BachelorBoy Posted January 16 Share Posted January 16 TVs are going down a similar route. Sometimes we can't watch stuff while ours updates. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
whart57 Posted January 16 Share Posted January 16 9 hours ago, beast66606 said: The actual reason was not financial, the customer was replacing the "other" system and therefore decided to keep my bit in place until that happened, unfortunately there were some problems implementing that new system (nothing to do with me or my company) so things lasted longer that they expected, quite a bit longer - but given it (eventually) ran for 17 years without issue there was hardly anything to panic about, Y2K came and went, ships didn't sink, planes didn't fall from the sky and that bit of software kept on dealing with hundreds of patients each and every day. During my time viruses and hacks were very few and far between but the Internet was not so prevalent and most/(all?) machines could only access the LAN. To gain access in bulk to any useful data would involve writing something to download it - and that would have been spotted almost immediately by the 24x7 monitoring which went on, human and software, I've run Windows since Windows 1.0 - my girlfriend, now wife, worked for Apricot at the time, 1980s and she was allowed to bring home a PC running Windows 1, the kit was so expensive she wasn't allowed to bring the mouse home so I had to use it with keyboard only, a skill which has served me well over the years, although I've forgotten a lot now, I used to be able to do virtually everything using keyboard shortcuts. - I didn't like it (W1) If you can convince someone to give you the root password for a minute or two, a snall program can be written which gives a back door into a UNIX based system. I was at a major national telecoms provider working on our stuff when I came across one of those living fossil applications. One that had been written to do a task and continued to do that task year in year out. Trouble was the guy who had written it had retired and he was now getting a nice supplement to his pension through getting called in for a day or two at a nice consultant's rate every couple of months as it needed updating to cope with other changes in the software around it. I'm sorry to say that we put an an end to that. If you get full admin rights to any computer you can sneak anything on, if you give someone the combination to the bank's safe they can open that too. Are the systems in place to detect that? I know how to look for things running that shouldn't be on Linux, I wouldn't know how to do that in present day Windows systems. Going back to the earlier topic of having a government Linux distro. Yes it would have taken a brave minister - and one who had been given assurances they would be allowed to stay in the job to see the project through - to go down that route. The reasons are not the technical qualities of the Linux and Microsoft offerings of the time, but the non-technical issues. Microsoft were very good at making non-technical executives jittery about going down a different path to the one MS were mapping out. If an executive didn't immediately buckle the chances are that they would consult their own strategy people. People who had been on Microsoft funded jollies, had been to breakfast meetings with Microsoft execs - Bill Gates was still doing these at the turn of the century - and had been well supplied with the "why choose Microsoft" arguments. And then there were the techs. Lads who had their MS certificates of competence or wanted to get them for their own career advancement reasons. Yes it would have taken not just a brave minister but one who was tech-savvy and knew how the IT industry worked to get out of that rut. I doubt there was anyone like that in Parliament, certainly not in the Commons. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted January 16 Share Posted January 16 10 hours ago, beast66606 said: Y2K came and went, ships didn't sink, planes didn't fall from the sky and that bit of software kept on dealing with hundreds of patients each and every day. I once had a customer claim some problem or another almost caused an oil rig to shut down. I cannot fathom any circumstances where anyone would use either their software or ours in any kind of critical application... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
whart57 Posted January 16 Share Posted January 16 52 minutes ago, 30801 said: I once had a customer claim some problem or another almost caused an oil rig to shut down. I cannot fathom any circumstances where anyone would use either their software or ours in any kind of critical application... We once had a Russian oil company with rigs off Siberia as a customer. According to them the critical app was the TV porn channel. If that failed the men on the rig downed tools. That could cause an oil rig to shutdown. 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RMweb Gold beast66606 Posted January 16 RMweb Gold Share Posted January 16 11 hours ago, whart57 said: I was at a major national telecoms provider working on our stuff when I came across one of those living fossil applications. IBM indeed - didn't read the rest, The Boys in the Suits IBM were known as, and known for an ill founded arrogance, Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
whart57 Posted January 16 Share Posted January 16 12 minutes ago, beast66606 said: IBM indeed - didn't read the rest, The Boys in the Suits IBM were known as, and known for an ill founded arrogance, Ah well, we were IBM not out of choice. We were an acquisition and we didn't wear suits. IBM's near death experience also taught them a measure of humility. This century I would say the ill-founded arrogance was from Microsoft and Cisco. Google probably now. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RMweb Premium melmerby Posted January 16 RMweb Premium Share Posted January 16 11 hours ago, BachelorBoy said: TVs are going down a similar route. Sometimes we can't watch stuff while ours updates. Never heard of that, usually you get the option and if you cancel, it will ask again next time it's switched on. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BachelorBoy Posted January 17 Share Posted January 17 15 hours ago, 30801 said: I once had a customer claim some problem or another almost caused an oil rig to shut down. I cannot fathom any circumstances where anyone would use either their software or ours in any kind of critical application... A sewage works in South Korea stopped operations on 1 Jan. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MartinRS Posted January 17 Share Posted January 17 On 08/01/2024 at 10:34, Adam88 said: Will Microsoft 365 work on Feb 29th? I'm waiting for 19 January 2038 when Unix type systems might just fall over! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BachelorBoy Posted January 17 Share Posted January 17 4 hours ago, melmerby said: Never heard of that, usually you get the option and if you cancel, it will ask again next time it's switched on. Obviously our TV is a bit of a nanny. :-) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MartinRS Posted January 17 Share Posted January 17 5 hours ago, beast66606 said: IBM indeed - didn't read the rest, The Boys in the Suits IBM were known as, and known for an ill founded arrogance, I too worked for a major national telecoms provider which serviced a number of IBM 3750's and an IMB 1750. Whenever IBM called it was free meals and beer for everyone in a local pub. No wonder telecoms managers were keen to buy IBM products. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
whart57 Posted January 17 Share Posted January 17 6 hours ago, MartinRS said: I too worked for a major national telecoms provider which serviced a number of IBM 3750's and an IMB 1750. Whenever IBM called it was free meals and beer for everyone in a local pub. No wonder telecoms managers were keen to buy IBM products. The motto was "no-one ever got fired for buying IBM". That's why managers bought IBM systems. IBM were clever too, they supported clone manufacturers like Amdahl so managers could "choose". The money wasn't in selling hardware though, it was in software services and as those Amdahl mainframes and FEPs ran IBM software, IBM was still making money. The cheaper Amdahl option on hardware kept the likes of DEC out though. That said, if you had a problem with your IBM stuff they did pull out the stops to get you back up and running. I worked on some of IBM's competitor products of the time before going to work in an IBM shop. I have to say that the build quality of the IBM kit was a lot better as well. IBM wasn't so good outside the machine room though. Their modems were heavy and way over-engineered for the purpose they fulfilled. The printers that churned out thousands of customer letters overnight or furlongs of reports printed on that "pyjama paper" were great, but that high engineering quality was overkill for a remote printer doing a dozen letters an hour. And that was the reason for IBM's downfall in the late 1990s. IBM applied the same business logic as they'd successfully used in the mainframe and midrange markets - high build quality, tolerance of "clones" and profits coming from software - when they developed the PC. Not the original IBM PC, that almost slipped out without the top execs knowing about it, but IBM's follow up of PS/2 with the OS/2 operating system. The ironic thing is that the flaws in the original PC design that IBM tried to fix - the limited ISA bus and the insecurities and single threading of MSDOS - would be fixed ten years later with the PCI bus and Windows XP, but at the time the price of IBM's PS/2 was way too high to compete with cheap clones, and when Bill Gates sold Windows 3.1 (which was still a MSDOS system) at rock bottom prices for hardware manufacturers to pre-install, OS/2 sales fell through the floor too. But "no-one ever got fired for buying IBM" morphed into "no-one ever got fired for choosing Microsoft". Decision making in the IT business has got no better in the last forty years. 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RMweb Gold StuAllen Posted January 17 RMweb Gold Share Posted January 17 On 16/01/2024 at 09:27, BachelorBoy said: TVs are going down a similar route. Sometimes we can't watch stuff while ours updates. Our TV does that as well - Sony Bravia - it’s Android based for all the apps etc. none of which I use as it’s just a monitor for Sky Q/Apple TV devices. Still annoying though, also the TV has got a habit of rebooting itself, or just not talking to the Amp/Sky so everything needs to be reset at the wall. I’m assuming it’s because the handshakes between the devices haven’t quite happened in the right order - spent many hours on the various help desks and they all blame each other. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
whart57 Posted January 17 Share Posted January 17 LG TVs seem to be OK. I read somewhere that the LG operating system was developed from Nokia's smartphone opsys, so not Android. Android is a really flakey system though, I shudder to think of Google having anything to do with self-driving cars if Android is their example of reliability. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted January 17 Share Posted January 17 31 minutes ago, StuAllen said: Our TV does that as well - Sony Bravia - it’s Android based for all the apps etc. none of which I use as it’s just a monitor for Sky Q/Apple TV devices. Still annoying though, also the TV has got a habit of rebooting itself, or just not talking to the Amp/Sky so everything needs to be reset at the wall. I’m assuming it’s because the handshakes between the devices haven’t quite happened in the right order - spent many hours on the various help desks and they all blame each other. I used to have a Sony TV, a Sony Playstation and a Sony soundbase and none of the HDMI connections would play nice with each other. Would variously have no sound, no picture or a little picture in the middle. Now have a mismatch of manufacturers and it works better, but I sometimes still need three remotes to select the correct inputs. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
woodenhead Posted January 17 Share Posted January 17 We have a Sony Android TV with a Sony Amplifier and sometimes the Amp just does not connect correctly leaving us without sound until it's been rebooted. Bit annoying as I have to go and find the Amp remote to do it or walk over to the TV, it's like 5 steps but at 8pm I just cannot be ar$ed. 😄 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RMweb Gold StuAllen Posted January 17 RMweb Gold Share Posted January 17 1 hour ago, woodenhead said: We have a Sony Android TV with a Sony Amplifier and sometimes the Amp just does not connect correctly leaving us without sound until it's been rebooted. Bit annoying as I have to go and find the Amp remote to do it or walk over to the TV, it's like 5 steps but at 8pm I just cannot be ar$ed. 😄 This is exactly my problem - tempted to get a smart plug just so I can ask Alexa to turn it off and on again Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RMweb Gold beast66606 Posted January 17 RMweb Gold Share Posted January 17 1 hour ago, woodenhead said: it's like 5 steps but at 8pm I just cannot be ar$ed. 😄 That's what my wife is for .. Fortunately she doesn't read RMWeb 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted January 17 Share Posted January 17 1 minute ago, beast66606 said: Fortunately she doesn't read RMWeb Because she's too busy turning the telly on and off for you! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RMweb Premium melmerby Posted January 17 RMweb Premium Share Posted January 17 Note that all these annoying smart TV apps are Linux based, even Android is based on Linux, so plenty of reasons to steer clear of Linux PCs😁 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
whart57 Posted January 18 Share Posted January 18 The difference is that while both Microsoft and Linux expect users to do the testing of new versions only Microsoft expects them to pay for the privilege. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael Hodgson Posted January 18 Share Posted January 18 (edited) On 17/01/2024 at 01:15, BachelorBoy said: A sewage works in South Korea stopped operations on 1 Jan. No sh1t ! Edited January 18 by Michael Hodgson 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RMweb Gold beast66606 Posted January 18 RMweb Gold Share Posted January 18 7 hours ago, whart57 said: The difference is that while both Microsoft and Linux expect users to do the testing of new versions only Microsoft expects them to pay for the privilege. I haven't paid for Windows for years - W10 and W11 were / are both available free if you're an existing owner of a license. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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