Posts by Wayland 923 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Feb 2016
Where I live the houses are mostly owned by a housing association. They've all been fitted with sophisticated wireless smoke detectors, three in each house and a button. When someone burns the toast half the smoke alarms in the street go off. I suspect they've all been set to the same house number.
Windows is OK as an OS but the full Windows Experience is horrible. Versions of Windows with all the cruft removed show that it's actually OK. You can get that desktop experience by running Linux which is why people switch to Linux. Often Windows programs install on Linux using WINE. Everyone would be happier with Linux if all the Windows programs worked.
Oh no, not New Outlook. My client was using Office Outlook with 3 mailboxes but then New Outlook imposed itself on her computer. Also she could say was that her email was acting weirdly and she'd lost two of her email accounts.
To get it back to Office Outlook was simply a case of switching the switch in New Outlook to OFF. It took me a while to figure out that was all I needed to do.
People who use computers for business are not interested in new feature and ignore them. This is why Microsoft have to force new features onto people and force them to use them. People only notice the new features if something is broken by them or they can't work the software in the way they have got used to.
Does anyone know what CoPilot does apart from slowing down weak computers? I've not met any clients who use it. Some have asked me what it is. I tell them it's a virus and I'll remove it.
I remember in the '90's I was writing library code in C and they wanted us to write documentation for each function as we went.
The project leader had set up a word perfect template in the text version of the WP. Simply by using the correct paragraph tags perfectly structured manual pages could be printed on the laser printer. I've never worked on such a well set up WP system before or since.
No, Windows cannot be expected to cope with a badly written security patch. For CrowdStrike to do it's job it has to be deep into the sensitive part of Windows.
The problem is still Windows however because such services as CrowdStrike should not be required if Windows was safe and reliable.
Now that ABS and ESP are mature technologies they work unobtrusively. However in my Supra MKIII the ABS was worse than useless so I did pull out the fuse. The car's limited slip diff made ESP unnecessary.
Cars already have a system to prevent accidental speeding, cruise control. Drive up to the speed limit then switch it on and the car stays at that speed until you touch the brakes or accelerator.
If cruise control were to have a button that sets speed to the speed limit then that maybe a welcome enhancement.
A nagging bleeping system that wrestles with your right foot for control is not how I want my machine to function. If I wanted to have a battle of wills with my ride I'd get a horse.
It used to be called Wombling after the Orinoco WiFi card. You gather WiFi MAC addresses whilst running GPS. It was once used as a poor man's GPS. Obviously Access Points go missing or get moved but you triangulate between the ones you can see. You young'uns don't remember the dayz....
True but then that's the nature of Excel. A database can handle missing or extra columns as long as they are correctly named. If you send out a load of blank Excel files asking people to put their data in them, you'll get them back modified and incompatible with your master spreadsheet.
Lotus Notes was the tool that people now use Excel for. If you want to quickly gather and organise data then create a Lotus Notes DB and email the link to your people. They can fill in the form you created and the data is all nicely arranged in your central database. Do that with Excel and you will have big problems.
Most complex business processes done in Excel would be better done in MS Access. However my clients have mostly not been computer literate enough to do these in a database. Excel is quite a good tool for business people to prototype what they want before I come along and turn it into a database.
MS Access is pretty easy to use but there are plenty of hurdles that the Excel user finds too challenging. If MS did some really good development work on the Access user interface Excel users could be creating competent business specific database applications.
I suspect there is a conspiracy against such a thing. Years ago Lotus had Lotus Notes which was a far better database generator that allowed the boss's personal assistant to knock up a database application in the morning and have data coming back by the afternoon from those emailed the link. That was 25 years ago but they killed Notes and replaced it with MS Office.
The contemporary equivalent of that is the secretary creates a spreadsheet template and emails it to people asking them to send it back filled in. She will then use copy and paste to merge these individual sheets into her main one. A time consuming and error prone task when the users can add and delete columns to their liking.
You're spot on. There are loads of things a robotic machine should be able to do when connected to your computer. Why is it limited to printing on one side of A4 paper? Why can't it print a brochure or paperback book? Load it up with blank business cards and have it print them, or postcards or a birthday card.
All of these examples are a total pain to do on a printer but at least if they wrote their own drivers there was a chance printers would one day do these tasks easily.
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