Posts by BongoJoe

Re: Ok...

FF22:

One question, if I may: How would you recommend people browsing the web protect themselves from maladvertising?

Re: Horses for courses

I am not sure. You try and find some information on, say, a war that America was involved in and you just end up reading something passed through a reality bending field.

I am surprised that I haven't read how the US won the English Civil War yet.

Re: Fair game

Would or should?

Because there's tens of millions of lines of code out there written on older Operating Systems using an older development platform (Visual Studio) which don't compile nor run properly on later operating systems.

All of these applications were written by Microsoft's tools on Microsoft's machines using Microsoft's guidelines and with Microsoft's assurances.

That's why.

Re: Tie me kangaroo down?

This reminds me of the classic, perhaps even classy, Alice Cooper song, "Cold Ethel"...

Re: Stuck with old IE?

I see my comment "what if the code was written by someone else?" was downvoted. Without explanation as to why.

I have a client who is in the travel business. They deal with a lot of suppliers, i.e. people who supply things like airlines, railways and the like who are abroad.

They have to use these people because quite simply the state airline/railway/whatever runs the monopoly in that country. And one of these suppliers has their only interface via an ActiveX plug in which can only work on IE6.

My client doesn't have access to the code but they have requested many a time for an alternative but the foreign state run supplier isn't going to give an alternative any year soon for whatever reason they have that they're not sharing with my client. So my client is stuck with having to use IE6 because of this.

This is where the holier-than-thou attitude of people who say "you have had time to fix it" annoys me. My client has had zero time to fix it because they have had zero chance of replacing code written by someone else for someone else in another part of the globe.

And I ask again; why was my comment "What if the code were written by someone else?" downvoted?

Re: HR gone mad.

But don't forget to writhe around on the floor in a seemingly productive manner...

Re: Doorbells? Who needs doorbells?

For the last fifteen years or more I've never needed a doorbell or a knocker.

Either the door is open or someone stood outside of the cottage and shouted.

But now that I live in a motorhome touring around the idea of having a doorbell seems ludicrous. Though one of those ships bells hanging outside does appeal even though it may be a little noisy going up the M5.

Erm, John Travolta (possibly a singer) is a Christian Scientist.

Re: They'll connect the hub to the smart beer fridge...

I would hope that they connect the mains consumer unit to the fridge for if anyone ever tries to kill off my beer by putting it in the fridge then they need a good jolt of 230v.

Re: and award for openess

Apple handcuffs?

Apple wedding rings*?

Apple slave shackles?

Apple Anne Summers' Dungeon collection?

(* not as ridiculous as it may seem given that the other week in a Radnorshire churchyard I saw a gravestone with the 'Animal' branding.**)

(** slightly less tacky, but not by much, than the infamous 'Kiss Kasket')

Re: Skype sponsored content

I am happy on version 6.2 and I don't get adverts, wasted screen and furthermore my messages appear as, well, messages and not bubbly clouds as per the bloody Beano and later versions of Shyte.

Re: @ LDS @ ben edwards

Helping your uncle Jack off a horse.

Helping your uncle jack off a horse.

Why would I want my uncle shoot a horse in the first instance?

Re: Happy customers

I am unique in the same way as you then

A few years ago I spotted something happening which I felt that plod should have known about and in the end I fired off an eMail as the event had happened so no point calling 999.

Less then 30 seconds later I received a call from Special Branch which shook me up somewhat...

Re: I wonder how many

I wonder how many people will wake up one day to find their media centre pc has essentially been bricked

Or worse. They finally get it working again and find there's a free U2 album on it.

Or worserer still, Bono is in your front room listening to it...

Re: Simple solution for google

I take it that you have never subscribed to www.advfN.com - the peddlers of stock market information in the United Kingdom.

Even with a subscription fee the adverts are served. And when I say 'adverts' I really, really do mean adverts.

Re: wikipedia; governments; churches; large companies; military etc.

Oh, the so called Wisdom of Crowds argument,

We've seen investors in the stock markets, One Direction weeny boppers, Daily Mail readership and the like. This isn't Wisdom of the Crowd rather a flock of lemmings.

Re: Given the chaos caused

I am thinking of little old lady taking her repeat prescription down to the chemist. A bit of paper she can handle but ask her to bring her phone will only cause confusion as she snips the cord of her rotary telephone receiver* from the hall passage and brings that in.

And, yes, they still use them.

Re: A bright future for IOT?

I can't wait for the bath tub soap holding pop-up toaster to start culling the herd...

Re: I don't think he handled this job at all correctly

Wouldn't a new server added to the network be the place to start and then to move stuff over to it, or them, if the manglement allowed the spending?

Re: The end of any driving pleasure

I've always thought that the large black thing one drives on would make for a great solar power collector. Okay, not massively efficient but it would be a dream to harness the sun on the roads.

Re: I hope...

I don't know about America but there was a case in my own town about a woman who left some prime real estate to the town almost fifty years ago, on the condition it was used as a place for mothers to rest and look after their kids. About ten years ago the council tried to sell it, since the land and building were worth millions at that point, being right in the middle of town, and they almost got away with it until a local lawyer stepped in and had a court look at the original will.

I wish that they did that with the London Olympics. The allotments were given to the people as a thank you for their efforts in the war and were promised to be left so for eternity.

Then some mega-corp waved a wedge of notes under the noses of the authorities. Of course, considering the government of the day all legal objections were overruled.

My point? Even if it's all set in stone and watertight the government can come in and change the rules at the last minute.

Re: When was the last time you paid road tax?

Alas, most folk don't. How many people do you hear complaining of cyclists on the road and that they don't pay the road tax? Or how many times do you hear of overseas drivers coming to the UK and using 'our roads which we paid road tax for'?

I would say that most people don't have a clue that there's no such thing as road tax these days.

Re: Would you believe Windows XP market share went UP last week?

Actually no. There are many things which aren't compatible.

For a start any version of Internet Explorer later than a certain version simply won't work with Visual Studio 6. So, if you use any of the controls that came with VS6 then it won't work. That issue is none of my doing.

Secondly, the code uses a lot of ADO because it works and that was the bees knees at the time. With XP I can blat out about twenty thousand queries and no end of operations on the resultant recordsets (each day's run may have over a couple of million iterations through all of the recordsets). All of the designs were the right design of the day and to MS' own approved methods.

Having said that; the quality of my code actually surpassed MS' own samples in the MSDN. This wasn't hard because, for example, MS were not very good at using data types in their examples.

On W7 machines and later this just chokes after lots of thousands of databases queries. The problem is, again, the lack of backward compatibility. Yes, I have tried to change the Connections and about everything else I can think of without going from the ADO.

But the point is. That the code that I wrote was to standard at the time. Not only that; I used Microsoft's own compilers, on their own operations systems against their own databases and to their requirements, specifications and standards and then along comes .Net and Windows 7 and what they've done is to ignore what was done in the past and made no real attempt at backward compatibility.

I know of other developers who have similar issues. On my main machine here I can at least load the application into Visual Studio because I have an old version of Internet Explorer. On my newer machines I can't even load the source code into the IDE because of the browser.

This last point. I fail to see how this is my fault. Anyway, myself and others all say the same thing: if we can load the code into the compiler then we can't compile it because that doesn't work for large Visual Studio applications. I don't know how large it has to be before it all breaks but I have an application with about 100 classes, dozens of modules, around fifty forms and the compiler breaks on Windows 7 machines.

Again, that isn't my doing.

That's why I need XP machines because MS have really buggered things up. And there's more than just the two of us with this problem: there must be billions of lines of code out there that works and was written well and to spec which still has to be supported.

Re: radio first?

I have still got my towel. It, too, is all stained from all sorts of stuff from over the decades.

I only keep it to mildly annoy the wife.

Re: re Pahh

I think you went wrong when you failed to use the wool to make the semaphore flags.

Yours with bags of black wool to card and spin...

Re: Happens often enough here in France

Wouldn't it best, under these circumstances, to take on the identity of the person who "wasn't dead"?

Re: Big Sister

As long as the citizens/voters get their bread and circuses, they don't care what government does to them.

So, nothing has changed much since the days of the Roman Empire then?