Posts by Nick Ryan 3756 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
Only if you left it on the floor...
But seriously... I'm used to using multiple different keyboards... and failing to type accurately on almost all of them other than my own. The offset doesn't look that bad and if your fingers are roughly aligned to the middle of the keys shouldn't be a problem.
I almost feel like the old arguments... Everybody laughing at the poor kid who's (PHB) dad bought something like an Oric because of they were given some branded golf balls. The Commodore and Spectrum owners laughing at the toff kidd who had a BBC Micro but when they were weren't doing that were having a go at each other...
I think that roughly sums up 1980s computing in the UK.
And the continuous validation of the tests, extending, validating, adding to them as necessary due to upstream, and local changes? This is the bit that's often missed, and combined with what is now considered normal, but appalling error handling - just throw an exception and don't care, things go awry very quickly on anything non-trivial. And by non-trivial I tend to include anything with user interactivitity beyond a "Hello World" popup with a close button - and I've seen developers make a mess of this one. Timing or resource or alternative route bugs are somewhat more difficult to automatically detect and codify in test libraries.
Often when I've stressed the requirement for a vector, or at worst a very high resolution pixelmap (bitmapped) image, what do I get instead? A .jpeg file either saved as a vector (they can include images) or expanded to a high resolution size and then saved back down.
For my next request, I don't want the master copy of a document, I'd like one that's been faxed twice, then a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy made from the resultant faxed document. Or alternaticely they could email me the file. Preferably not as the said multiple copied document scanned as an image into .pdf form of course...
Quite reasonable.
What's scary at times is that even pathological cretins like Farrage and Ree-Smogg may say something sensible and reasonable on occasion. Obviously it neither validates nor justifies the vile bile that they come out with normally but if one's stomach is up to it, it's worth listening just in case there is a valid point, or a point of view, to consider.
Except Trump, of course. Trump is purely about Trump and nothing else. :)
The direction of Delphi went immediately downhill the moment that some "genius" decided that the only direction was "enterprise". It was pointed out that this was certain failure within moments of it being announced at some conference or other that I attended - I'd like to say that it was me that raised me but I was beaten the this.
Somehow they utterly failed that the popularity and therefore viability of a development environment is massively based on its availability, particularly to student, hobbyist and other beginner developers. While there may be a very brief spike in exhorbitant license fees, users will move on to other platforms: and they did.
Other things that contributed to Delphi's failure were the strange desire to pretend to be cross platform using a very weirdly licensed and out of date kludge system that produced non-native applications on all platforms.
That's akin to compiling a Delphi application with package support. Frighteningly small application .exe sizes, with frighteningly large external package files (DLLs, in practice). .NET applications are largely the same.
The curse of .NET applications is not always the individual installations of various versions of the .NET support files (effectively DLLs) but how many sets of these there often wind up being installed on any one given system and therefore the multiple copies of these that exist on a system. it's understandable given how Microsoft never implemented a central library management system in the OS but also important in some ways given system security.
In any case, when it comes to loading up external libraries, and APIs, where does one draw the line as to what is considered the application size and not? In some abstract manner, the classic hello world in Windows 10 is roughly 4GB because it requires Windows 10 to be installed...
There are two key performance issues with some of the code: Variants and automatic memory managment. Combine variants with differing string types (unicode and so on) and the executable efficiency slips into the glacial measures of processing cycles. Automatic memory management involves the insertion of arbitary clean up methods within code loops which could either do nothing or process tens of thousands of CPU cycles, the developer really has no control over this. In a strictly event based GUI application this usually isn't too much of an issue but can be where there are tight looks and efficiency and responsiveness is required. There's a reason that almost no games are written entirely in C# but to it's credit it can integrate with non-managed acceptably well these days.
Oh hell yes, the paradox database system was a total and utter curse in every way. I remember encountering early projects and it was one of the first things to be taken out of an application and terminated with extreme prejudice. I don't remember there being a single advantage to using it but countless disadvantages. Almost nothing needed it, there really didn't need to be another inefficient and unwieldy competitor to ODBC and even from v1 of the VCL it was possible to put in direct, useful and efficient connectors to databases - although considerably easier to do so with later versions.
Paradox? [shudders] brrrrr
Unfortunately it wasn't just a case of "The amount of today’s ‘techs’ or ‘sysadmins’ that have no idea how to properly configure a SCSI chain is laughable!" - it was the damn hardware developers that seems to posess a terminal lack of understanding when it came to SCSI. Usually, but not exclusively, limited to PC targetted components rather than those that were intended for use in a variety of platforms.
All this reminiscing is bringing back a lot of repressed memories. You bastards.
Next we'll start hankering after the glory days of needing a sheet of graph paper to work out how to combine various bits of PC hardware with their individual IRQ options into one workable configuration. I probably still have a bag of jumpers from this time. Prior to the similar juggle of loading DOS drivers such that there is enough base memory left, and suitable EMS or XMS facilities for the PC to be able do anything remotely useful after starting up.
I was at the Tring Natural History Museum the other week (shameless, unrelated plug: it's great, go visit) and there was some exhibit with a touch screen built into a desk to provide more information for the curious. No matter how curious I was, it never worked for me. My daughter, on the other hand, it worked just fine for and she was swiping through the virtual map and articles merrily.
Possible, but the use of the caps-lock key to type a single character rather predated soft/virtual keyboards.
I probably still have a slight fear of typing on a mechanical typewriter both through fingers getting stuck between the keys and the hammers (?) getting jammed together when i typed too fast.
I once worked in the pub and club industry. Before the smoking ban the foul state of the systems that we deployed and supported was something to be seen (and promptly purged from mind if sensible). These systems sucked in dust, sweat and tobacco smoke and combined them into a foul, sticky hairy mess. The cases also usually wound up brown rather than the 'orrible cream colour they started (later we speficied racks to be deployed with proper filters, these had to be cleaned weekly). The fans and the motherboards of the systems were usually coated in a sticky, hairy tobacco smelling mess that somehow most systems survived for a surprisingly long amount of time. It generally took overheating, either directly of components or through fan failure, to finally kill them. The PSU was usually more susceptible to failure through shorting than the motherboards.
Almost equal annoyance is those that don't know how to use the cursor keys to go back and correct a mistake, therefore rather than cursor back a word or three and change the typo, they back space all the intervening characters, fix the typo, and then type the deleted characters back in again.
Seeing it was only a couple of years ago that I loudly slapped down a developer who proposed to put in place a hard coded super-admin password in the software they were developing... it's hard to tell an utter lack of competence from malicious coding. The best malicious coding could easily masquerade as lack of competence and how would we know?
One of the most disastrous ways to implement MS-Access "applications" was to have the "application" and the "database" in the same damn file. Separate the two and a whole lot of pain suddenly disappeared. It also made it rather more obvious that using MS-Access as a front end into a "real database" was considerably better than relying on file-sharing concurrent access which Microsoft intentionally borked on anything other than Microsoft file servers... damn that was painful getting down to the bottom of.
While arbitary price increases piss me off as much as the next person.. .it's a good point that you make about the memory requirements and it being a relatively niche target for price gouging.
On the other hand, with the steady move to more parallel processing within individual instances it's a relatively niche hit now however will be rather more so in the future.
How should these things be licensed? By each discrete processing core (the very dubious mess of hyper-threading aside) when things are moving towards more parallel execution. Which at least is a way to have MS Windows properly multi-task (old dig, largely fixed now). Or by discrete chips? It's an interesting conundrum
A few years ago I bought a Phillips bathroom light. Other than the bullshit about "natural coloured light" (ghastly cheap and yellow fourescent bulb that took two minutes to get to stabilise - replaced with a nice daylight light LED), an inexplicable custom headed bolt requiring the use of the specific allen key that came with it... it came with what was genuinely a 2m x 1m sheet of health and safety crap consisting of many inexplicable symbols with apparent explanations in multiple languages, most of which didn't make sense in any language. Most of the warnings didn't even apply to the fixture in question.
There were tools, which I cannot remember the name of now, that allowed one to remove, or at worst permanently disable, all the unwanted crud that came with Windows 9x. Doing so one had an OS that was actually rather fast and stable and as long as the drivers were of an acceptable quality (WHQL? tested, and you could also run the independent test tools for further validation).
The eventual crash based on elapsed time was usualy due to the integer size/wrapping of the boot tick timer. It didn't necessarily cause the OS to crash, but some applications tended to fail as a result of it and on occasion these included drivers. I remember having to write code to detect when close to the wrap-around time and to extend the counter programaticcaly to ensure that the counter (timer) based events were still triggered as expected.
Probably the same "anyone" who thinks that using JavaScript to (badly) re-create standard browser functionality in JavaScript is anything but a really stupid idea - HTML and CSS are there for a reason. Similarly the same "anyone" who thinks to vomit out yet another barely usable, incredibly low accsssibilty, zero SEO and buggy Single Page Application (SPA) is a good way to take advantage of modern browser functionality and the browser platform as a whole. It's not that the technology doesn't have a use, but pretending that the browser page is a modal client application demonstrates an utter lack of comprehension. JavaScript and so on should be used to enhance a web page, not to build a web page. See the historical train wrecks of single page Flash websites for how well this works when this is forgotten.
Oh dammit.. repressed memories time... Netware 6 (?) introduced an absolutely appalling GUI that was unstable as hell, slow as a superglued frozen slug and only had half the functions of the old text based UI. Which helpfully had some of the functions removed and shoved into the new wonder-GUI.
Sounds like the typical situation when the typical developer is let loose with security settings... because access to the world is not the default.
Of couse all applications absolutely require full adminstrator level access to the entire local system. And to the database. And to the domain too, just in case. This is much easier than a developer thinking and working out the absolute mimimum access rights that are necessary and assigning just that and nothing else particularly when security is something that can be cobbled into a system later if remembered. It's also very important when doing this that the super-administrator fallback support password is safely encoded using ROT26 for all applications. In the application itself.
In the past I took over, and rather fixed, two applications written in (Borland) Delphi where the developer, in a fit of ********** (insert range of expletives) used the binary dump of internal objects as the saved file format. Because nothing ever changes in a private data format, between dev software point releases, dev software full releases, let alone versions of the application with slightly different class structures.... ******** (I am remembering how painful this was).
Both applications wound up with XML data structures by the time I finished with them. With versioning of the structure used as the first thing in the file.
Oh hell, I'd forgotten about the accidental mangling of source code files due to this. Damn, that's one hell of a repressed memory, and for good reasons too. It didn't take me long to switch every download into binary mode, which was easier in some systems than others because in some it was a set operation and others it was a toggle operation... eeek... shudders...
In once stayed for four days in an accessible room in the Purple Palace chain (who's most salient point was that they were usually clean and in good condition compared to the other budget business chain).
After four days I had copious bruises on my legs from the low bed, back ache from using the low sink and a nervous twitch every time I touched a pull cord in case it was one of the emergency alarm chains... I tried tying them up out of the way but the cleaning staff put them back every time.
The problem is not that they are commies (they aren't, btw; they are a crony-capitalist one-party dictatorship), but that they are after our wealth and our jobs.
yeah, about that crony-capitalist one-party dictatorship... a certain nation famous for using hollywood to tell the world about what an amazing democracy it is is working towards this noble aim. As is the lap-dog political regime the other side of the pond which for some reason wants to emulate all the worst bits of everywhere else.
The personal website of a whack job unqualified loon does not count as evidence.
While I'll admit that climate change has been politicised way too much, and focus on some elements of are in place compared to others, total denial of the kind of thing that this website spouts is insane.
I get your point but it's not necessarily true that the metadata didn't give rise to suspicion.
Usually the orignal digital copy of invoices are saved into a suitable repository in an accounting system. If payments were made without such invoices existing then he would have been caught very quickly. It would only take a user to chance upon the invoice and be presented with "document created by HICHAM KABBAJ" and for this to raise suspicion about something being up. Metadata being metadata and entirely editable it is unlikely to be legally significant but it would be a component of the process and could easily initiate investigations.
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