Posts by John Campbell

Ex-Borland's Delphi owner re-ignites cross-platform dream

Bugs a go go

Well I bought Kylix - wrote most of our hotel management and pos software with it and still use it although Lazarus looks to be less bug ridden and more importantly not obsolete.

One of the main problems with Kylix is that is was only certified to work on distros of Linux which were old when Kylix came out and are now really old. With a bit of fiddling it's possible to get it to work on other distros, but it's an uphill struggle. Any software that allows Pascal/Delphi programming on Linux is welcome here!

What if computers went back to the '70s too?

Not in its Prime

Guy, I remember Prime computers. Napier College (now University) had one. You'd painstakingly type your program into the terminal, type "compile with pascal" (or "c with pascal" if you were feeling lazy) and then find your job at the end of a queue of 300 users. After a few pints and a couple of rounds of pool at the student union you'd come back to find that you'd missed out a semicolon in line 23 and the whole thing had failed.

The year I left they ditched the Prime and bought PCs with turbopascal.

Google launching its own navy?

Blup blup blup

and if it stops working you can be given the completely honest excuse that "the server has gone down"

Sorry, couldn't resist that.

El Reg celebrates 10th birthday

Surprising

I didn't see any sign of my uncle-in-law Mr Kewney in the pictures. Not like him to miss a party. Maybe there was too much Tia Maria and not enough ale

Polish builder sacked for humping hoover

He had a lucky escape

Henry is a British classic. We had one. We persuaded our project manager, who was of the opinion that "hoovering was women's work" to use it. Henry promptly exploded in a shower of sparks and black smoke. And no, he wasn't doing anything kinky with it. That builder should count himself lucky.

Quake rocks Britain

Shaken but not stirred

I've never experienced an earthquake. And then this one comes along and I sleep through the damn thing. I want another, bigger earthquake - preferably while I'm awake.

Hotmail dies on both sides of the Atlantic

Recovered

I was getting "server error" or "wrong username/password" when trying to log in with aMSN earlier. Logged in after four goes and got kicked off ten minutes later. Seems OK now.

The art of software murder

Acrobatics

Adobe reader? Is that like Ghostview?

Philips sells set-top box biz to Pace

Crash and burn

When I worked in broadcast TV, there were two set top boxes in the transmission area. At 6am, when the line switch to GMTV occurred, the Pace one would twitch, lose signal for a few seconds and then recover.

The Philips one would crash and have to be restarted.

Compact Disc: 25 years old today

Nostalgia

Well, now I'm feeling really old! I had one of those Philips CD100s (actually a Marantz but it was the same machine coloured gold). It cost £300 in 1984 having just come down from £600. It had limited controls and just a row of green leds to show which track was playing, but what an improvement on the total inconvenience and hassle of those horrible black scratchy vinyl things!