* Posts by AndrueC

5081 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Aug 2009

Users now keep cellphones for 40+ months and it's hurting the secondhand market

AndrueC Silver badge
Meh

Bought my S10 summer 2019. I don't intend to replace it until the battery becomes useless. It's currently managing to last two or even three days so that's fine. And if/when it fails I'll try and get it replaced. My S10 does everything that I need a phone to (apart from having an easily replaceable battery). Nothing that's been released since offers anything else I want.

Japan's lunar lander is dying before our eyes after setting down on Moon

AndrueC Silver badge
Meh

Re: Upside down?

Surely the thrusters would be underneath and therefore (if the craft is upside down) now pointing at the sky. Firing them would at best drive the craft nose first along a furrow.

The 'nothing-happened' Y2K bug – how the IT industry worked overtime to save world's computers

AndrueC Silver badge
Joke

Re: 2038?

I have to say I'm not particularly concerned about the year 30828 though.

40 years since Elite became the most fun you could have with 22 kilobytes

AndrueC Silver badge
Happy

The original Elite story was written by Robert Holdstock. Who went on to become one of the best British SF/Fantasy writers of his time. The Mythago Wood series has to be essential reading as an example of how to merge the two genres.

I played Elite on the BBC, Spectrum and Amstrad CPC 618. Got to Elite on all three platforms.

I refused to play the Commodore 64 version because of the stupid Tribbles and because, well, as a Spectrum owner I was obligated to hate the Commode :)

Microsoft touts migration to Windows 11 as painless, though wallets may disagree

AndrueC Silver badge
Meh

To be fair my HP ProBook 470 G5 which I bought back in September 2018 upgraded to Windows 11 with no fanfare and no disturbance to me. I'm still using it to this day as my primary computer. So you don't need really modern kit.

Post-Brexit tariffs on EU-UK electric vehicle imports staved off for three years

AndrueC Silver badge
Go

Re: That doesn't matter. You have to waste a lot of time charging it,

Lucky you. Most people don't have dedicated parking spaces.

Not true.

"A third of UK homeowners don’t have a driveway or garage to install a home chargepoint"

..meaning that two thirds (ie; 'most') do.

We should also factor in self-selection here. Someone who owns a car will avoid buying a property that doesn't have somewhere they can reliably park it. So of the third that don't have a driveway or garage a fair number will be inner city properties where the occupier is happy to rely on public transport.

Not even poor Notepad is safe from Microsoft's AI obsession

AndrueC Silver badge
Happy

911 apparently can work if dialled from a mobile. Supposedly a lot of mobile phones recognise it as a call to emergency services and redirect it according to their current locale.

AndrueC Silver badge
Meh

Re: Microsoft?

As for the “\” DIRECTORY separator, OMFG!! How many millions if days (years?) of work have been lost to dealing with this particular fiasco in pretty much any normal programming language?

C# is pretty much a normal programming language and for a long time it's supported the '@' string prefix for literals eg; @"This has a \ in it". C# 11 gains another version using three "s that avoids having to escape anything.

To say nothing of the Path helper class which good programmers use to avoid this entire problem in an OS agnostic way.

And a knowledgeable Windows developer will know that '/' is an acceptable path separator to API calls. Some applications don't accept it but that's due to the ignorance of some software developers. You can prove that it's a valid separator by opening the run dialog and typing (without quotes) 'c:/windows' then click okay or press [enter]. It'll open the directory in Explorer just fine.

Microsoft suggests command line fiddling to get faulty Windows 10 update installed

AndrueC Silver badge
Happy

That's a new one. I once had to code "This is not an error" in one of my libraries (the code was used as a flag internally) but I can honestly say that I've never had to code "This is not the error you are looking for".

HP customers claim firmware update rendered third-party ink verboten

AndrueC Silver badge
Unhappy

They aren't the only ones. It was sometime last year when my Canon printer developed a curious fault and couldn't print in magenta and lost 'focus' for black ink. The solution was to buy official Canon cartridges. I haven't bothered to swap out the black cartridge yet as the effect is not too bad.

I think it must have been a stealth update. My printer was fine in early Summer and I didn't touch it for several months at which point it wouldn't print magenta. And it wasn't the age of the cartridge because I had a spare sealed one waiting and it had the same problem. It's a shitty thing to do.

Ransomware payment ban: Wrong idea at the wrong time

AndrueC Silver badge
Stop

Rubbish. It's like all ransoms - if no-one paid no-one would bother. Every time a ransom is paid it's encouraging the perpetrators to continue.

Is it time for 6G already? Traffic analysis says yep

AndrueC Silver badge
Meh

Re: Lucky me

Lordy knows what kind of browsing/calling habits are resulting in you being pestered 24/7/52. I can't remember the last time I had any kind of spam on my phone. And anyway my phone has quiet hours functionality. Only friends and family can disturb me between 2300 and 0800.

Although I do still pine for the days when I could activate airplane mode during those hours automatically. Would save quite a bit of battery life.

AndrueC Silver badge
Meh

Re: Can we just have 4G please -- working as advertised?

telcos only focus on the big towns to the detriment of smaller locales.

No they focus on the areas where the RoI is acceptable to their investors. There is no intended detriment to you or your neighbours.

It's just that if they spend £100k on you they might only get £5k back every year. If they spend £100k on a large town they might get £5k back a month.

Amazon already has a colossal ads business and will extend it to Prime Video in January

AndrueC Silver badge
Meh

Re: Cancelled Prime 12 months ago, hardly noticed, next Netflix, NOW...

I thought Sky, at least in the UK, was pushing Sky Glass and "dishless" Sky services hard this last year or so?

I looked into this last night and it turns out that they offer a £5pcm 'no adverts' add on. This doesn't work with live TV (hardly a surprise) and requires the viewer to skip over the adverts manually as they would with a DVR during playback.

It seems to require that the streaming service be compatible with Sky's system but I doubt many will turn down the opportunity given Sky's market power.

AndrueC Silver badge
Happy

Re: Sorry. I pay to *not* have adverts.

"If you want a truly advert free experience you're going to have to pay a lot of money for it."

.. torrents are still a thing.

Alright then.

If you want a truly advert free experience and you would like to help fund the content you watch then you're going to have to pay a lot of money for it.

Just because I don't want to sit through advertising breaks doesn't mean I'm a freeloader. I will happily pay the content creators and even the delivery service just not by watching adverts.

AndrueC Silver badge
Happy

Re: Cancelled Prime 12 months ago, hardly noticed, next Netflix, NOW...

They've been pushing it but I'm not sure how good the take up has been. I seem to recall that they once threatened to disable fast forward back in the day but realised that it would kill their business. They also refused to implement 'jump 30 seconds' for a while but relented when Sky Q was released.

As regards satellite rental it's worth noting that Sky only operate those channels with Sky in their name. Most channels available on the Sky platform are independently operated and are only paying Sky to be listed on their EPG and (if they need it) a fee to be encrypted using Sky's system. Cost of satellite rental might also be falling if the owners perceive that everything is moving to a streaming service. Also worth noting that Sky boxes give access to various streaming services (Amazon, Netflix, Disney and several others) including various on demand channels. Sky's own on demand content currently supports skipping over adverts.

It remains to be seen what Sky do next but I'd argue that they already have a large and fairly captive audience who are paying them well. As other streaming services deteriorate Sky may decide they can weather the storm and continue as they have done.

AndrueC Silver badge
Happy

Re: Sorry. I pay to *not* have adverts.

That might be why you pay but apparently you're not paying enough. So many people thought Sky were ripping people off because they still carried adverts but it's the same story. If you want a truly advert free experience you're going to have to pay a lot of money for it.

If you don't want to see adverts either pay more or subscribe to a service like Sky that fully supports skipping through adverts when playing back recordings and learn to record first, then watch later.

AndrueC Silver badge
Trollface

Re: Cancelled Prime 12 months ago, hardly noticed, next Netflix, NOW...

Interestingly regarding adverts, we were watching Vera the other night on STV player (yes, I know, but the stories and main character are actually quite good) and I'm not kidding, we were shown the EDF EV charging ad between 4 and 6 times IN A ROW on EACH break!!! So for AMZN to show meaningful fewer ads than this won't be too terribly hard...

I recorded it on my Sky Q box, watched it the next night and skipped over the advert breaks by pressing 'jump forward 30 seconds' four times.

I remember when these streaming services first started and loads of people said they would kill off Sky and demonstrate that subscription models don't need to have advertising. At the time I said they wouldn't last - classic bait and switch. Fast forward (or even jump forward, lol) and Sky is still here, I'm still a subscriber to it but I haven't see an advert in many years and the streaming customers look to be getting them forced down their throats.

Oh well.

As for Vera the story was good but I felt the final confrontation was unrealistic.

War of the workstations: How the lowest bidders shaped today's tech landscape

AndrueC Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: All that knowledge in those comments...

And the (un)funny thing is how old you can sometimes feel. I remember the 80s fairly well. They were after all my formative years. I'm sure I owe my political development to the Thatcher years. But my strongest memories are of the 90s. The glory years. The world was becoming sane and the future seemed bright.

I remember the 00s clearly but to me that's the start of the modern world with all its problems and troubles. And yet.. I like watching true crime documentaries and I've noticed that cold cases are now dealing with incidents that happened in the 00s. That is such a strange feeling. To realise that what I consider 'the modern world' is actually so long ago.

The financial crisis of the mid 00s feels to me like a recent event..

I need a drink.

AndrueC Silver badge
Meh

The article is both wrong and right. Yes, what initially took over the world was less functionally capable but that was because of economies of scale and what people needed to do with computers. Clustering, complex filesystems, sophisticated languages. All good stuff but they required too much hardware, too much skill and far too much money. I wasn't there for all of it (I started in computing in the early 1980s with a Sinclair Spectrum) but I've seen enough to be able to comment on the computing (r)evolution.

Other commentards have already pointed this out: Survival of the fittest. A 1970s mainframe might have had as much functionality as a modern workstation but I didn't have access to mainframes. I never have had access to them. They've forever been locked away in universities and large corporations. If I'd had to wait until things got to the point where I could experience all the wonderful stuff the author talks about I'd never have had a career as a computer programmer. It would've taken several decades before that stuff trickled down into the real world.

The article smacks to me of typical 'ivory tower thinking'. The author apparently is unaware of how the real world works. I was using a word processor and had access to spreadsheets in my flat in the 1980s when I was at polytechnic. I was writing software commercially (for a small company based in North Wales) well before that decade was out. That would never have happened if the IT industry had refused to lower its sights and produce simpler, less powerful computers. That is not (or shouldn't be) a mystery. That's why we called them 'mini computers' and 'micro computers'. We knew they were cut down versions of 'the real thing'. That was deliberate and it didn't matter. What mattered was that we had access to computers no matter how small the company we worked for and that we had access at home.

It's called being pragmatic.

AndrueC Silver badge
Meh

Re: Instant Mutability of Software Systems

C# / .NET supports modify on the fly. Okay so Visual Studio has an annoying habit of refusing to resume the application just when it's getting interesting but still. Set a breakpoint, inspect and/or modify variables, change the code and resume is supported.

Bricking it: Do you actually own anything digital?

AndrueC Silver badge
Meh

Re: Just imagine

That's not the same thing though. With clothes you are paying for a good that keeps you warm and dry. Ds or DVDs are just plastic media. It's the information encoded on the media that you are paying for.

Put another way:

If someone offered to replace the contents of your wardrobe with random clothing (that fit you) you probably wouldn't object much if it all.

If someone offered to replace your DVD/CD collection with random discs you certainly would.

Music/TV/Film is ethereal. It's not a physical good as such and therefore any attempt to treat it the same way is going to be flawed.

AndrueC Silver badge
Happy

I used to collect books. I loved buying books and I liked seeing bookshelves. But then one day I realised that there were only a couple I ever read more than once and that wasn't often. So instead of buying yet another book shelf I got rid of my books. I have a Kindle reader and subscribe to Kindle Unlimited. I'm currently reading two or three books a week so that saves me a tonne of book shelves :)

For TV shows and films I'm even less likely to want to watch things again. I've posted before that I subscribe to Sky Q and have a strict watch-then-delete policy. I'm happy to wait for the handful of films that I'd watch again to come around as/when the broadcaster decides they need to pad their schedule out.

Thanks to Sky I have a DVR that is almost permanently three-quarters full with stuff I haven't seen before.

I do have my own digital music collection but that's because I haven't got around to installing the Squeeze Server plugin that lets me add a link to a streaming service. I should probably look at that again as it did appear that it could treat the remote service as just another source of music so random play would include stuff both from my archive and the remote one.

But my view is that the ability to enjoy various types of media without having to incur the cost and hassle of significant storage is one of the major benefits of modern times.

Programmable or 'purpose-bound' money is coming, probably as a feature in central bank digital currencies

AndrueC Silver badge
Meh

For low usage, try SMARTY (Three's cheap brand). They offer a monthly rental of (effectively) £5 for unlimited calls and texts, and £1 per GB for data (max 3GB though). If you don't use all the data you have paid for in a particular month, you pay that much less the next month.

It's fine for calls and texts but for internet it's poor. You can have a reasonable signal but bugger-all data transfer until suddenly the gates open and you enjoy data for ten minutes.

I don't need much data when out and about so I put up with it for the low cost but definitely a case of buyer beware. It's cheap for a reason..

Calculating Pi in the sky: Axiom Space plans to launch 'orbital datacenter'

AndrueC Silver badge
Happy

The company name should be Tessier-Ashpool.

Artificial intelligence is a liability

AndrueC Silver badge
Happy

From the description of 'Destination Void' by Frank Herbert:

'In the future, mankind has tried to develop artificial intelligence, succeeding only once, and then disastrously. A transmission from the project site on an island in the Puget Sound, "Rogue consciousness!", was followed by slaughter and destruction, culminating in the island vanishing from the face of the earth.'

I always thought that was evocative. And considering how the series 'ended'..hmmm.

Microsoft puts the 'why?' in Wi-Fi with latest Windows patch

AndrueC Silver badge
Unhappy

It wasn't all that great to start with. For the last year or so my laptop has sometimes failed to immediately reconnect when it wakes up. Curiously it seems that waiting at the login screen when it had failed to connect immediately meant it connected faster than actually trying to login.

So the options were:

* Connected on lid open: Login, no delay.

* Not connected on lid open: Wait (if I notice) for 20 seconds then login, no further delay.

* Not connected on lid open: Login, realise that I have no connection so have to wait nearly a minute before a connection is established.

Irritating. Weird.

England's village green hydrogen dream in tatters

AndrueC Silver badge
Meh

Very few modern houses can be heated or have hot water without electricity. There are probably a few gravity fed CH systems still around most are reliant on a pump. One of the reasons I replaced my gas fire when the old one failed was to ensure that I had a source of heat if the power ever failed.

Then again I live in a country with a very reliable national electricity grid. In nearly 25 years I think I've experienced two or three ten minute outages and one that was nearly an hour which impacted half the country a couple of years ago. Depending on electricity seems like a safe bet to me.

Google hopes to end tsunami of data dragnet warrants with Location History shakeup

AndrueC Silver badge
Facepalm

They certainly shook it up for me. I wanted to check the timings of something last week so went to the timeline and couldn't make heads nor tails of it. Despite the fact I was accessing it early December it defaulted to telling me what I was doing in October. The only way I could fathom to change the date was to scroll sideways date by date. When I finally got to where I wanted I discovered that it thought I was still driving to Banbury from my home (a distance of about 12 miles) and had been since that default date in October.

Hmmm. They seem to have fixed it now. Sorta. Half the time I click on a date in the graph I just get 'no response from server'.

Oh cool. Wednesday 6th of December I drove for 17 hours and 9 minutes but it doesn't know where from/to. Actually, Google, I drove to my golf club (10 miles away) then back like I always do on a Wednesday.

And people get upset about Google tracking them :)

Shame about those wildfires. We'll just let the fossil fuel giants off the hook, then?

AndrueC Silver badge
Facepalm

My parents bought me and my brother a set of encyclopaedias when we were very young. Published in the very early 1970s I'd say. I have fond memories of reading them over the years. One of them was all about 'Planet Earth' and it had a chapter on the greenhouse effect and possible consequence of burning fossil fuels. Toward the end it referred to 'spaceship Earth' and the fact it was the only one we had. As a young nipper who was an avid science fiction reader that resonated.

From that point on although I embraced technology I was forever mindful of the possible impact and sought to reduce it.

So yeah: Humanity has known about this issue since at least the early 1970s and yet here we are.

..and I seem to recall that Thomas Edison wrote something about the risk so I suspect we've known about it for well over a century.

And. Yet. Here. We. Are.

To BCC or not to BCC – that is the question data watchdog wants answered

AndrueC Silver badge
Meh

Re: Oh FFS !

Yup, been saying the same for years. Why is 'CC' even visible by default? Why can't it at least be the bottom of the three default fields?

Both CC and BCC are hidden on my Thunderbird installation but I confess I don't know if that's something I've configured.

Tesla says California's Autopilot action violates its free speech rights

AndrueC Silver badge
Happy

Re: According to Musk, fraud is protected under the 1st Amendment

We should have the freedom to do anything we want as long as it doesn't interfere with another individual's rights to do as they want.

Therein lies the complexity ;)

AndrueC Silver badge
Meh

Re: They do it over there but they don’t do it here …. (Ooh fashion)

However the ASA has no legal powers and is presiding over a collection of voluntary agreements. They can refer particular cases to another body that has legal power (eg; Ofcom) which may or may not then decide to act based on its own rules.

That the ASA works at all is more of a complement to the business environment in the UK than an expression of its power.

I'd also argue - based on 'Fibre broadband' - that the ASA are no paragons of good sense.

Openreach hits halfway mark in quest to hook up 25M premises with fiber broadband

AndrueC Silver badge
Meh

Re: We live in exciting times.. :-(

Openreach do allow their ducts to be shared. It's something called PIA. It's not free but Altnets are using the facility.

Unfortunately ducts can get blocked or collapse or just become full. It's at that point that things go awry. As far as I know if an Altnet finds a blocked Openreach duct it will just install its own duct to bypass it. I don't think there's any provision in PIA for the company concerned to repair or upgrade the Openreach ducting nor to insist that Openreach do it.

And to be fair if you were paying to rent space in someone else' ducts would you repair them for free?

PS: You also need to come up with some new product names, "Full Fibre" is the name of your 80Mb VDSL offering, which is in fact 50% Fibre.

Lol, yeah. Sort of. That boat sadly sailed many years ago when the ASA allowed Virgin to call their service 'fibre based'. But in %ge terms every telephone line in the UK is already 99% fibre. It's only the last kilometre or so between property and exchange which is often still copper.

AndrueC Silver badge
Meh

How many of those 25m premises already have fibre courtesy (e.g.) City Fibre? (As we do at this location.)

Not all that many, over 1 million a couple of months ago.

As a follow-up, why are they duplicating fibre connectivity when there is still much of the country as yet untouched?

Because..I dunno. Investors and speculators. I've always thought it was silly and a waste of resources myself. I live in a small town in South Northamptonshire as of this year we have both Swish and Gigaclear available, both of whom found it necessary to dig up various (but not all) sections of pavement throughout the summer.

Openreach will presumably be coming here next year and given that the above two had to dig up some of the pavements (renting ducting space from Openreach and found some of it blocked I'd wager) I'd assume Openreach will have to as well.

So three companies digging up pavements and laying three sets of fibre cable. Unnecessary from a technical point of view because sharing physical media between different communication providers has been a solved problem for over thirty years. It even means that if you change ISP (eg; from Gigaclear to a BT based supplier) someone will have to come out and dig another trench and attach another ONT to your property. And in a few years mergers and consolidations will likely mean some of the fibres will become surplus to requirements anyway.

AndrueC Silver badge
Boffin

Re: Copper

Given that BT are removing Copper, since its valuable now and generally has been installed for a few decades so may be a bit corroded here and there, there is actually not a lot in it for the average punter. Sure, they will get a faster internet connection, but that's a by-product of the change to fibre running more modern protocols over the top of it.

Nah, BT don't have an active copper reclamation programme. If it's in the way (eg; blocking the duct to a property) they will pull it out but otherwise they seem happy to leave it where it is. They aren't even in a mad rush to turn off the copper system and seem happy to let that gradually happen for the most part.

The speed from fibre isn't down to more modern protocols. In fact arguably that's a detriment since like most CPs they are using GPON which means sharing the fibre with your neighbours resulting in contention in the local loop that wasn't there before. With ADSL you get a dedicated line to the exchange. With FTTC it's dedicated to your cabinet. With FTTP it's dedicated to the end of your drive way..

The speed from FTTP comes from fibre being a better physical media for the transmission of digital data, not from the protocols.

Moving to fibre does have a big benefit for BT though and arguably more so than for most punters. It reduces their need for archaic, hard to source and costly analogue equipment. That is the real reason behind this push. BT want to avoid the expense of trying to keep the old PSTN system creaking along.

AndrueC Silver badge
Meh

Re: Bye bye, BT OpenRetch

I'm switching to CityFibre on Tuesday, lately my FTTC through OpenRetch has started buffering

You can't buy FTTC through Openreach because they don't sell to end-users. The chances of Openreach's bit of the connection (from exchange to your cabinet) being congested are slim to zero. BT has historically done a very good job of managing the local loop and of running their Wholesale service. Go back to the 2000s and you could get issues but they got to grips with it and now the problems can almost always be blamed on the ISP for not buying enough capacity.

Zen operate their own network in a lot of places (at least as far as the exchange) so if you're one of those places it would be Zen's fault for sure. But even if you're on Zen via BT Wholesale history tells us that Zen is still likely to blame. They used to be very good but seem to have gone a bit wobbly over the last couple of years.

I've heard mixed things about the CF network so good luck with that. If the speed of FTTC was enough for you you could likely have just switched to another FTTC provider like A&A and gone back to a rock solid service.

AndrueC Silver badge
Meh

*I guess despite the FTTP it’s throttled somewhere as the speed is still asynchronous.(most download far more than upload … but noting it).

Rumour has it that BT are protecting their leased-line business.

A leased lines should offer a more consistent service than residential due to their 1:1 contention as far as the CP's routers anyway but given how good residential broadband can be if you sign up for a decent ISP it would make sense for BT to be trying to retain a more obvious differentiation so as to justify the higher price tag.

AndrueC Silver badge
WTF?

That doesn't imply any number fiddling. It proves that your parent's house has indeed been passed so should be counted in the statistics. Typically that implies service availability to those properties but there are sometimes delays in the fibre actually going live (as in the other poster I replied to who had the fibre but couldn't get a connection).

However what you describe sounds mad. Utterly bonkers. Connecting a property to the fibre is only done to provide an active service. What you describe is akin to a restaurant letting you sit down, order a meal then tell you that the kitchen is closed. If this is the case then someone has cocked up big style. I'd be tempted to get your parents to switch to a different ISP and see what happens.

As for the landline removal though that is a separate thing. There's no requirement to remove them so if it's not worth the effort they will leave them in situ.

AndrueC Silver badge
Meh

Sadly, yes. I've heard of a few of those. It's usually down to head-end capacity but in one case it was because a wayleave agreement fell through. It's not really something to blame on the CP who laid the cable. They will be as pissed off about it (perhaps moreso) than you. They don't lay cables for fun or even to 'make up the numbers'. Unless they can connect customers to them they are an expensive loss.

Do you know who installed the fibre? It might be worth contacting them to ask what the delay is. Sometimes knowing that there are customers actually chomping at the bit can concentrate minds and encourage them to solve whatever the problem is more quickly.

AndrueC Silver badge
Stop

That figure should be taken with pinch of salt, of course.

Not really.

It is industry practice to record 'properties passed' when rolling out cables. No-one counts actual connections because those will only be made as/when/if the property owners choose to take up the service and may never reach 100%.

However what they shouldn't do is regard a property as passed just because it is in relatively close proximity to the cable. Most of the time it doesn't matter but if a property at the end of a street is accessed via a bridge over a canal it shouldn't be considered 'passed' unless the fibre has already been taken over the bridge or if the bridge is known to have viable ducting or suitable poles to carry the fibre.

So if by 'pinch of salt' you imply that OR is lying, then no. OTOH if you mean that engineering always has a little wiggle room then maybe. Call it 12.5 million +/- 500 ;)

To be, or not to be, in the office. Has returning to work stalled?

AndrueC Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: Remote

And I have cameras, alarm + Kensington locks at home, because I don't relish the cost and inconvenience of not working for weeks while they sort me out a new laptop if mine gets stolen.

To be fair I have one of those as well just as a protection against burglars. I have little or no faith in it though. I've never tried but it seems to me like it could be pulled out with a good yank. It'd slightly damage the case but it doesn't seem like it would stop anyone other than a casual burglar in a hurry.

AndrueC Silver badge
Meh

Re: Remote

There are multiple ways to gain entry to a company.

Or just a poorly paid worker from a cleaning agency who has a key/card to access the office out of business hours. I've worked at several companies over the years where the cleaning staff come in out of hours when no employees are around. During that time they have the freedom of the office.

Now to be clear I don't believe any of the cleaning staff I knew ever did anything nefarious but still, there's an awful lot of SMEs that have unattended outside staff wandering around on their own at various times.

What's the golden age of online services? Well, now doesn't suck

AndrueC Silver badge
WTF?

Today, I sit here with my 1 Gigabit-per-second (Gbps) fiber connection that is horrifyingly slow.

What the hell are you doing that's making it appear slow? I 'only' have 70Mb/s (18Mb/s up) and it lets me do anything I want including UHD videos from Netflix.

I had a CompuServe account back in the day. Back before they allowed you to specify a user name. I think my CS handle started 1002643, but I forget the second part. So I've been online most of my adult life but can remember life before then. All I see is it getting better and better. Granted I've never participated in the cess pit of social media (No FB account, TwitterX). I have been active on numerous forums over the years but that's as far as I ever got. I read about these things called adverts but never see them thanks to my adblocker.

So..I don't really understand the author's whining here. 1Gb/s is way, way, way more than I need. I should be getting FTTP in a few months and will probably go for a 100Mb/s service but honestly might as well stay where I am on a nominal 80/20 package. Even the extra 10/2 would probably go unnoticed.

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

AndrueC Silver badge
Flame

Re: Which led to Turbo C and C++

Visual Studio is quite nice

I think there was a time around about 2008 when that statement might have been correct. Oh and possible 2019 (when I think they finally released the 64 bit version) but aside from those two brief moments of time VS has been a bloated and often unstable pile of shite. I credit it as being one of the main reasons why I finally retired last August. I was sick to my back teeth of it and its foibles.

AndrueC Silver badge

Re: Amiga Version

You could distribute DOS applications for free as well with early version of TP but it was restricted to the .COM executable format. Which wasn't really a 'format' at all and was restricted to 64kiB. The .EXE format allowed for significantly larger applications.

AndrueC Silver badge
Happy

Re: Lazarus IDE

My programming career was: Sinclair Basic -> Locomotive Basic -> BCPL (yes, really!) -> C -> Turbo Pascal -> Delphi -> Borland Builder C++ (still using the VCL - oh how I smirked at the idea of so many other C++ programmers using MFC) -> C# (WinForms -> WPF & Xamarin) where it eventually ended last August.

I liked C#. It was an easy language to work with and made me very productive. But I did miss the cut and thrust of C++ (templates were both fun and scary) and I certainly missed RAII. C# has using but it ain't the same thing and not being able to just put objects on the stack and have them cleaned up when it unwound was irritating.

AndrueC Silver badge
Happy

Kylix was the product name. CLX was the cross-platform component library. According to that article it was based on Qt but the API followed the VCL so it's unclear whether it really was a cross-platform version of the VCL. I never used it.

"Its aim was to replace the popular Microsoft Foundation Classes with Visual Component Library. CLX was based on Qt by Nokia[citation needed].[3]: 196 The API of CLX almost completely followed VCL. It was envisioned that existing applications using VCL would be recompiled with CLX.

However, due to lacklustre performance on Windows, subtle differences from VCL, and bugs, it didn't become the expected successor to VCL. Commercial failure of Kylix stopped further development of CLX."

Amazon on the hook for predictably revolting use of concealed clothes hook spy cam

AndrueC Silver badge
Joke

Re: Another frivolous case

The best time to have a dental appointment?