Posts by david 12

Yes, the research document specifically mentions Foxit as well as Acrobat.

so, PDFs, not just one application.

Also, although they only fussed Word documents, they used a VBA binding. Somebody is going to try their tool on Excel.

Yes, it's obvious that the are trying to recreate a phone interface as your desktop gui.

It became popular after Apple changed the osX vertical scroll bar direction to match that on the iPhone. Which you could sort of understand, because the iPhone and iPad were more popular than their desktop offering.

And understanding the design heritage, you can understand that it's a stupid idea, and it sucks.

Re: Question...

I think they used to have shutters on homes in the UK, but not so much as in the USA. So when you close up, empty out and lock down the building, one of the last things you do is close the shutters. It blocks the light, but it protects the windows and interior.

Re: I wonder how many people still remember how to use it?

The early MSDOS (and PCDOS) manuals were very good, "well-organised, covered so much stuff in a very readable manner and were full of examples and as much technical information as one could imagine."

As were many other op systems at the time. Of course, DOS (and many of the other op systems) were really simple, with nothing more complex in the MS DOS 2.x manuals than how to write a device driver using edlin and debug.

unix really was the standout exception, where (in spite of the man pages), the standard way of learning the OS was to learn at the feet of a guru.

Re: Odd

It was a jury trial, with damages set by the jury.

Civil jury trials always can have odd results, and damages are always large, compared to judge-only trials, in any jurisdiction, not just Virginia, not just the USA.

It is one of the reasons so many large American companies are registered in Delaware (more companies than residents). Delaware doesn't have civil jury trials.

Re: I would get it fired for inventing Powershell

actually do things in Windows now.

Using the same COM objects that were used by vbscript to do the same administrative tasks.

It's right there in the name: "shell".

Re: If you can turn almost anything into a speaker, then I have bad news for you...

In a moment of blankness, I asked my lecturer why I was getting voltage readings when I dropped the speaker. He gave me a look of disgust, and said "it's a transducer".

IE mode in Edge is an 'emulator' only in the sense that the linux kernel loaded by Win10 WSL is an 'emulator'.

The IE GUI is gone from Windows, but the guts is still there, and is loaded by Edge (or any other application), to do IE rendering.

Re: Semantically similar

Indeed. That is the whole point of the article, and of the research it refers to.

Re: Wait, what ?

This is a log system. Like LogJS. MS does not "create a log file that nobody knows about". Applications may use it to create logs. Like LogJS....

Somewhere around 50 years ago I read with interest a Bulletin Board thread discussing if computers should be turned of (saves thermal hours) or left on (saves start up stress). These threads used to run for weeks because users would only login perhaps once per week.

The thread was effectively terminated by two guys, who wrote, respectively,

1) I used to leave my computer on, then one day while I was working, the side of the monitor turned brown, smoked, and flamed. Now I always turn the computer off when I leave the room.

2) I used to leave my computer on, then one day while I was working, a gout of flame erupted from the power supply at the back and ignited my curtains. Now I always turn the computer off when I leave the room.

And ten years after that, I worked for a fire-alarm company, who reported that the most common cause of office fires was computers.

They use non-flammable plastic now, and computers sleep when not in use, but back in the day....

Re: Missing memory safety

It's not a new language to replace c.

It's a fork of c, (with strings instead of character arrays, array slicing, and tagged union return types.)

Once you acknowledge their idea as a fork of c, rather than a new language, it all falls into place.

Re: unbelievable that ANYONE thought that W11 was remotely needed for a till!

"The ONLY think absolutely needing Windows was Workstations ...."

Point of Sale terminals are workstations.

You could have written "last 15 years" and been arguably correct. But 20 years? 2002?

Re: IPv8 anyone?

TCP latency is chiefly a layer 3 issue.

At layer 2, IP is the wrong protocol for high-loss and low-bandwidth channels, which unavoidably creates level-3 latency, even if TCP wasn't the wrong protocol.

Worker: "There is a problem here"

Management: "Don't talk to me until you have a solution:

Worker: "I've got a solution to this problem"

Management: "Don't waste company time working out a solution until you have approval from me"

Worker: "It would be good if something were different"

Management: "I like things exactly like they are, and I'm here until retirement."

Re: This call may be recorded for training purposes...

It's much messier in AUS, but built-in call recording is clearly illegal.

The messy bit is that there is a whole bunch of hidden carve-outs that aren't mentioned in the telecommunications law.

For example, if you phone a police station, you are recorded. No message, not exemption shown in the telecommunications act, but the recording will be played in court.

Which is another messy carve out: in addition to the telecommunications act restriction on connected recording devices, there are a bunch of 'privacy' restrictions which are different in every state. The 'privacy' restrictions mean that you have to treat the data like private data, authorized and protected and not shared. Except when you got to court. Courts consider themselves above stuff like privacy laws, so that unauthorized recording which would be illegal in every other context, may be offered as evidence in court.

"It's insecure" is a myth perpetuated by the ignorant. It's prolix, and after being moved to tcp/ip, and having had encryption and authenticated added, it has high latency, which is an issue because it's prolix. Because it's prolix, and because the modern implementation has such high latency, it's been replaced by SMB2, which is less prolix, and has lower latency.

That means that the SMB1 servers and clients are falling out of support. The o/s version on my SMB1 NAS has been out of support many years: even on my ancient hardware, it's moved from 3.x to 5.x.

"Server falling out of support" is insecure, not "SMB1" is insecure.

And, as demonstrated here, most of the those SMB1 servers are appliances, and are the reason why MS has been slow to discontinue SMB1.

Re: why NFS ?

MS has native Network File System drivers, and I've had them installed since Win2K. I haven't used them for anything other than testing, since NFS is light-weight feature-poor Network system, but the feature has always been there for server systems, and sometimes for pro or home systems.

I think that NFS for Windows turned up even earlier, but I personally never ran earlier versions of NT, and I think it was originally developed by a third party.

Re: I wonder if it would be simpler

It's logistics. The whole point is to build without having any trades or special materials. This isn't about building a better building, or even a cheaper building: it's about building with generic material and generic labour, so that you don't have to store or transport particular items. Just like the whole of NATO uses one rifle bullet, so you never have the wrong bullet.

Re: The Most Down Voted Post Ever

The thing I hate most about Edge, is Google asking me every f-g time if I wouldn't rather use Chrome.

Re: "Once upon a time, all UIs were flat"

The enormously successful Windows 95, with the distinct window frames, was the result of usability testing. Which was vindicated by it's enormous success and popularity.

Steve Jobs famously didn't like the Win 95 UI, but he was hardly independent -- and even if he had been independent, examination of the Apple Mac OS UI indicates that, for him, it was more important to make the Mac screen 'look good', than it was to make the Mac screen 'work well'.

The Mac was justifiably popular for putting a good representation of the Page up on the Screen. People who had the job of publishing Pages thought that was important. Win95 sacrificed page publishing for clarity: even the fonts were designed to be pixel aligned /on the screen/ for clarity, sacrificing print design.

I was not a fan of Win95. There was a certain amount of general flakyness, demonstrated by the difficulty dong a first installation on a random generic PC. There was a reason for the Mac meme "it just works". But the UI was not one of the problems. The UI was provably superior to X-Windows and to the Mac, justifying the money spent on usability testing.

I'm only old, not blind, and I'd sit here clicking up votes for the next 20 minutes if they allowed that.

The change from bordered icons to a new style of borderless or focus on hover icons made the packages unusable overnight.

Re: Water companies in England

Fortunately, our eyes are sensitive to the energy emitted from the sun which reaches the surface of our planet: this enables us to use reflected light to see objects around us.

Naturally, solar panels use the same energy emitted from the sun. If you cover your windows with something that absorbs solar radiation at the same frequencies used by our eyes, where all the power is, then you don't have windows. You've just got solar panels.

Unfortunately, half of the solar radiation that reaches a building comes directly from the sun. If you cover the sides of building with solar panels, only the side that faces the sun will receive that solar radiation, and then only to the extent that the panels are broad-side on to the sun. When the sun is high in the sky, it's shining along the length of vertical panels, and they don't actually get much if any sun at all. At morning or night side panels might get some sunlight, if they face in the correct direction, if the sun isn't blocked by hills or other buildings, on a side which faces the sun, although not as much, since the sun has to shine edge-wise through the atmosphere. (We can see in low light conditions, but that's only due to the extraordinary sensitivity or our eyes: solar panels need actual solar energy to produce power).

The other half of the available solar radiation comes from the sky, but that's spread out over the whole sky, again, panels can only get energy from the part of the sky they see, and only to the extend that they are broad-side to that part of the sky. Vertical panels aren't good at that either.

If covering the sides of buildings with solar panels was a good idea, people would already be doing so. They don't because, although it is an /obvious/ idea, it is not a /good/ idea.

Re: Give back some?

People whose idea of business and theft is that 'cost is the same as profit' are an explanation for why they don't notice fraud until 40M is gone.

Re: Does anyone care?

It was skedule in rural Victoria (Australia) when I was a kid, and the only person who said shedule in my high school was a teacher from NSW. That and ABC radio, which in the day was very BBC influenced (our capital city radio station was 3LO ...)

But at the time, society was dominated by people who used "American Pronunciation" and "American Spelling" as a guide to which British pronunciation and spelling to avoid, and that may have had an effect on which pronunciation of schedule came to dominate.

Re: Old equipment

Well that linux protocol converter won't be running a current version of Samba.

You can understand why: SMB1 is a complex protocol, and over TCPIP the latency is bad. The only reason MS continued support was to support old unix implementations (they got a mega --- load of criticism for "breaking" open source when they defaulted to more robust authentication protocols), and Samba has reached the same point.

Re: USA change its date format ...

But talk about 'noticing the rest of the world' !!!!

If Richard was not a London-Based London Journalist covering a foreign country, he probably would have noticed that the USA had it's daylight savings Y2K event several years ago, when, for the first time since introduction, the set-in-stone start and end date were shifted.

What they are looking at now is a Y2010 event. "Same as last time, only less important".

Re: Human factor

In any even slightly open system, he could have diagnosed 'not plugged in' himself.

Re: would this be...

Yes, the superior scripting language abandoned so that 'developers' could have 'Java' in the technology name instead of 'Basic'.

DAISY (A bicycle built for two) was one of the first piece of computer music ever generated, and was reported in scientific and technical journals at the time. As HAL's hardware was disconnected, it regressed both physically and mentally to a more primitive computer, doing more primitive tasks. 'Early computer development tasks'., not 'sales demonstration' tasks,

Dramatically, this was also a regression to a more 'child like' state, because 'Daisy' was, at the time of filming, a children's song.

Re: Ethernet turned out to become the network winner

>What changed was the move from coax<

His original had the separate cable interface device.

Metcalf was on record as saying that Ethernet had been invented, and invented, and invented, and that all of the inventors who invented subsequent versions were inventors who invented modern ethernet

Re: Still humans in the mix here not just machines

Of course there are vulnerabilities -- well known and repeatedly documented buffer overrun errors on all kinds of read-only files, including unix script files. The file recognition system was a well known security vulnerability of unix systems -- so well known that it's been mostly fixed. It's been, what, a decade or more since the last known exploit.

Re: If this moves to release

Enterprise installers, and home users, do have internet connections and MS accounts. People installing without internet connections are (1) Not enterprise, or (2) not advertising targets.

If this moves to release, expect MS to not care about the non-revenue-stream users they loose.