Re: I had heard that the Soviets used plywood...
Yes, that can be a knotty problem.
5089 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Aug 2009
Lol, probably hardware failure. Trying to deal with error codes from hardware is never fun because hardware developers never have understood software and they can't be arsed to give us enough information. This looks to me like a hardware error failing to be surfaced in a useful manner.
I've been there and thankfully rarely get involved these days.
I was developing data recovery software and was using SPTI to talk to the storage device. The first thing that gives pause is that it's accessed through IOCTL which I think all programmers would agree is never going to be a pleasant experience. But of course on the other end of that there is SCSI which is no great friend of programmers either.
So you can imagine my irritation when attempting to issue some SCSI command or other only to be greeted with error code 0x80070057 'The parameter is incorrect'. Thanks guys. Very helpful. One of the two dozen parameters I've sent to the device has been rejected. Maybe by the OS. Maybe by the device driver. Maybe by the device itself.
Thanks a *censored* million.
Ah yes, The Illusion of Control. Either as you say 'better suicide than execution' but could also be 'I can't control the virus but I can control the vaccination'.
On a related note I think managers often suffer from this illusion. 'I can't control our sales but I can force my staff to come into the office'. From that article:
Wyatt Mann hypothesized a basic competence motive that people satisfy by exerting control.
And:
Self-regulation theory offers another explanation. To the extent that people are driven by internal goals concerned with the exercise of control over their environment, they will seek to reassert control in conditions of chaos, uncertainty or stress. One way of coping with a lack of real control is to falsely attribute oneself control of the situation
Lol. No I think what I'm talking about is Arithmetic Coding.
"Arithmetic coding differs from other forms of entropy encoding, such as Huffman coding, in that rather than separating the input into component symbols and replacing each with a code, arithmetic coding encodes the entire message into a single number, an arbitrary-precision fraction q, where 0.0 ≤ q < 1.0."
If you can understand all that you clearly have better mathematic skills than me :)
I've dabbled with compression over the years and for the most part it's all quite simple. LZW is a bit mind bending in the way it regenerates the dictionary as it decompresses though and I vaguely recall there's one that uses floating point numbers in a really odd way.
My favourite has always been Huffman because that's the first I ever played with although I also have a soft spot for NTFS compression both the way it handles the bit stream (speed over efficiency) and the way it encodes the cluster allocation.
Yes, it is boring
Not if you're paying attention. I like to drive efficiently and for the most part that means minimising my use of the brakes. To do that requires good acceleration sense and an awareness of what's going on around me so that I can predict the actions of others.
I find driving to be interesting. It's like a never ending soap opera. I sometimes go out for a drive because I'm bored and want something to do.
There are lots of accidents on UK roundabouts, caused by folks not adhering to the 'give way to the right' rule due to impatience or belief they're better drivers than they are
Of course, but you appear to be guilty of the classic human fallacy known as a false dilemma. The original poster wrote that roundabouts are a lot safer (which they are) but you appear to have conflated 'a lot safer' with 'nothing ever goes wrong' which is the fallacy at play.
No physical intersection design (even drop down barriers) will prevent accidents caused by stupidity. To prevent such accidents..
Just because roundabouts don't completely prevent incidents(*) doesn't mean that they aren't worthy of praise for what they do achieve.
(*)I dislike using 'accident' to describe problems on the road. 'Accident' implies something that just happens whereas most 'accidents' are the result of specific human decisions. There is nothing 'accidental' about most road crashes.
Yes my problem with panspermia is that it seems to be a violation of Occam's Razor. We know that life exists on Earth but claiming that it came from space means we have to make an assumption about life that is without evidence. Not only that but the idea of life 'floating around in space' actually goes against what we know about life.
It now appears clear that there are organic molecules all over the universe and I can accept that they are sometimes delivered to locations that are conducive to life forming.
But without knowing how you get from 'some organic molecules' to 'it lives!' it's impossible to guess how often life arises. From Earth we can tell that life isn't as delicate as might be thought. It appears to be everywhere including places that must once have been sterile. So I'm inclined to think that life will arise anywhere and everywhere it can.
How often it gets as far as intelligent life is anyone's guess. I sometimes think it's yet to achieve that on Earth.
But this is fundamentally how humans advance. Almost everything is just an older idea better wrapped or used differently. If we had to reinvent everything every single time we'd never get anywhere.
Worth looking at this documentary series.
True 'blue-sky' inventions are uncommon.
As computer systems get more and more complex we have to rely more and more on pre-existing solutions. It is not reasonable for me to have to re-invent a trace/logging system every time I start a new project. Whether it's truly new or I'm just joining an established team there is far too much value in me being able to say 'Oh yes, I know that package'. The cost of me having to learn a proprietary library or help develop it is unreasonable for most projects.
The answer is not to shy away from utilising external code. The answer is to learn how to do so safely.
Me too. I liked the editing keys although they were easier to use on an old keyboard that had the ctrl on the middle row. But still I always claimed I was faster with WS keys because it kept your hands on the home row - no need to break off and reach for the arrow cluster.
I found Edlin to be very useful back when I was doing technical support because I could predict exactly what was on the user's screen. You could also pipe commands into it from another file so a primitive form of script control. There was also a time when Edlin was the only thing you could be sure to find on someone else' computer. Same deal with Notepad on Windows. It's crude but it's always there.
I liked Vi because back when I was using it you could never be sure if the terminal you'd been dropped in front of had the correct mappings configured. Half the time you could forget anything 'clever' like arrow keys. Vi supported almost every terminal out of the box and even if it couldn't give you the full screen experience it would drop back to Ex mode and I was happy with that as well.
Funny thing was a few years back (but a couple of decades since I'd stopped using Unix) I had to edit a config file on a system so I fired up Vi and my fingers/brain still remembered the editing keys.
The full map update takes an hour and a quarter for Toyota but if you only opt for the UK maps (available over the air for later versions) it's quicker. But it's a ridiculously tortuous process via their website and does nothing to encourage me to start paying from next year. Quite the opposite.
We can also edit our maps because they use Here maps but I've yet to see any major benefits to that.
Applying the latest update to my Toyota sat nav (currently free, but I doubt I'll pay for any more) reminds me just how shite some sites can be. First-off at the top of the page is a socking great image that conveys no information and takes up more space than my laptop screen (and I have a 17" screen). The entire process of getting your update is awful. At no point does it actually tell you how to download the update. You have to spot the download link on the order confirmation page. You also have to copy the ridiculously long license code while you're there. Both are actually available from your order history but neither is well messaged at time of purchase.
The best bit though is the invoice you get emailed to you. Even though I'm currently in the free subscription purchase I still get an invoice for £0 and £0 VAT.
Meh, if your only target is to retire at 55 the best thing you can do is not start a family. My programming career started in the very early 90s and the highest I've ever got is senior software engineer. I've mostly worked for small companies that have nothing to do with finance but I paid off my mortgage at age 45, could've retired any time after 50 and will probably do so at age 56 in 2023 having finally got fed up of the idiocy that pervades today's toolsets and frameworks.
LogMeIn said today it planned to "increase investment in the customer experience" for the new standalone business and said customers would see "planned enhancements on an accelerated timeline in 2022
Oh dear. My experience is just fine as it is, thanks. And does this mean we should expect more useless chuff and unwanted intrusions?
A logging system should take what it's given and store it somewhere. It has no need to interpret/evaluate that input and definitely no hint of a reason to execute it.
Yeah thinking about it if something needs to act on it then a separate utility should be parsing the output and doing so. Separation of concerns and all that.. Still a potential security hole but at less likely to be included by default and one can hope that concentrating the developer's mind on a smaller scope might help them realise the risk.
Yup. I've had occasion to load external code for things like plugins but I have always been leary of it (even going back 30 years) and have insisted on some form of validation when loading and as far as possible sandboxing when executing.
In the early years it was just because I didn't trust the buggers writing the DLLs (third parties) but as time has gone on my trust has done nothing but reduce. On the plus side now that I'm working with C# I do have a degree of implicit protection courtesy of assembly signing. But still - I sandbox where I can.
Should have been higher. Much higher. I f'in hate all forms of marketing and this is taking the piss.
If I opt out of receiving marketing shite it's because I don't f'in want to receive marketing shite
I'm not entirely surprised though because I think other companies sometimes fire off an 'accidental' email just to test the waters. I'm always very, very careful to click/unclick the appropriate checkbox when signing up yet still get sporadic crap.
It's true that most gas central heating won't work without electricity, but you can at least light a gas hob to make hot drinks/food. Electric only? Screwed.
This is why houses that have gas central heating should also have a gas fire. I paid a rather eye wateringly large amount to have my old balanced flue gas fire replaced (£1,400 if I remember(*)) but as long as there is gas flowing to my property I have a source of heat. Although it's in the living room the heat flows surprisingly well throughout the house. It does have electric ignition but it uses 2 AA batteries so I'm not dependant on the mains supply.
(*)That did include a new surround, new mantlepiece and flue relocation. The new fire is sunk into the wall.
Yeah the makeover to the Paint UI annoys me. I keep struggling to find the resize button. One complaint I used to hear back when I used OS/2 was 'it looks old fashioned.' and 'why are they still leaving that there?'.
The answer to both questions was apparently 'because that's what our users are used to'.
Whether that's a good approach or a bad one I was never sure :)
Dark mode messes with my eyes. I had a similar problem with ClearType when it first appeared (it used to make me nauseous) although either my eyes adapted or the technology improved. I've no idea if I could adapt to Dark Mode but I don't particularly want to try. It's a different symptom to CT. With DM my eyes temporarily lose their ability to change focus which is very annoying and potentially dangerous.
I'm surprised they've waited this long. And don't call it AI. It's just statistical evaluation of waveforms. Surprisingly accurate and more than enough to scan for trigger words that result in notifying a human for evaluation. Frankly if prisons aren't doing this already I'd call it dereliction of duty.
I think I mis-phrased that. I'm only peripherally aware of our installer but I know that we build both an .EXE and an MSI because some sites need one, other sites need the other. I can see that large sites will want an MSI because it makes it easier to roll it out but I confess that I don't know why we continue supplying EXEs. It be related to our update process. I vaguely recall that an MSI is incompatible with our update process for some reason.
There are some other thoughts here. This comment seems interesting:
"An msi could check for required software, it would just be a bit more complicated to code. Depending on what tools were used to make the installer, the Setup.exe can be generated automatically by some of MS's development tools, making life easier for the coder."
Also this:
"A single MSI file can only have one single locale for the install wizard (details).
This can be a reason for distributing an app as .exe, which is more flexible.
So, if the language of the install wizard is important, you might have better luck with the .exe"
We use the Wix toolset. I wouldn't say it was difficult per se just somewhat unpleasant due to its use of XML. The real headache isn't the toolset so much as having to maintain multiple configurations to generate different installers or implement alternative logic paths for the installer.
It may be the nature of our market which is the NHS but we have sites where individuals can install their own software. Sites where a nominated person installs. Sites where installation can be via our Web front end and sites where a multi-site supporting IT department (or NHS Digital itself) impose various restrictions on us.
And once you've got it installed you have to consider how you're going to push updates. Or pull them. Or send the IT department a package for them to roll out.
It's a minor but ongoing nuisance for our development team and impacts sales and support departments as well.
Windows installers do generally work well and yes the signing system is pretty secure. The problems are really on the developer side.
* Where to install to: Program Files\, Program Data\, AppData\ ? All have good and bad points.
* To MSI or not to MSI. Great for Sysadmins but impose restrictions on what an installer can do that can be a nuisance for the developer.
We have yet find a standard way to install our software. It seems like almost every IT department we encounter needs it to be done differently.
I don't get ill in the way I am supposed to. I get hay fever in the winter. Only in the winter.
I get 'hayfever' in Autumn and Spring. Although I remember 2014 when it lasted from October to March with only a brief respite around New Year's when there was a cold snap
It's fungi and trees that cause the problem. And you do feel a bit of a fool going into a chemist's to get hayfever medication in November.
One of the few sites that gives fungus and tree information.
'Penicillium, Aspergillus and Basidiospores (from mushrooms/toadstools) will continue to be airborne during dry weather at a generally moderate risk. Visit our fungal spore webpage for more info.'
Which is why I'm currently back on the Certirizine :/
If you are fluent in WPF you can develop a form as quickly as WinForms and if you follow MVVM practice (which you can do in WinForms but you have to be more disciplined) it will be more maintainable. Complex forms are a lot easier to code in WPF because inter-dependant controls are generally a non-issue.
In both cases I'd recommend DevExpress to smooth things along. Well..mostly. Some of their stuff can be a bit weird at times but familiarity solves most problems and their technical support is excellent.
The trick is not to use the visual designer because that tends to be a slow and iterative process. It's quick for simple forms but not for anything complicated. WinForms without the designer is ugly and difficult. WPF without the designer is only slightly ugly and is fairly easy to read and understand.
Oh not all C++ developers saddled themselves with MFC. Some of us found something better long before .NET and Winforms. And moving from the VCL to WinForms was a trivial step, not hugely surprising given who was behind them both ;)
In fact even before they gave us RAD Borland's OWL was a better framework than MFC. It was more consistent and coherent.