictures/dilbert_BrendaUtthead.gif

Obvious question:

"nearly a third of all ransomware attacks (29 percent) last year began as a result of miscreants acquiring login credentials"

How are these credentials acquired?

Promising results for osteoarthritis treatments tested in space

Re: Must be getting slow...

One biological system well known to be sensitive to gravity is plant growth. A very old experimental trick is to grow the subject in a horizontal pot being slowly rotated around its axis. If the mechanics of tissue culture can be suitably handled I'd have thought this could e used far more cheaply and conveniently than in space. But then I suppose "on the ISS" or "in Earth orbit" in the title gets a paper more attention.

AI future: Nvidia boffin hopes 'everything that moves will eventually be autonomous'

Remember the saying about it hard to get a man to believe something if his salary depends on it. The converse also applies - a man will readily believe anything if his salary depends on it.

Activist investor pressures Texas Instruments to stop spending cash on fabs

Hedge fund managers should be used as the wall.

Re: Priorities

Inst that more along the lines of:

Vultures : "My fellow Americans, ask not what you can do for your country. ask what you ca do for us"?

Two big computer vision papers boost prospect of safer self-driving vehicles

Re: Naples, anyone?

I don't know about Naples but when I first arrived in Belfast I was warned about Dublin traffic. When I got to Dublin I realised the difference was that Dublin drivers were aware of that gimmick, the rear view mirror and assumed each other were using it.

Colorado governor signs 'best in the world' right-to-repair law

Just a thought, but is the parts pairing provision wide enough to include print cartridges?

Why RISC-V must get its messaging right on open standard vs open source

The rest of the world will keep using Risc-V. The US comapnies disadvantaged by it can just fork the standard in a new name and carry on. The politicians won't notice.

but they do not understand "standards" and "ISA" even less

The more technologically advanced ones may tell you the ISA bus came out with the IBM PC and hasn't it been obsolete for years?

" It hopes to avoid a crackdown by getting lawmakers, policy wonks, and officials to understand what the community sees as the subtle difference between open source and an open specification."

Good luck with that. The people they're trying to persuade are either identical wit or from the same batch as those who think an encryption scheme can be back-doored so the good guys and only the good guys can intercept it. Some of them may think that mathematicians have made an error by not having π equal to 3.

Will Windows drive a PC refresh? Everyone's talking about AI

Re: AI is being pushed, but who actually wants it?

Is Poe's law in operation here?

Re: The end of the PC

The answer will be 43.

Re: The end of the PC

If people working from home are buying their PC instead of being provided with a corporate one there's something whron with their employer's IT management.

"with a clumsy feature to extract more "telemetry" and inject more ads"

That depends on whether the AI says "I'm sorry, I can't let you do that Dave" when you start to download a Linux or BSD ISO.

I assume Morgan Stanley expect to make money from either lending to buyers in a PC refresh, dividends from vendors or both.

Yup, both. That'll be it.

Even closer: xpert systems?

There's plenty of digital roadkill.

Google’s in-house docs about search ranking leak online, sparking SEO frenzy

Re: Views in Chrome

One possibility is that when a search result is clicked and the user then clicks on links within it these, otherwise invisible clicks, would be reported back to base to boost the relevance of these links. For someone using it for research that could be a useful thing. However, given that it could be following a user making purchases, linking to their bank or whatever this is not necessarily reassuring.

"likely as the result of accidental publication by an in-house bot."

Who needs humans to make mistakes when you can automate it?

The Apache licence is a particularly nice touch.

MIT professor hoses down predictions AI will put a rocket under the economy

We all know that manglement have two thought processes relating to planning and prediction. Respectively they are magical thinking and wishful thinking.

Give then anything at all to consider and that's what will be applied.

Re: The Paperless Office

One of the many gems from TMMM: "The user manual is the first item to be started and the last to be finished."

At least that's how it should be done.

Parliamentarians urge next UK govt to consider ban on smartphones for under-16s

And you think it's likely to be untrue?

Don't forget the spaghetti harvest.

Re: Here's a thought...

Politicians aren't usually in favour of teaching kids critical thinking.

Re: Re:

It stands to reason. All the adults you know used to be 13.

"National Service for the youth"

They seem to have taken the first episodes of Tes Minister (getting rid of rthe difficult bit in the title) and now Yes Prime Minister (national service) as a source of ideas. Did nobody tell them it was saire?

"massive pension hikes"

Anyone old enough to remember YM and YPM is probably in favour of this.

OpenAI sets up safety group in wake of high-profile exits

It's the number of independent reviewers that determine my confidence in this.

SpiderOak One customers threaten to jump ship following datacenter upgrade

"an email from SpiderOak the day before the upgrade was due to take place, apologizing for the expected service interruption"

Unless this was an emergency upgrade a day isn't much notice.

Microsoft's Recall preview doesn't need a Copilot+ PC to run

"we will need to faff more to disable this cruft"

Nothing a big enough hammer won't fix. Possibly something that nothing but a big enough hammer would fix.

"It's surprisingly good even on something this low spec."

For some dubious values of "good".

NASA, Boeing opt to fly leaky thruster as-is for first crewed Starliner CST-100 mission

Re: Its just a O-ring...

Let's hope the reviewers have read their Feynman.

Re: Here we go again.

Not the next iteration, this iteration. Just in case there isn't a next iteration.

We polled thousands of IT pros – and sustainability just ain't a priority right now

And deciding is just too much like hard thinking.