Posts by GerryMC

Here's a great idea: Let's make a gun that looks like a mobile phone

Re: "Absolutely no one can make sense of the United States' infatuation with firearms."

And no one would want to remove YOUR guns, any more than they would want to remove a New Zealand farmers .22, shotgun or whatever they need for pest control (rats, rabbits, possums etc).

Or a hunters guns for that matter - plenty of them here. Very few handguns or assault rifles as they're designed to kill people, which we kind of frown upon here.

Just don't take them into town - except when returning from hunting. You don't need a handgun to get groceries.

Flash – aaah-aarrgh! Patch now as hackers exploit fresh holes

Re: So, which comes first?

"Vulnerability-free Flash, or the next ice age? "

Do you mean in Hell?

This is why copy'n'paste should be banned from developers' IDEs

Re: I had a user-written script for a National Instrument's interface box...

20 odd years ago I worked with data from an old DOS Point of Sale. It was written in an in-house "database language" - (like dBase but worse). They used two character names for most of the files, so the stock file was st.dat, products pr.dat and customer cu.dat. Memo fields for each table were stored in "notes" files named by adding 'NT' to the file name, so stock was STNT.dat, products PRNT.dat and customers was ....

NZ unfurls proposed new flag

Re: Me no understand

Because the voters in favour of changing the flag would be split five ways, against one option for those in favour of the status quo.

Electrician cuts wrong wire and downs 25,000 square foot data centre

Re: If anything can go wrong...

Murphy is an optimist...

Oh em gee – Adobe kills Flash Professional (it's called Animate now)

Re: Now fucking kill Flash completely!!!!

I suspect that is rather the point of the rebrand - to remind the Flash Professional users that there is an alternative - the "perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future." part of the Jobsian quote.

The easiest way to get rid of flash is to make it easier to convert old projects to HTML5

Microsoft tool-crafter Idera buys database, app firm Embarcadero

Re: Will Delphi survive?

The BDE (Borland Database Engine) has been deprecated since Delphi 6 - which was released in 2000, so hardly a fixation,

Sun? In Blighty? Nah, just build that rooftop data centre, it’ll be fine

Re: Seen this kind of thing

Back in my early days in IT EDP as a lowly Computer Operator, we had a similar problem in NZ. Over winter a number of new washing machine sized HDD drives had been added. Come February (usually the hottest month in Auckland) the central air conditioning system couldn't cope with the extra heat, so several millions of dollars of ICL 2900 mainframe and associated equipment had to be powered down every afternoon from 2pm to 6pm.

The problem was quickly solved by adding some large window mounted aircon units. Upgrading the building systems was too difficult.

Got an Android phone? SMASH IT with a hammer – and do it NOW

Re: Workarounds

I'm just glad that I tend to disable hideously obtrusive apps like hangouts - I want text messaging, not a social network/video chat/photo app. I like apps that do one thing well, not get in the way with "cute" features.

PEAK PC: 'Most' Google web searches 'come from mobiles' in US

Re: Similar results

...and almost unusable on a PC. Check out aa.co.nz

BBC releases MYSTERY RIDDLE poster for Doctor Who anniversary episode

Re: Old who

SKY TV in New Zealand have been showing old episodes since January this year - one Doctor per month, except for #8 of course - they filled in with a documentary series. It was usually one storyline per week, starting with "The Unearthly Child", then "The Aztecs" Currently up to Ecclestone

Rise of the machines, south of Milton Keynes

Re: 2966 disks?

I can confirm that when I worked with a 2966 in the mid eighties the removable disks were 200MB in covers like the one labelled "122". While I was there they added a bunch of pairs of 80MByte? fixed disks in similar orange cabinets.

Windows Vista woes killed MS Pinball

Re: AAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

What part of " but given that this was code written several years earlier by an outside company" don't you understand? It's not like it a core part of the kernel.

The Sons of Kahn and the assembly language of the internet

Re: Delphi was corrupted from within long ago

Delphi isn't dot net - in fact the Delphi.net compiler was Kylixed (see http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/26/embarcadero_buys_codegear/) in Delphi 2009. However the IDE (Galileo) still uses a mix of Win32 native code and .Net.

This must have seemed like a good idea in 2003. The IDE stability is almost back to Delphi 7 (2002) level now, and my i7 loads in about the same time as my old P4 took for D7!

(Actually I prefer Galileo to older versions, I just wish it was more stable and faster).

The current version (XE3) of supports Win32, Win64 and OSX (via non-native OpenGL based controls)

Forget fluorescents, plastic lighting strips coming out next year

I replaced most of the large number (25+, stupid downlights) of 40W incandescent bulbs in my house with CFLs when I moved in 7 years ago. Some of the original Philips bulbs are still going, but cheap supermarket bulbs can fail quickly.

The best thing is that I don't have the hassle of constantly replacing bulbs, I would average only 4-6 a year, and will be less once the last of the crappy ones fail. If I used incandescents, it could be 15-20 a year. I also live in a climate where I don't want the waste heat from 6x40w bulbs in summer, and have more cost effective heating options in winter.

Windows 8: An awful lot of change for a single release

Re: Security @RICHTO

I know from personal experience with NT4 that a (accidentally) corrupted Word document could consistently cause a BSOD, on multiple machines (but possibly all the same basic Dell Optiplex system)

Australian boffins have a ball with lightning maths

Re: Oh how perfectly dreadful

AUSTRALIAN boffins, hence Australian usage - i.e. Maths

If Hotmail was a person it could have kids now. But it would be a crime

Same here - no numbers

Both as a spam hole, and having my name unnumbered.

An advantage of having a relatively rare surname really.

Re: I use Hotmail

So do I, in fact I just logged in with it to upvote and post this!

Here lies /^v.+b$/i

More Pascal

program Stob(input, output);

begin

while Alive do

begin

live;

end;

end.

The full stop after the last end is important - it means end of the code file.