* Posts by ITMA

1033 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Aug 2019

Thanks, Sir Clive Sinclair, from Reg readers whose careers you created and lives you shaped

ITMA Silver badge

"my VIC-20 that ran out of RAM to hold the program code, let alone compile and run it"

Except of course BASIC on the VIC-20 (I had one of those as well at one point) was interpreted, not compiled.

"Tokenised" doesn't really count as the BASIC on Commodore 65X02 machines, in common with almost all 8 bits machines, did the tokenisation on entry.

ITMA Silver badge

Re: Well

"rather than trying to get a seat in the terminal room to share an overloaded mini."

Don't tell me you also had experience of trying to do "Computer Studies" using a Teletype Model 33 linked (via acoustic coupler) to the local town hall's mainframe?

LOL

Those were the days....

Then the first Commodore PET 2001 (8K) arrived... (BASIC v1.0 with TIM loaded from tape).

ITMA Silver badge

Re: Beep

Ok then, just to add some 6502 "balance" LOL.

POKE 59468,14 does......?

And which machines do you NOT do the "fast screen update" POKE on? :)

ITMA Silver badge

Re: Seriously off-topic

You've obviously missed a whole bunch of other comments by me on the subject.

Oh if only it was as easy as that....

On a lot of PCs, particularly desktops, you can have all the power settings correct and it STILL doesn't work because of "Fast start up". If that is ticked, then on many PCs (Dell in particular) it powers down the NIC, WHATEVER your other power settings are INCLUDING having "Allow this device to wake the computer" ON - and that other Dell BIOS stalwart, "Deep Sleep Control", which must be disabled also.

No power to the NIC, ergo NO WAKE ON LAN.

Even then, a misguided network driver update can bugger it again. Which explains why on PCs with certain Intel NICs in the Windows Update section of Settings, under Optional Updates, there is an OLD Intel LAN driver - which works!!! Some newer ones break WOL.

A bit more research into the subject first would be helpful.

One more snippet - this information doesn't come from trying to get it work on one PC. Nor the 6 Optiplex desktops at home (though they serve as a testbed). It comes from managing an estate (largely remotely) of 70+ machines.

ITMA Silver badge

RIP Sir Cliver

I never used a Spectrum or QL to any degree, having been seduced by the 6502 in the Commodore PET and offspring (including Tangerine Microtan 65, Acorn Atom and mighty BBC Micro).

I did use the ZX80 and ZX81 though when the main "computing war" was between Sinclair & Acorn with the gaggle of "also rans" chasing along way, way behind.

Sir Clive was the quintessential British boffin who loved inventing technically "sweet" things for ordinary people.

Rest in peace Sir Clive in the great Non-Volatile Memory which lies beyond the short DRAM refresh cycle of this life.

The man whose ideas help launch thousands of IT careers, mine included.

The magic TUPE roundabout: Council, Wipro, Northgate all deny employing Unix admins in outsourcing muddle

ITMA Silver badge

You didn't work for RBS Group Technology by any chance? Or one of the various IT outfits that were part of NatWest before RBS gobbled them up?

Your description sounds more than a vague resemblance to thoset events....

I remember Project Monument (the main Coutts desktop environment integration project), Monument Returns, Son of Monument and Monument Rides Again (only to fall off its proverbial horse for the umpteenth time)...

I think the small team I was in went through (at least) 5 different managers, half of them based 300+ miles away in Edinburgh (!!!) and at least as many HR "bodies" who were a total waste of space, air and flesh.

Fix five days of server failure with this one weird trick

ITMA Silver badge

Re: The "inspector"

God you make me feel old....

When I was little more than a toddler PC didn't exist, the first Commodore PET was still years away and TVs (my dad was a TV repair engineer/technician) were all valves (vacuum tubes for those on the other side of the Atlantic). Not even discrete transistors, never mind ICs

Colour TV was something few could afford to buy and most were rented...If they could afford that!

Microsoft suspends free trials for Windows 365 after a day due to 'significant demand'

ITMA Silver badge

Re: How much?

BYOD, or as it is otherwise known:

Bring Your Own Disaster

Dell won't ship energy-hungry PCs to California and five other US states due to power regulations

ITMA Silver badge

Re: As a Californian, all I can sat is "Who cares?".

I still don't have a "smart meter" and refuse to have one.

Not because of any of the "tinfoil hat" claptrap reasons - simply because they are a massive con.

They are nothing to do with energy efficiency or saving consumers money. They are all about being able to impose finer and finer granular control over pricing - i.e. maximising revenue.

ITMA Silver badge

Re: As a Californian, all I can sat is "Who cares?".

"Would you like to buy more? Additional credits are available at 3x market rate for electricity guzzlers such as yourself"

Are you talking "standard market rate" or the "variable according to demand" market rates which "so-called smart meters" are ultimately designed for:

When there's demand, the price goes up, priced by the second.

That's where it is going - and here in the UK we have a tax payer funded, government backed "smart meter roll out programme". Backed by most of the most competitive tariffs being restricted to having or accepting both a smart meter and payment via direct debit.

At least Dick Turpin made it clear he was going to rob you rather than claim was going to "save you money" (the central tenet of the marketing BS behind the UK roll-out).

Want to REALLY save money on your energy bill? Ues your eyes, read your own (standard non-smart ) meter and learn to SWITHCH THINGS OFF.

NASA fixes Hubble Space Telescope using backup power supply unit, payload computer

ITMA Silver badge

Re: Any fuel left?

You are absolutely correct about Hubble using reaction wheels to do the essential job of pointing it in the correct direction.

Astronomers, being picky buggers, do like to be able to move their telescope around to look at different things.

However, while safety for crews approaching Hubble during servicing missions was a factor, it wasn't a major one. After all, STS crews would deploy payloads mounted on PAMs (Payload Assist Modules) which are basically a rocket powered platform for firing payloads out of orbit and off elsewhere (to the other planets etc).

The major reason for the reaction wheels? Science....

The alternatives were small maneuvering thrusters which used propellant - typically hydrazine - for moving things about in space. Fine if you are generally moving your spacecraft from Point A to Point B.

If, as is the case with Hubble, you are not making it "go" anywhere, just slewing it around to point in different directions. Then your spacecraft can quickly end up sitting in a orbiting cloud of residue from the hydrazine.

At best this will interfere with all the optical instruments - the whole point of it being in space was to get above most of the atmosphere so the last you want if for your spacecraft to create its own.

At worst it get onto, and seriously contaminate, the surface of the single most critical component that could never be "swapped out - the main mirror.

ITMA Silver badge

Re: Sounds vaguely familiar.. LOL

Strangely the worst place for security I ever visited was British Shoe in Leicester - a bloody shoe factory!

My car was thoroughly searching twice going in, and THREE times when I went to leave site

ITMA Silver badge

Sounds vaguely familiar.. LOL

That in an odd way reminds me of a problem (years) ago when I had to go to an MOD site to figure out why a page printer (LED not laser) was producing garbled printouts from a mainframe it was connected to via RS-232.

The slight complexity was there was no separate "flow control" on the host systems serial interface, so it was all running via XON/XOFF.

Off I went down to the site in the South West - one of those with soldiers on the gates with real guns loaded with real bullets! - complete with an old "luggable" RS-232 protocol analyser with built in 5" CRT. Everything seemed ok, except a lot of the XOFFs which should have been sent by the printer to tell the host system to shut up for a bit, seemed to be being ignored or even missing.

One of our field engineers had been down to it twice and changed most of the controller boards - the serial interface board had been replaced 3 times. All to no effect.

Bit of thinking then out came the multi-meter and onto the PSU. The +12V and -12V outputs were somewhat low (less than +8V and -8V respectively). Turns out that those voltages, only used by the serial interface, (standard RS-232 signalling levels) were just too low for it signal reliably to the host system. So it just wasn't "hearing" the XON/XOFFs.

New PSU, with the correct outputs and normal service resumed.

And I got to "chaperone" one of our other printers on the same site which was going through "naval submarine" validation testing. Basically subjecting it to various shock levels (on a huge shock table) in various orientations to ensure:

1. It worked up to a certain level.

2,. Above that it didn't have to work but nothing had to fly off (simulated battle conditions).

And the last test - see just how stood up to "destruction level shock testing". Basically give it the highest level shock and see what happened. It was prettyy buggered inside, but only the main "smoked plastic" cover flew over 15 feet away, a couple of knows flew off and something cracekd. Otherwise stayed pretty intact.

Windows 10 to hang on for five more years with 21H2 update

ITMA Silver badge

Re: Last security update for Windows 10, when?

If they are not "home" machines, at what rate do they get depreciated?

Wen buying new PC hardware, I tend to opt, where available, for on site 3-year warrant. Our PC estate is too small to cost effectively do all hardware maintenance on standard PC hardware internally, yet too big to want to waste too much time faffing around if/when one does have a significant system failure, such as M/board problem.

Any that do fail it's a phone call and next (working) day it gets fixed on site under the warranty. After the 3 years, any that fail are "scrapped" and replaced as they have already, in accounting terms, depreciated to £0 value.

They worst for failing are laptops (no surprises there).

The coming of Wi-Fi 6 does not mean it's time to ditch your cabled LAN. Here's why

ITMA Silver badge

Re: Datacenter usage

"Datacenter usage

I can see a future where Wi-Fi might be used in the datacenter. Switches aren't cheap, and they take up real space. If you want failover, double both. Wire installation and management takes some extra time as well."

Sounds like a VERY BAD IDEA.... All those costly switches etc are to achieve not just redundancy and reliability, but raw

THROUGHPUT. WiFi will cripple that.

It would just be a completely unnecessary added level of useless complexity.

And I'd love to see you try and map the WiFi signal propagation in among that forest of metalwork to get even a vague idea of where the odd "hotspots" are and where the much larger number of "notspots" are. And as soon as anyone walks down an aisle and opens a (screened) rack door - your propagation map goes out of the window and lots of "odd signal dropouts" start plaguing your datacentre infrastructure.

ITMA Silver badge

Re: WiFi it's the future honest!

God help you if you have to manage a PC estate of any size.

With wired networking you can effectively manage your estate with the aid of WOL - anywhere from a few tens of PC to tens of thousands.

Once you shift across to WiFi - FORGET IT! Remote management of your estate is effectively crippled as there is not reliable WiFi equivalent to WOL. Then you are back to pleading and begging your users to not shutdown their PCs or anything else that may cause them to drop of the network,

And if they don't, your ability to do effective remote management, especially out of hours and at weekends is STUFFED.

A few laptops on one's network can be bad enough - I've lost count of how many times I've re-iterated "do not separate laptops from the power supplies", and the monotonous count of "lab laptops" which drop off the network because they have been left running on battery until it's drained. And the dull regular "laptop hunt" to find them, their PSUs and plug the buggers back in to get updated.

ITMA Silver badge

Re: Wired

The location where our main office is, there are 35+ other networks listed. None of them ours.

That is the biggest problem of all with WiFi. It was fine when you and someone else in your street had it. Now EVERYONE has it and it is EVERYWHERE.

Consequently it is very very VERY crowded.

ITMA Silver badge

Re: WiFi 6 may not; 5G may

"But for those who have made the change, it 'just working' anywhere and everywhere [there's coverage] is great, and quickly becomes essential."

But here in the real world, it "just doesn't", is more the norm.

ITMA Silver badge

Re: And security?

Precisely!

WiFi is a solution to ONE and ONLY ONE problem: a situation where it is impractical or impossible to use a cable.

In every other respect WiFi, compared to cable, is one MASSIVE kludge and nothing BUT disadvantages and problems.

IBM's 18-month company-wide email system migration has been a disaster, sources say

ITMA Silver badge

Re: All good [law] firms

And many - eBay/Amazon - don't seem to know any keyboard layouts other than US.

Making them totally US (I leave it to your personal preference as to whether you interpret "US" as "uselss" or "utter shite").

ITMA Silver badge
Devil

Re: Dark, chaotic pit of not being able to access email or calendars

"Email is the worst method of communication"

I find that the orange plastic "dead-blow" mallets that come with industrial grade, self-assembly steel racking/shelving makes a very effective communication tool.

Especially at short range.

ITMA Silver badge

Re: All good [law] firms

" if you can find an old spark-plug sized keyboard connector gender-blender to USB..."

By "spark-plug sized" I assume you mean the 180 degree, 5 pin DIN connector?

Windows Server 2022: Azure Edition slips into Public Preview

ITMA Silver badge

Re: The white fluffy stuff

Everything Microsoft to do has for some time appeared to be aimed at driving customers to suscription based services.

Hell they even confgiured the pretty dire OneDrive Sync crap to automatically start hoovering up your files from your PCs hard to "helpfully back them".

NO F**K OFF Microsoft!! I have my own backup solution thank you very much.

"Cloud" services have their uses, but I am no fan of using them for data storage unless they are the only viable option. Cloud storage (like OneDrive) breaks one of my fundamental principles:

The best way of ensuring control over your data is to have physical control of the devices it is stored on - in other words on drives/arrays I own, locked away in my machine rooms.

Leaked print spooler exploit lets Windows users remotely execute code as system on your domain controller

ITMA Silver badge

Re: What the ever-loving frak ?

Unfortunately.... yes....

ITMA Silver badge

Re: What the ever-loving frak ?

"...but who knows what rationale people have for odd configurations"

I know.

When small company IT are over ruled by PhDs who know nothing about real world IT, but whenever they are given reasons why they can't do something in the way they want (such as "explicitly prohibited by the licence conditions") suddenly become "IT experts", scweam and shout and stamp their little feet until they get their way. And they never "lower themselves" to say "thank you".

UK urged to choo-choo-choose hydrogen-powered trains in pursuit of carbon-neutral economic growth

ITMA Silver badge
Trollface

Re: happily drive a cat with 60-80 litres of explosive liquid in a single walled plastic bowl.

My cat wants a word with you in private - down some nice dark lonely lane with some of his feline mates LOL

Oh. He says make sure you bring your own pre-labelled body bag if you want your remnants returned.

ITMA Silver badge

Oh great!

Not content with many of them (the ones not fitted with air-con) being ovens-on-wheels, they want to make them bombs-on-wheels as well.

I wonder how many supporting this happen to have "interests" in the very outfits that would be potential contractors in providing the infrastructure for "re-gassing"?

Revealed: Why Windows Task Manager took a cuddlier approach to (process) death and destruction

ITMA Silver badge

Re: Why so long?

"Also, note that Windows 10 does not really 'shut down' when you select Shut Down; Windows 10 features Fast Startup... The shutdown might be slower due to the write, but it is balanced off with a faster startup as full system & hardware initialization is not required"

Except on a lot of PCs it also completely powers down the NIC.

"They figured that most people are impatient to get started, less so when they finish and are ready to walk away, so they rebalanced the two operations towards a faster startup at the penalty of the slower shutdown. Turn off 'Fast Startup' for the faster shutdown at the cost of the slower startup."

And if you manage remote estates of desktops which are affected by Fast Startup powering down the NIC (which is a lot) then, frankly, your buggered if you need to use WOL to do your job as Microsoft have fecked it!

Unless you disable both Fast Startup and Sleep.

ITMA Silver badge

Re: Why so long?

"Also "shutdown" doesn't really shut down the computer fully anymore"

Are you talking about "Fast star-tup" on Windows 10?

Which BREAKS WOL on a lot of PCs because it powers the NIC down totally. Not sure how that is meant to help a PC start fater....

Especially Dell Optiplex PCs.

So I ALWAYS disable Fast start-up and Sleep (on desktops).

Microsoft releases Windows 11 Insider Preview, attempts to defend labyrinth of hardware requirements

ITMA Silver badge

Re: Silicon Valley's post pandemic recovery plan

"But no-one, not even Miscrosoft, is forcing anyone to upgrade to Windows 11."

That was said about Windows 10 - but Microsoft went ahead and did it anyway.

That decision made "New Coke" seem like a rip-roaring success.

ITMA Silver badge

They just don't learn....

You would think that Mickeysoft would have learned a few things from the last time they messed about with the Start Menu to such as degree - and that went SO WELL didn't it.... NOT!

ITMA Silver badge

Re: Silicon Valley's post pandemic recovery plan

My reply to the cartel involves sex and travel in bold capitals with day-glo yellow highlighting.....

Dell SupportAssist contained RCE flaw allowing miscreants to remotely reflash your BIOS with code of their creation

ITMA Silver badge

Re: Just Wow! Say it ain't so!

The "right" operating system is the one which runs the majority if the apps I need.

There is a long, long, long way to go before that will be Linux.

And installing most hardware is still a bitch compared to Windows. And sorry, no actually I'm not sorry, but having to type a load of cryptic commands to install relatively common bits of hardware is NOT simple. Especially when, as I suspect most PC users are, you are not the least bit interested in HOW it works or how clever you think you seem getting to work, all you care about it is b***dy working.

Three things that have vanished: $3.6bn in Bitcoin, a crypto investment biz, and the two brothers who ran it

ITMA Silver badge
Devil

Can I come and plant my Tulips where your body is rotting down please?

No need to let good fertiliser go to waste....

Windows 11: Meet the new OS, same as the old OS (or close enough)

ITMA Silver badge

Re: Oh SH*T

The day I resort to getting my "news" via Microsoft is the day I book myself in to that clinic in Belgium to move on to the "next life" (if it exists).

ITMA Silver badge

Re: Windows 11 - Subscription only

"The first thing I want to point out is that the main reason why Linux is not on Desktop computers is just because of companies and marketing."

Nope. It is MUCH simpler than that.

95% of the software which we need to run as a business is NOT available for Linux. End of story.

ITMA Silver badge

Oh SH*T

If the most recent "here have it, YER HAVING IT WHETHER YER WANT IT OR NOT" addition to Windows 10 - the pathetic "News Feeds" is anything to go by. God Help Us!

What horrors must be waiting in Windows 11? "Please sign over your wife, kids, cat, dog, house and cars to continue using Windows"

'Lots of failed startups came out of Campus': Google axes London hub because startup scene 'doesn't need' another 7 floors of workspace

ITMA Silver badge

Power????:

There are only two objectives when it comes to "power":

1. Aquiring it.

2. Once you have it, KEEPING IT.

Anything and everything else is pure "bum fluff".....

A hotline to His Billness? Or a guard having a bit of a giggle?

ITMA Silver badge
Trollface

"They thought it would be interesting for the executive board directors to spend a day doing a job in their division."

That would be a brilliant idea for a TV series :)

Bollocks - some bugger has thought of it already...

ITMA Silver badge

I've done the same with the CEO of BT OpenReach and, after some carefully worded email interactions with the (very helpful) person assigned to resolve the problem, achieved what few others seem to have been able to do:

Have an EO (Exchange Only) phone line's copper, rerouted so that it goes through the nearest FTTC enabled cabinet and thus be able to upgrade a site from plain old ADSL to 80/20 FTTC.

Spyware, trade-secret theft, and $30m in damages: How two online support partners spectacularly fell out

ITMA Silver badge

Re: Call that "support"?

"Or, to be more precise, just trim 'er support costs' off the end."

Well that would definitely account for the utterly dire support on Outlook.com Premiun accounts (the one you pay for).

ITMA Silver badge

Re: Call that "support"?

Have you felt my cat's claws? LOL

Anyone who has would not even dare such an utterance as "Have you trie....."

ITMA Silver badge

Call that "support"?

"LivePerson provides online engagement technology, which takes the form of chatbots that corporate clients add to their websites to field questions, gather interaction data, and reduce customer support costs."

Sorry.... Well actually no I'm not sorry. It really pisses me off when outfits think a chatbot or any other sort of automated non-human "entity" is a substitute for a real live person.

Particularly when you try to get through to a person and all you get it that F**KING BOT!!!

If I want to "talk" to a non-human about a techinal or other issue, I'll talk to my cat. He's a billion more likely to respond with something useful.

We don't know why it's there, we don't know what it does – all we know is that the button makes everything OK again

ITMA Silver badge

Re: The knob......

"DFA" - isn't that a management term that applies to certain members of staff?

LOL

ITMA Silver badge

Re: The knob......

If there is one thing office "users" should never be allowed anywhere near or, even worse, physically be abel to touch, are HVAC controls.

Does't matter what you set it at someonme is too hot, someone else is too cold. It goes on and on....

And God forbid, someone is allowed to bring in portable heaters! They multiply like vermin.

I think anyone who has to deal with such environments would do well to consider some (of the few) words of wisdon that came (allegedly) from some NASA guy during a meeting with Hubble (telescope) scientist:

"I have had it trying to make you happy. I'm now just going to concentrate on making you all equally unhappy"

LOL

Microsoft releases command-line package manager for Windows (there are snags)

ITMA Silver badge

Re: Oh, the irony

No....

I just don't see the point in a GUI based OS where you have to resort to cryptic commands to do things.

Sort of defeats the object.

ITMA Silver badge

Re: Oh, the irony

There is the alternative GUI based view - and I just KNOW I'm going to get serious stick for this - but:

If a Windows user wanted to have to learn and use lots of cryptic commands on a command line do anything useful, they would be using Linux, not Windows.

Ubuntu, Wikimedia jump ship to the Libera Chat IRC network after Freenode channel confiscations

ITMA Silver badge
Joke

Re: By their actions you will know them

Is it necessary to insult honest, hard working, genuine toerags through such a scurrilous association?

Microsoft: Behold, at some later date, the next generation of Windows

ITMA Silver badge

Re: next generation?

And Norton *IS* a virus....

Lessons have not been learned: Microsoft's Modern Comments leave users reaching for the rollback button

ITMA Silver badge

Re: This is Google Docs comments

"MS have fucked up by pushing this out instead of letting people opt in"

Microsoft have form doing this. The reason I was given with the great "Focussed Inbox debacle" was to "encourage" users to try it.

The real reason, I firmly believe, is this - they are shit scared that if they made them "opt in", rather than force them on users (by rolling them out switched "ON") they would see the truth. Which is most of the "improvements" they laboured over developing are utter shite that nobody asked for and nobody wants.

"Focussed Inbox" was a bit of a rude awakening when the backlash of "how the F**K do I turn this F*****G poxy thing off and get all my emails back?" came.

On a par with their botched attempt at forcing users PCs to upgrade to Windows 10 whether they wanted it to or not. Not everyone's "estate" is of a size to justify WSUS and Gibson Researche's Never10 was a real Godsend.