Re: BREAK
I seem to recall Macintosh had a "programmer's" button.
Posts by TRT
9611 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Sep 2009
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Bill Gates says he'd do CTRL-ALT-DEL with one key if given the chance to go back through time
Manchester plod still running 1,500 Windows XP machines
Wednesday 20th September 2017 15:28 GMT 
Re: Not unless you consider it a good use of the "big back end system"
"...and appropriately in such a way that it can be swapped out without the adjacent layers noticing if and when it becomes necessary."
I would not consider the sorts of applications that make use of esoteric IE6 functionality or rely on deprecated UI interfaces in the host OS as fulfilling that criterion either. I merely offered the sort of very simple, very-thin client, text-based interfaces that some businesses rely on and have done for many, many years as an example of making something that has a long operational life and that requires very little done to it, if anything, when the other end, the client bit, needs to change. Changing something in one place is, usually, far easier and cheaper than having to change it in ten thousand places. As many of these "web form" type applications are feeding information back to a central repository, having excessive complexity at both ends makes things much worse.
Having said all of that, if javascript and HTML5 were to be banned or superseded without any legacy support tomorrow, everyone, including myself and my web pages and web apps, would be royally f***ed. At least I could implement a replacement without having to go and install a software package at each end point, though.
Wednesday 20th September 2017 13:27 GMT
Re: Entirely unrelated to reduced funding by central government…
The digital photo booths, fingerprint scanners, cell monitoring systems, interfaces to in-vehicle data systems, evidence barcoding systems etc etc. There's a lot of embedded technology in things nowadays. I'm actually shocked, though, by how much of the "must have legacy systems" are actually an on-the screen form drawn in some visual basic like interface designer that relies on IE6 foibles to work. I always get a little buzz when I see something like in a shop where they tab through a VT-100 style interface and get an immediate response from some big back end system. No reliance on any real local processing, no reliance on Windows or Microsoft libraries for the actual leg work... I mean, it's how it should be, right? It's going to keep working forever, practically. It could work with a VT-100 CRT display and an ethernet card, or with a VT-100 emulator on Windows XP, or on a Windows 7 , or Win 10 or a VT-100 emulator on a Raspberry Pi stuck under the counter. It just keeps going because you're asking so little of it.
Behold, says robo-mall-cop maker: Our crime-busting dune buggy packed with spy gear
Boffins discover tightest black hole binary system – and it's supermassive
Downloaded CCleaner lately? Oo, awks... it was stuffed with malware
Tuesday 19th September 2017 10:13 GMT
Re: Ruisert
I've always found the registry cleaner to work well. Its value is limited nowadays, but on a 32-bit machine with 2-4Gb of memory and several programs running, risking the HIVE files getting too big to fit into actual RAM and becoming paged to disk instead... well, CCleaner's registry tool would prune 100s of K off the file, the machine still worked, and the reported things being removed were mostly left over broken links to .NET files orphaned by upgrades. If a machine had been sitting there updating for years, with software going on and coming off, then the reported issues from that tool could easily run into the thousands. I always used to rerun it until I got two consecutive "no problems", because keys referred to keys, which referred to keys, which referred to nothing.
Tuesday 19th September 2017 06:28 GMT
Re: Hopefully el-reg readers are aware of...
It is also a far more comprehensive uninstaller and startup tweaker than you get in the OS, as well as the disk space utilisation tool being quite handy sometimes. Not had a problem with it myself, ever. However learning that it's now owned by Avast, I'm less than happy to continue using it.
A todger, a 2.5kg dumbbell, the fire brigade... and the inevitable angle grinder
Noise-canceling headphones with a DO NOT DISTURB light can't silence your critics
Monday 18th September 2017 10:59 GMT
Whilst I've toyed with the idea...
of using noise cancelling headphones because they moved me to a shared office and I'm just about on some spectrum or other (probably the spectrum of being a perfectly normal human being) enough to find it impossible to work when there are people reeling off lists of numbers or talking loudly and having meetings under 6 feet away; it is enough of a disturbance to entirely wipe out that internal voice that reads out code and plans subroutines and holds function names and parameter lists in temporary workspace after looking up the definition in another file because the documentation (my fault) isn't yet extended to include the new parameter.
The problem is that the silence that falls is NOT a natural silence. I'm freaked out enough that my map of my personal space and environment is multi-modal - I like to hear my keyboard clicks bouncing back off the walls in a rather predictable pattern of reverberation. I can tell if someone stands behind me because they cast a shadow in the sounds I'm making as I type. I find it VERY disturbing to wear headphones. Can't do it on the street when I'm walking about. Can't understand why cyclists seem to wear headphones. Can't do it if I'm sat at a cafe waiting for someone. My hearing is like a sixth sense for me.
So I don't want to wear headphones, let alone noise cancelling ones.
So I've taken to staying late after work until the rest of the people have gone home if I have coding to do. Photoshop work is fine. Typing shitty invoices up, letters, instruction manuals (but not code documentation), posting on El Reg... I can do that with background noise - just - and it's fine. It's just coding, proof reading and statistical analysis - can't do that with other people talking near me. Can't do it with headphones on as I start getting paranoid about people standing over me.
TL;DR. Open plan offices suck balls.
Mad scientist zaps himself to determine the power of electric eel shocks
Friday 15th September 2017 22:58 GMT
Can I be the first to say...
Eels, eels, eels, eels give it up now?
User worked with wrong app for two weeks, then complained to IT that data had gone missing
Monkey selfie case settles for a quarter of future royalties
Boffins fear we might be running out of ideas
Massive iPhone X leak trashes Apple's 10th anniversary circus
Tuesday 12th September 2017 06:47 GMT
Re: Animated poo is one of the last things any sane person would ever want to see!
Scientists, free software bods still worried about EU copyright proposals
F-35 firmware patches to be rolled out 'like iPhone updates'
User demanded PC be moved to move to a sunny desk – because it needed Windows
Friday 8th September 2017 12:19 GMT
Re: PC fail
I did a stint in A&E for a while. We had a few. My favourite is...
"I was cleaning the bathroom using limescale remover and a bleach spray, and I'd taken all my clothes off so I didn't ruin them. I started getting dizzy so I sat down on the nearest thing, which happened to be a crate which was part full of cucumbers; I work at Covent Garden Market. Anyway the top of the crate broke and I fell right in, and..."
Then of course, hats off to the guy who came straight out and said from the off that the curtain ring currently generating something that looked surprisingly like an aubergine in the guy's lap was put on there deliberately in a crazy act of foolish sexual experimentation and that's the truth, no funny story to laugh at, so just get on with getting the fucking thing off there NOW! Please! PLEASE!
Stand up who HASN'T been hit in the Equifax mega-hack – whoa, whoa, sit down everyone
Top tip, hacker newbs: Don't use the same Skype ID for IoT bot herding and job ads
Friday 8th September 2017 04:41 GMT
Re: Parents maybe not doing their job?
TBH I'd almost be glad if it were my boy. I tried so hard to get him to do something technical, you know. He said he liked computers and building stuff and technology and robots... enrolled in the local free college when he left school for a BTec in computing and robotic sciences with a side order of A levels in business studies, computing and technical design (or was that some other qualification?) Spent a fortune on books and tools and components for the course.
Anyway, he was there 8 months, did f*** all except play with Lego Mndstorms, then declared he wanted to switch to the hospitality course and become a trolley dolly, He was too far gone to switch and ended up flogging bacon rolls for a rail company.
Such a disappointment.
My daughter, on the other hand, did a degree in psychology but has now totally pwnd the systems of a major credit card company, and they pay her for it too.
Go figure!
Fruit flies' brains at work: Decision-making? They use their eyes
Wednesday 6th September 2017 13:03 GMT
Re: "scalpel-fodder" ?
Yes. Yes they do.
Really tiny little knives on the ends of thin needles, which are themselves on the ends of micro-manipulator arms capable of movements measured in nanometers. They can slice a fruit fly up into slices less than a cell thick.
The technology was actually developed by the pre-packed delicatessen team at Tesco.
It's official: Users navigate flat UI designs 22 per cent slower
Dear rioters: Hiding your face with scarves, hats can't fool this AI system
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
