Posts by jeffdyer

Free Blue Screens of Death for Windows 11 24H2 users

Can't remember

When I last saw a BSOD despite using Windows for development daily.

HP Inc settles printer toner lockout lawsuit with a promise to make firmware updates optional

Re: I do have an HP printer

I have an Epson but bought some refillable ink cartridges, you basically just top them up with a syringe every few months. Don't even have to remove them from the printer so there's no gap in the ink flow as long as you don't let them run out.

The printer does complain that I'm not using original ink sometimes but that can just be ignored (usually)

As Chromecast outage drags on, fix could be days to weeks away

Re: NOOOOOOOOO!!!

Have you tried yours?

I just tested my ChromeCast Audio and it still works, no need to dig out the CD collection quite yet

Windows 11 user hurt by the KB5043145 update? Microsoft offers a way out

Re: Preview updates

Guilty - just checked and have now disabled auto "preview" updates

Codd almighty! Has it been half a century of SQL already?

Re: RDB and friendly queries

Paradox didn't use SQL IIRC

I didn't touch a thing – just some cables and a monitor – and my computer broke

Worst thing that happened me was a user's network cable came out the back of their PC and they thought they were helpful by plugging it back in - trouble was they plugged it into the back of the hub/switch if came from causing a loopback that took the entire network down.

Took hours and hours to find out what was wrong - missed my daughter's 10th Birthday party

Ten years ago Microsoft bought Nokia's phone unit – then killed it as a tax write-off

Re: While your entitled to that opinion it may be a bit biased

I think I remember the first iPhones couldn't run more than one application at a time while Symbian S60 certainly could

Help! My mouse climbed a wall and now it doesn't work right

Things that never happened #87654

Microsoft Visual Studio: Cluttering up developer disks for 25 years

Re: Offline environment doesn't work well either

I've been using daily for the last 7 years. It's never "blown up" or anything.

Dump C++ and in Rust you should trust, Five Eyes agencies urge

Re: Happily, I pragmatically stuck with C, assembler, Cobol and Fortran :-)

It only takes someone to accidentally get the bulb in the "live" part of the circuit i.e. the switch works on the neutral not the live wire for that to go badly wrong. Agreed. Always turn it off!

A brand new Linux DRM display driver – for a 1992 computer

Re: Good.

I bought an Amiga midi adaptor with cables a few years ago on eBay because it was actually cheaper than buying cables themselves ... still have it in the attic somewhere. The PiStormed A500 is under the bed...

The New ROM Antics – building the ZX Spectrum 128

CP/M on VAX ? interesting...

What if Microsoft had given us Windows XP 2024?

Not quite sure what the point of that was?

40 years of Turbo Pascal, the coding dinosaur that revolutionized IDEs

Re: University 1987

MicroVAXes were still popular in about 1990 when I joined this firm that were phasing out their PDP/11s - sort of died out by the late '90s though as PCs and PS networks became ubiquitous

Re: University 1987

It doesn't have to be like that, although when I started using Delphi in about 1997 the systems I inherited would generate a whole invoice in the "InvoiceButtonClick()" procedure for example. It was only way later that I realised all this should have been put into a datamodule or plain class - my education pre-dated OOP and in work it was mainframe/mini stuff which was strictly procedural.

Anyway I actually first used Pascal in the sixth form when we went to a local poly at the the time but I don't even think that was interactive...then in university it was Pascal on a Pr1me system. I dropped out to MVS/Fortran and VMS/C for a while but then moved to that Delphi job which kept me in Delphi employment up until about 2018 when we dropped the Delphi/OpenGL marine tracking application that I blagged a position with being the only Delphi programmer within a 100 mile radius and rewrote from scratch in Unity/C#

I like Pascal

Creating a single AI-generated image needs as much power as charging your smartphone

Power or energy? Disappointing reporting

Windows users can soon ditch Bing, Edge, other bundleware – but only in the EU

"On the other hand, Europeans have to wait for Copilot"

Well clearly not as it's available in the UK

It is 20 years since the last commercial flight of Concorde

Re: Where does the time go?

In South Wales Concorde would fly overhead every morning at about 11:07 IIRC? I still miss looking up to see that delta shape

AMD Zenbleed chip bug leaks secrets fast and easy

This is just nonsense. Anyone "exploiting" this is just seeing random bytes, nothing more. They can have absolutely no idea what they mean.

Dialup-era developer writes ChatGPT client for Windows 3.1

How does it know to provide answers to 1995 era questions?

The PainStation runs Windows XP because of course it does

Re: Good times

9 months later and I logged on to say the same thing

Why ChatGPT should be considered a malevolent AI – and be destroyed

Why do you seem to think that you're the only Alexander Hanff in the world?

The crime against humanity that is the modern OS desktop, and how to kill it

Re: It does suck

"Just sitting with a few browser tabs open"

Yes My Win11 does that on some things - but yes, it's the browsers not the OS

ZX Spectrum, the 8-bit home computer that turned Europe on to PCs, is 40

Agree, the 2.0.4 release on my Amiga 500plus had no amiga basic so bought hisoft assembler and acquired lattice c instead. Both good moves!

Re: Nostalgia Isn't What It Used to Be!

Yes we had to go to the local technical college to do our A level computer studies

Re: Where it all began...for some

The 6510 in the commodore 64 was pretty much a 6502 and that didn't seem to do it any harm.

Ceefax replica goes TITSUP* as folk pine for simpler times

Very useful for checking share prices back in the day as there was no other real option for the amateur/casual investor

Re: Closed connection

Maybe the national newspaper who covered it a few days ago....

FYI: If the latest Windows 11 really wants to use Edge, it will use Edge no matter what

Re: The only people putting this edge prefix on urls will be microsoft.

"Malware purveyors will use it to circumvent normal channels to make sure their content gets put front of screen for unwitting people to click on it."

How exactly?

If you can read this, your Windows 10 2004 PC really is connected to the internet no matter what the OS claims

Never had that problem

25 years of PHP: The personal web tools that ended up everywhere

Re: > PHP really is an awful language.

Presumably you code nothing but web pages, in which case I guess that's OK.

Re: Ancient history

Much less useful though. My first dynamic website work in 2000 or so was CGI using a third party Delphi library called CGIExpert. Once I got my head aroun the statelessness and the request/response side it was a doddle to create page templates in any editor and populate them from a back end database. I didn't have to learn a new language, only to be unable to use it anywhere else (i.e. desktop applications)

Lenovo certifies all desktop and mobile workstations for Linux – and will even upstream driver updates

Nutella?

Why the Nutella jar? Marmite would be more appropriate surely?

Planet Computers has really let things slide: Firm's third real-keyboard gizmo boasts 5G, Android 10, Linux support

Re: Marmite

I don't think Marmite is niche...

Post Office burned £100m in UK taxpayer cash on Horizon IT scandal legal fees, MPs told

Re: Who is responsible

The fact that gas pipes were run through "public" spaces is a right no brainer.

AMD, boffins clash over chip data-leak claims: New side-channel holes in decades of cores, CPU maker disagrees

Re: Fear mongering

So process B can read memory written by Process A. Unless B knows exactly what is stored there, it is of no use whatsoever.

Open-source, cross-platform and people seem to like it: PowerShell 7 has landed

"Shuttering" That's not a word, please stop using it.

BAE Systems tosses its contractors a blanket... ban on off-payroll working under upcoming IR35 tax reforms

Re: Retired JIT

Why are you bothering reading this then? I'd be down the pub.

25 years of Delphi and no Oracle in sight: Not a Visual Basic killer but hard to kill

Re: not Cool

No, C# WinForms is still not quite as good as Delphi, except when you want to link to the latest MS technologies like Outlook 365 EWS, which I couldn't do with Delphi 7 but did in minutes with C# VS2017

Delphi's killer trick is the live database links, where you can see your sample at design time.

Re: "Delphi used Paradox"

I learnt Delphi in a small software house where the owner had just switched across from Paradox, so he kept the DBs and just rewrote the forms in Delphi. He wondered why there we fewer and fewer people going to the parados users group meetings....

Of course, his code was entirely "onclick" button events, which I just accepted being a mere youngster (this was about 1997)

Delphi seemed amazing to me, coming from PDP/11 and VAX stuff with just dumb terminals.

I still have a software suite in Delphi7 i maintain now.

UK contractors planning 'mass exodus' ahead of IR35 tax clampdown – survey

To be fair, the advantages of being a Contractor (apart from the higher salary) have been eroded recently with the changes in taxation on dividend payment. I was briefly a contract through my software development company, which has multiple clients so did not come under IR35, and it was a toss up whether to pay myself via PAYE or through diviies.

Things I learned from Y2K (pt 87): How to swap a mainframe for Microsoft Access

Reminds me of a time my firm was looking at taking over a struggling competitor, and their directors came down to sell the deal to us. While running through the back end procedures they showed us a shortcut they just ran to update the database with external data. I asked him to open it just to see what it did, only to find that is was a bomb intended to shut down the database server, rename all the database files and restart the database server, all the while displaying various fragmentation and reconfiguration messages.

They'd not been paying their developer who decided to get his own back. Needless to say, they deal fell through, and they went bust.

Re: Security?

Surely the simplest solution - after all, the caller could hardly pull money out of the system, could they?

I do remember using Access as the table designer for MSSQL backends, until SQL Server Management Studio became more friendly.

Very little helps: Tesco flashes ancient Windows desktop on Scan-As-You-Shop device

Re: Low Expectations

"eventual June 1991 release of MS-DOS 5.0"

About thirty years ago was 1990, pre MS-DOS 5.0, so was this machine a time traveller, which had been running for years in the past?

Re: Handheld shopping...

I assumed this story MUST have been from an online picker, not a normal shopper?

"mouth-breather". Nice.

Microsoft boffin inadvertently highlights .NET image woes by running C# on Windows 3.11

Re: I love .NET

I've used FORTRAN, FileTab-D, RPL, C, Delphi, C# ASP.Net, now mainly using C# on Unity. Visual Studio just works for me.