Posts by david 12

Re: "[Microsoft felt] the 32-bit version a safer choice for most users"

You would think that, what with COM being specifically designed as a cross-platform inter-processor network protocol, you could arrange to communicate between 32 bit and 64 bit processes. And you can. But only if you create a 64 bit object to do so.

The problem is that (with a few exceptions) MS had no interest in exposing even their own 32 bit objects as 64 bit objects.

This means that any VBA project which used external objects -- one of the prime use cases for VBA -- is automatically broken when run as a 64 bit process.

Do the right thing

For the rest of is, it was often the case that IT couldn't or wouldn't tell us what was banned. Our salesman was trying to communicate with an acquaintance as a client, and d'd if they could work out why his email had been deleted. By cunning testing of small parts of the message, they worked out that "a large international cigarette company" had decided to block and discard any email containing the magic phrase:

Just do the right thing

Re: Satellite Latency

". I have to wonder if some bright spark decided that San Jose to Corvallis was best relayed via Myanmar."

Least Cost Routing is done automatically -- in the short term, it doesn't require human intervention at all. The only 'bright sparks' involved are those approving the cost of the telecom contract on the buyers side, and those approving the cost of the telecom contracts on the providers side.

Re: SYSTEM

The 'print spooler' is the system that manages print jobs for multiple users on multiple computers. It needs to have some kind of super-user permission to do that.

If it was a new service, it would probably have some kind of special default user, but back in the day all the critical parts of server infrastructure were "SYSTEM".

High-end network printers have their own computer, OS, and spooler services: the Windows Print Spooler as was common at the turn of the century, implemented all that stuff on a Windows Server, and a cut-down version was implemented on workstations for printer-sharing.

Re: The Beast of Bolsover

>Hansard does not record Mr Skinner using the work "crooks" at all,

At the option of the house, Hansard does not record things that 'never happened' (were withdrawn with exceptional circumstances). So there is a small open possibility.

More commonly, heckling is not reported unless the the member with the floor responds. So Mr Skinner may have used the word 'crooks' many times, and simply not been reported.

Re: '67 ?

The big step that opened up computers to a vast array of people who began to write software that now powers just about everything we equate with the modern world was Dartmouth BASIC. At the time there was a split between the SF idea of computers as intelligent thinking machines, and the real world idea of computers that they were big calculators, tabulators, or accounting machines. The world of computing laughed at Kemény for wanting to put computers into the hands of humanities and social science undergraduates: they laughed at Kurtz for thinking it was possible.

The BASIC compiler that Dartmouth built was complex, fragile and engineered by a brilliant programmer. In the 80's, any undergraduate with an interest could write a BASIC interpreter. The difference was "Principles of Compiler Design".

EST 7:09PM

Re: Serial port-Yay!

The standard internal bus is PCI. There will be a PCI - RS232 bridge, not PCI - USB - RS232 bridges.

Re: Typo fixed

Lynch is alleged by the US government to have CLAIMED TO HAVE followed standard American business practices. Which is part of what made his behavior illegal in the USA. The American courts have ACCEPTED THAT Lynch represented that his statements were following American standard business practice, and that HP accepted that representation.

I'm not barracking for either side: I don't know if it was reasonable for HP to expect a British firm to respect American law, or if the American courts got it right, or what British courts will make of the same allegations.

If the Americans were alleging that Lynch had /actually/ followed standard American business practice, he wouldn't be in court.

10:51AM AEDT

Re: All has changed

> just forward the searches to Google, then strip out all the adverts in the results and replace them with THEIR own adverts. <

This is what HTTPS is designed to prevent.

Oddly enough, HTTPS was backed and promoted by Google, and most of the worlds web browsers are now based on technology developed and funded by Google.

7:14 AM AEDT

Re: So which search engine did you use? an imaginary one?

News flash:

GOOGLE RESULTS ARE PERSONALIZED.

The results you get back depend on your history, location, and the google secret sauce.

9:40AM AEDT

A landfill site full of rotting garbage is a low-oxygen environment. Soft Iron doesn't rust in landfill. Neither does Copper/Chrome/Stainless Steel.

And since I've found it impossible to adequately compress garbage or recycling by any means, and, as I've read, you can walk away after getting compressed in a garbage compactor truck that you've been tipped into (while sheltering in a skip), I'm not inclined to think that a disk drive is likely to be damaged by that method either.

#12:25 15 Jan 2021# UTC

Re: Enigma code broken in the 1930s, not 1942

Yes, an Enigma code was broken in the 30's. It wasn't the machine, process, or code used in the 40's, but it was the starting point for the later work.

Re: Sorry but ...

20 odd years ago, you would have known that, if you really wanted it, you already had this functionality. It was very effectively hidden in office 95 and 97, but the ability to write functions using the native function language of Excel, as it existed in 4 and earlier, was still there.

Re: Sin tax

The only language I've used without syntactic white space was FORTRAN, in which GOTO100 and GO TO 100 were the same statement, X=SUM SX was the same as X=SUMSX, and accidentally hitting the . key instead of the comma key gave you a legal statement meaning DO50I = 10.1 instead of DO 50 I = 10, 100

I'm not aware of any person who's actually /used/ a language without syntactic white space who wants to go back.

Re: Breaking a lot: we can't do that

""People… have code they've committed and if you take anything out or change what it means, you're breaking a lot: we can't do that," "

Which it's been right from the start, when they wanted people to move seamlessly from c and c++ to c#.

And which is why VB.Net was such a fail. Because it was designed to be like c/c++/java, which largely changed what it meant.

Re: How on earth wasnt this toe rag jailed?

Stopped in 2016, caught in 2018 (on a purchase from 2015), sentenced in 2020.

Might have been different if he hadn't demonstrated changed behavior 2 years before he was caught and 4 years before he was sentenced.

Re: Using a computer where pen and paper would have sufficed!

a shared user database that doesn't go through a server.

It does go through a server -- that's the problem. There is a network database service provided by matching "workstation" and "server" services which auto-start on most Windows machines, and a database protocol called "SMB" which provides record locking and retrieval. Problems are that (1) SMB on IP is notoriously high latency, buggy, and made worse by authentication and encryption, (2) the native Windows database API dates back to DOS 3.x and was never upgraded to provide record-level security or authentication (WinFS was canceled) and (3) If it worked properly, why would people pay for SQL Server?

The DOS 3.x database API is so limited that not even Access can use it without another layer on top, and even then is fragile due to the lack of record-level ACLs. While the 'server' service and SMB/IP protocol is so heavy weight that the number of recommended users has declined from 32.. to 16 ... to 8 ... to 4 ... to 1.

Meanwhile, the free version of unix that was provided to universities did not include a native OS database system (just one of the reasons why mainframe programmers thought it was 'not a real operating system'), and the whole idea of a native OS database system ('computer says "no") was lost to a new generation, who are convinced that Access is a 'flat file' database because they have no idea what that means.

Re: $750

This is old tax forms, so the line numbers don't match the current forms.

But 'total credits' includes form 3800, which includes business tax paid.

So the magic of $750 was not that it was total tax. The magic was that every year, after deducting expenses and tax paid, it came to /exactly/ $750. Which suggests that the tax returns were a form of fiction, written to get a particular result.

But that's true of all complex tax returns in the USA. The tax system is such a mess that even the IRS doesn't understand it, and their tax revues are a form of fiction, written to get a particular result.

I'm sorry. I give this one to Trump.

Re: Looks good to me

>It’s more likely to go bang than a pool of fuel.<

It doesn't though.

Propane is known to be dangerous, and sometimes goes 'bang', but hydrogen doesn't. Even the Hindenberg didn't go 'bang'.

Re: Opposite wealth

This is just the engineering development budget. Actually building missiles is a separate allocation.

also... Boeing could bid for a control program sub-contract :) Recently demonstrated incompetence may damage their chances in that area too.

Re: I'll See Your 33xx and Lower You

It was the 2110 that made the Nokia ringtone ubiquitous; although the number sold was much smaller, the total market at the time was tiny, and the sound of the Nokia ringtone was the sound of a mobile phone.

Re: The revenge of OS/2?

MS killed OS/2 because it was owned by IBM and written in Assembler.

Re: Ok, I have to ask...

SMB was always a dog when running on TCP. That's the internal dog food environment.

Re: Every time I think people can't get any crazier,

>What, people in the 19th century pushed newspapers into your face every 10 seconds?<

Well they certainly did in the 20th Century. 3 kids on every corner, 4 corners on every intersection, leading down to the main railway station, where more waited. And, as I think about it, I can still hear the voices, crying the name of the evening paper.

Re: User Error

Nobody wants this feature of Excel.

Lots of people like Excel, and lots of people use Excel, but nobody likes this feature of Excel. There are a large number of people who haven't been bitten by this feature of Excel recently, who don't care today, and there are people who have been bitten, who do care, and there are people who don't use Excel, but there are no Excel users who want this feature of Excel.

Re: Alternative fakery

>We know they never went to the moon anyway<

As shown in the 2002 French documentary "Dark Side of the Moon" (William Karel)

It is very good if you are the kind of person who likes watching history documentaries or are interested in the space program.

And it demonstrates that you don't need Deep Fakes to do deep fakes. Watch the film before reading the Wikipedia article :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Side_of_the_Moon_(2002_film)

Re: I see this BS because of minimal trust for Microsoft domains

>The correct way to detect no connections, should be continuous failure to connect to any internet address, during a set time period, a good one can be the time server, if set to an internet address. <

This is the way Win10 detects internet connection failure, and up until now has been the reason for this bug. You get a routing failure, and Windows labels that as an Internet connection failure, and that affects routing....

It's been a problem with Win10 for some time, -- IPV4 standards/RFCs never really caught up with multi-homed systems and multi-homed systems are subject to corner-case routing failures. It should be fixed by total system conversion to IPV6 protocols (but of course will probably be broken by the transition).

And no, "IPV6" doesn't just mean IPV4 with more bits.

Re: There is no breach

The fee isn't outrageous for a credit account, (although they look to be making money on their business accounts) and Revolut has an Australian presence. I'll look further.

Re: Efficacy of warning messages

Chkdsk /does/ do that. It recovers chains of clusters. If all your chains are only one cluster long, either all your files were one cluster long, or your FAT has been overwritten.

Not RABV (rabies.lyssavirus). Australian bat lyssavirus (ABLV). Fruit bats, wombats ....

Re: But you can recover deleted Items ON AN EXCHANGE...

If that mailbox was on an exchange you have the option to recover deleted items

If only that were true. On exchange you actually have several options for recovering deleted items, and even experienced exchange administrators are unlikely to know all of them. And when you go to the "the deleted items store" on exchange, to recover the deleted item, you do not find it there at all. Although you do eventually find it in one of the other undocumented places where exchange hides deleted items.

Re: Inconveniently placed keys

It was an IBM keyboard. And although Personal Computer World reviewed the IBM PC as --meh--, they were unequivocal about the keyboard: not just excellent, not just best: genre re-defining.

Re: re: Not a defence, it's not difficult to make things work cross browser.

Personally, when I use an unsupported browser, I don't care what the site looks like. If I render tables, side panels and transparencies wrong, I know the blame is on me. On the other hand, if they just refuse to provide a page at all, that's a problem, and it sucks.

jQuery started out offering transparent support for multiple browsers, then, as you no doubt know, later choose to interpret 'does not support' as 'will deliberately break support for'. So that when using an older browser you would get a blank screen on sites using current versions of jQuery.

jQuery pioneered "break site for unsupported browsers".

Re: I'm not so sure that options are the answer to why Office is so popular

Office is popular because Microsoft gave it away to schools

Not like Open Office? That schools would have had to pay for? Or perhaps you are think of 1990, when every school had a MSDOS computer lab that students could use? Obviously I'm missing something, because this doesn't seem to have any historical basis.

What I was thinking, but I wouldn't have put it like that. Life and Career collapse, he self-medicates with addictive self-destructive behaviour: drugs, alcohol, gambling, or, in this case, computer gaming. For that at least I've got some empathy and he's got my sympathy.

Re: "he just exploited them better"

Soviet communism was a menace, but he tried to fight it like Beria and Stalin would have By killing people? By sending them to concentration camps in Siberia?. Please moderate your hysteria.