* Posts by AndrueC

5081 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Aug 2009

Ofcom measured UK's 5G radiation and found that, no, it won't give you cancer

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Yo, Imma let you finish, but for the 6,000 people still using that app on a daily basis ... we have a question: why?

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Joke

Re: Oh Cod

The app sounds useless. I don't think it has any porpoise(*).

(*)Yes, I know they aren't fish.

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Joke

Re: re: Yo-Yo

Now you're just stringing it along.

Wake me up before you go Go: Devs say they'll learn Google-backed lang next. Plus: Perl pays best, Java still in demand

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Meh

Re: Continual Professional Development

It's a nice idea but with the ongoing world shortage of software developers and the 'need' for rapid development I don't think it will ever fly. And truth is it's probably not necessary. The careers you mention all carry serious health and legal implications if things go wrong. Lives can be lost or irrevocably damaged. Whilst the same is true for some software development most of us don't do anything that important or risky.

I've been developing software for nearly 40 years and throughout that time if I screwed up and my code was wrong it mostly just meant restarting the application and/or avoiding a particular feature or using it in a specific way. Annoying, yes, but no real harm done. For better or for worse most software only has to be 'adequate'.

Software development is also slightly different in that issues can be fixed quicker and for less cost than most disciplines. Some can be fixed on the fly and most can be fixed by a simple exit application, apply an update, restart the application cycle which might only mean ten minutes of downtime.

Would it be a different world if all software was developed to the same rigorous standards as medicine or law (ha ha) is practised to? For sure. Software would be developing at a far slower pace, probably to the accompaniment of hordes of lawyers. I'm not convinced it would be a better world.

I'd also argue that most software developers get paid quite well for their work simply because they have scarcity value and are in high demand. I've only felt underpaid once in my career that was in my first job so to be expected. At age 53 I've earned enough to be able to retire any day now when the need for more golf becomes unbearable. I'd say I've had a lucrative career.

AndrueC Silver badge
Happy

Also, self-taught programmers may be heartened to learn that 32 per cent of developers who work for companies of 49 people or less do not have a college degree.

I've been programming for 38 years now (started with a Sinclair Spectrum which is why it's 38 years). I don't have any programming qualifications and have done well for myself forging out a career I love that has left me - at age 53 - contemplating retirement at a time of my choosing.

I do have an OND in engineering but it's the 1970s version and didn't have programming on the curriculum.

Bada Bing, bada bork: Windows 10 is not happy, and Microsoft's search engine has something to do with it

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Thumb Up

Yeah I've got most things on the Taskbar but there's a few things - like Paint - that I don't use often enough to justify that privilege.

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Unhappy

Sadly, it's the only option unless you want to scroll through the start menu looking for something and unless you know where to look (eg; Visual Studio is under 'V' but Teams is under 'M'). I don't need it at home but at work there are so many things I use that I have little choice.

Mind you the search is pants anyway. It often fails to find things or changes its mind in strange ways. I can't test now because it's borked but I think 'Not' shows 'Notepad++' as the first hit but 'Note' changes the first hit to 'Notepad'. 'Vis' finds 'Visual Studio' but 'Visu' finds nothing.

It's hard to believe that Microsoft could have made it worse but apparently they now have.

Despite being a mostly life-long Windows fan I have to say that Microsoft have made a right bog-hole of the Start menu ever since they tried to remove it.

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Mushroom

So..borking the online part of the search prevents the local search working?

That's basically shit, if true.

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Facepalm

Same here. I had to resort to using Paint 3D instead of Paint because at least the former appears on the start menu. Not a pleasant experience.

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Meh

Re: Pfft...

That will only work if the application is on your PATH or you know the full path to the executable.

Artful prankster creates Google Maps traffic jams by walking a cartful of old phones around Berlin

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Meh

Quite a lot of new cars are sending location information and driving parameters back to base. My Toyota Corolla does and there's an app that comments on your driving.

There are already Chinese components in your pocket – so why fret about 5G gear?

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Joke

Re: prudent operators

What’s the word for when coffee comes shooting out your nose?

Wasteful?

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Mushroom

Maybe one day we'll have grown up to the point where borders are nothing more than the edge of administrative regions and no-one cares where people/jobs/things are located. I know it's a pipe dream but we're getting increasingly closer to the point where regional pride/protectionism is something we cannot afford.

Star wreck: There's a 1 in 20 chance a NASA telescope and US military satellite will smash into each other today

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Joke

I was born in 1967 and have good memories of 1983. So yes, there's some old stuff around :)

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Happy

Re: Recycling

Salvage 1. I loved that show when I was a kid.

It appears to be on YouTube. I might have a quick look although I suspect it'll shatter my nostalgic memories :-/

Remember when Europe’s entire Galileo satellite system fell over last summer? No you don’t. The official stats reveal it never happened

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Joke

Re: "how unreasonably low a target uptime of 75%"

2. Kieren wrote 3 great articles on Tuesday, and we at the back edited a load more. We're always pushed for time, there are always improvements and extra work that can be done, and we have to ship a product at some point. Sometimes you have to call it and run it, and move onto the next thing that needs covering.

As long as 78% of them are correct you're doing better than Galileo.

InLinkUK collapse: Ad market, planning woes, £20m debt and drug dealers using booths to blame, say admins

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Alert

Re: Boo-hoo what a shame

..and it's not a new idea.

I read that when I was a teenager and I credit it with giving me my lifelong hatred of all forms of advertising.

Capita Education Services accidentally spaffs email addresses in Helpdesk snafu

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Joke

Re: Oh for fucks sake

If you make something idiot proof, someone will just invent a better idiot.

Fly me to the M(O2)n: Euro scientists extract oxygen from 'lunar dust' by cooking it with molten salt electrolysis

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Happy

I did quite well with my OND but I was the last year to do the original (1970s?) version. That course worked better for me because it made you think rather than just throwing information at you and hoping it would stick. There was a time, thanks to that course, that I was quite good at calculus (though integration was always a pain). And I'd only left with school with a grade 2 in CSE maths.

First 'maths' lesson of the HND course we were given a page of calculus formula and told those would be the only ones we'd encounter in the exams. And maths was optional after the first term.

So it was back to listening to lecturers droning on and trying to make notes in an attempt to remember everything. Plus analogue electronics is just hard I remember one part where we were being taught how to create power supply circuitry. Every single step seemed to need yet another circuit to stabilise the last one.

Anyway I was already into computers and had begun to realise that I could program them as easily and 'thoughtlessly'(*) as I could talk to people. Possibly more so. So I decided to switch careers and get paid for doing something laughably easy. That was in the mid 1980s and I've never regretted that decision. Just call me the computer whisperer :)

(*)Without obvious conscious thought I should say. The results of my endeavours show that some form of mental processing is taking place but damned if I'm aware of it any more than I'm aware of how I construct coherent English sentences :)

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Happy

It's that kind of thing that probably explains why I failed the analogue electrical part of my HND. That and the fact I'm a bit thick :)

Windows 7 back in black as holdouts report wallpaper-stripping shenanigans

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Boffin

Re: XP compatablity

Check the security policy for files and printers. I think MS recently changed the default on Win 10 to be to require passwords. That's all well and good except that it doesn't give a meaningful error message nor the opportunity to enter alternate credentials. Users just get some generic error thrown back at them.

https://windowsreport.com/windows-10-turn-off-password-protected-sharing/

Just a thought - I was chasing my tail over that for a week thinking it was a credentials problem of some kind.

The Curse of macOS Catalina strikes again as AccountEdge stays 32-bit

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Alert

Re: Confusing.

Ouch, that's nasty. Still, that's a language compatibility issue rather than API so it doesn't invalidate my point. But it does make we wince on behalf of Apple developers and goes a long way toward explaining the problem.

I only have experience of MS platforms but at least we've always had a fully supported C/C++ pathway. For the last couple of decades I've been using C# so arguably that potentially puts me in the same boat but so far MS haven't done anything drastic that would kill it off (although the current multiple .NET 'editions' does my head in sometimes). Large parts (all the recent bits) of C# are now open source (hmmmm) so maybe that will help ensure its future even if MS abandon it.

And of course a fair number of VB developers screamed when it was brought into the .NET stable.

So the moral here might be to always be careful with proprietary languages and if you must use them then be prepared to jump and change direction when the owner suggests it.

AndrueC Silver badge

Re: Confusing.

Yes but the point remains. We're talking about an accountancy application, not CAD software or a game. It's an application that reads data from somewhere, manipulates it in memory, displays it to the user, takes user input and writes the data back out somewhere.

Every language supports most(*) of those operations out of the box via its RTL (Run Time Library). A Windows application for instance doesn't call CreateFile() unless it's doing something esoteric. Accountancy packages will call open() or File.Open() or whatever the language provides. As long as there is a version of that language available for the target platform it doesn't matter what the OS offers for an API because the compiler vendor deals with that.

(*)GUI would be the main area of concern. GUI frameworks come and go eg; the uncertain state of WinForms on Windows. Accessing a database might also be a concern if they've tied themselves to an ORM but I think it's the GUI framework I'd be most concerned about.

AndrueC Silver badge

Re: Mixed messages

But an accounting package has no business making direct use of OS APIs. It should be possible to write an accounting package sticking to functions provided by the language RTL and third party libraries.

The business logic (where the value lies) should be platform independent.

The RTL wont change much and third party libraries aren't usually radically different even if you are forced to change to a different one.

AndrueC Silver badge

Re: MacOS vs OS/X

Something like this would require a MAJOR re-write.

I dunno. How many OS API calls does an accounting package make? I'd have thought that most if not all of what it wanted to do could be done through the RTL of whatever language it is built from and a handful of third party libraries.

I've done such ports before - from 8 bit DOS to 16 bit Windows then to 32 bit Windows. None of them were particularly onerous. We just upgraded to the appropriate (Borland) C++ compiler and fixed up the errors. The only real gotcha to be wary of was the 'int' type but that was rarely a problem. Typically it just meant upgrading some const MAX_XXX value but you also had to be careful if you were persisted ints (we didn't normally - we'd persist a WORD or QWORD).

So my assumption here is that either they are building their software using old, unsupported tools (naughty). Or are just trying to move people to an alternative service (naughty).

Moving to a platform with a wider 'bitness' is not particularly difficult for a competent development team.

Help! I'm trapped on Schrodinger's runaway train! Or am I..?

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Unhappy

Re: Enquiries

It irritates me because I don't have a Twitter account :-/

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Alert

Will it reach its terminus as usual or will it apparently go inexplicably missing from the tracks in the countryside outside Lille?

Reminds me of a short science fiction story. A subway Named Mobius. Be careful out there, Dabbsy!

Go on, eat your fibre, new build contractors. It's free! OpenReach lowers limit for free FTTP connections

AndrueC Silver badge
Meh

An example of that would be the Devon village of Templeton, where speeds hover well below 1 megabit. In 2017, villagers burned an effigy of an OpenReach van in protest about the business failing to deliver superfast broadband.

Openreach said they couldn't do what DCC wanted for the price DCC was able to pay. A competitor stepped in saying they could do it. It now turns out that the competitor had misjudged the work required and it can no longer do what it promised either.

I note that the villagers haven't burnt an effigy of a Gigaclear van yet. They probably still blame openreach :-/

But never mind, DCC are soldiering bravely on.

Privacy activists beg Google to ban un-removable bloatware from Android

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Unhappy

It's not just cheap handsets - Samsung do it as well. And they don't seem to be very good at writing software. Their push service does nothing that I want yet consumes about 2% of my battery unless I remember to disable background data and the service itself. The latter option became more difficult with the last update so I get the impression that Samsung aren't happy with users trying to switch of its bloatware.

Google and IBM square off in Schrodinger’s catfight over quantum supremacy

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Joke

Re: So we're up to 56 now

Now the question is : are 56 qbits enough for everyone ?

Sometimes yes, sometimes no.

Shhh! It's us, Microsoft. Yes, it's 2020. We're here with a new build of Windows 10

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Joke

Are we just talking about dates here or in general?

GSMA report: Sorry, handset makers, 5G is not going to save the smartphone market

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Meh

Re: "It just so happens that there's something better."

The same process is evident in the wired sector as well. Only this week VM have announced another round of free upgrades because so many of their customers see no reason to pay for it.

TBB has pointed out previously that if everyone in the UK paid for the best service available to them we'd be in the global top three for average speed.

We won't CU later: New Ofcom broadband proposals mull killing off old copper network

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Joke

Re: No,no, thrice times no!

Good for you. Give them some flack

AndrueC Silver badge
Meh

Re: reliability

Yes..although the reduced risk of theft assumes that the scrotes currently doing it have the intelligence to realise that the resale value of fibre is almost zero and not worth digging up.

Fibre might me more vulnerable to accidental digging up, however, since I don't think there's any way to detect it when its buried (someone correct me if I'm wrong there). So Mr Bob the Big Builder with his JCB might be more of a problem than he is with copper.

The Six Million Dollar Scam: London cops probe Travelex cyber-ransacking amid reports of £m ransomware demand, wide-open VPN server holes

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Stop

Re: into the public domain unless the company pays up

Ransoms should never be paid. It only encourages the perpetrators to do it again. I know it can be tough when Aunty Maud has been grabbed but think about Uncle Bill - he could be next.

If no-one ever gave into ransom demands there would be far fewer kidnappings. Every time demands are met it perpetuates the crime.

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Unhappy

..either that or price rises will have to ;)

Reusing software 'interfaces' is fine, Google tells Supreme Court, pleads: Think of the devs

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Joke

I still have a lit of popcorn I bought in for Christmas, is there any way they could drag it out a bit longer?

Sure thing. Just got to find a way to link it to one of the SCO cases.

From Soviet to science fiction icon, the weird life of Isaac Asimov 100 years on

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Happy

He also pulled End of Eternity into the series. It's a bit convoluted though.

A yes.

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Happy

Re: Quote

"Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent".

This page is currency unavailable... Travelex scrubs UK homepage, kills services, knackers other sites amid 'software virus' infection

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Meh

Re: Compliance....

Taking cash out on a CC is a bad idea wherever you do it. There's usually a handling charge even in your home country. Also since cash can be stolen you lose most of the protections of the CC since no issuer is going to refund you for cash stolen out of your pocket.

But if you have a CC why would you want cash? There are some remote parts of the world where you need it but in most tourist destinations CCs are freely accepted. Certainly anywhere that accepts a bank card for payment (and most places within spending distance of an ATM) will accept a CC.

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Meh

Re: Compliance....

Credit card would be better. That way it's not your money at risk.

With a bank card the miscreant is draining your account and you have to wait/hope for a refund while your creditors send red letters. With a CC as long you check your statements carefully and inform the issuer of dodgy transactions you'll never have to fork out a penny. Just have the crap struck off and wait a day or two for a new card to arrive.

AndrueC Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: .NET 4.0.30319

They had public facing RDP so I'm not sure we can assume any level of knowledge on their part above 'appalling'.

How do you ascertain user acceptability if you keep killing off the users?

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Joke

Re: tripped over a guy wire. It was a trifle embarrassing.

Unfortunately I think the case would crumble.

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Happy

Re: ObXKCD

I'll eat almost any vegetable raw (potato being the exception). Sprouts are okay but best eaten leaf by leaf. Trying to crunch a raw one whole takes strong jaw muscles and after a bout of TMJD long ago in my early 20s I wouldn't dare risk it.

AndrueC Silver badge
Joke

Re: accidental aerial food delivery!

I had an incident with a dessert once at a party. I ran back to my chair carrying it and tripped over a guy wire. It was a trifle embarrassing.

Canada's .ca supremo in hot water after cyber-smut stash allegedly found on his work Mac ‒ and three IT bods fired

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Uncle Sam challenged in court for slurping social media info on 'millions' of visa applicants

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Joke

Re: And for those with NO social media accounts

If they check me out they'll find no social media but membership of several online forums. Most are innocuous enough but membership of DigitalSpy and TheRegister forums might result in me being taken aside for a 'chat' :)

UK parcel firm Yodel plugs tracking app's random yaps about where on map to snap up strangers' tat

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Joke

Re: "we can confirm that it is now resolved"

That is bad. I do hope that it has been effectively dealt with.

Absolutely. Some PR wonk has issued a bland response which acknowledges that something has changed whilst alluding only tangentially to the problem and certainly without admitting any kind of corporate blame for the problem.

This appears to be what Big Business(tm) considers to be 'effectively dealing with it'.

But rest assured - they take security seriously.

Explain yourself, mister: Fresh efforts at Google to understand why an AI system says yes or no

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Alert

Re: Applying Asimov's 3 Laws of Robotics to corporations

Asimov had one view point. Frank Herbert had another.

"In the future, mankind has tried to develop artificial intelligence, succeeding only once, and then disastrously. A transmission from the project site on an island in the Puget Sound, "rogue consciousness!", was followed by slaughter and destruction, culminating in the island vanishing from the face of the earth."

..and before you know it you have a Jesus Incident :-/

I don't know if we'll ever produce true AI but the idea both amazes and scares me in equal measure.