Posts by John Brown (no body)

Re: string manipulation

That might take up a few minutes of costly developer time to do properly. It's cheaper to waste a few minutes of millions of users time working it out for themselves!

Re: Runtime Error

"not running" errors would be compile-time errors?

Re: Turbo Pascal - Missing Semi-Colon at line 454

"I can't even remember the specific point at which any system I was using switched to producing editable source code files."

PET BASIC had a screen editor TRS-80 BASIC had a line edit, eg type EDIT 450 to edit that line. Not sure what Apple ][ BASIC did but it had an editor. All prior to Atari. But, of course, few people got to play with and learn about more than one brand so as you say, you used what you had and didn't know anything different, however good or bad it might be.

Re: Turbo Pascal - Missing Semi-Colon at line 454

"No, you learned to debug code."

Yes, especially in the early days of computer magazines before there were enough of any one particular brand for the magazines to specialise. There'd be programme listing for different computers. Not different versions of the same programme, but entirely different programmes, each for different computers in different version of BASIC, often based on different screen geometries. Trying to understand and then translate a CBM PET BASIC game to get it working on a TRS-80, and making it fit in a 64x16 screen instead of the intended 40x25 was...interesting and challenging. Oh, and different extended character sets too.

"anticipating every possible mistake they can make is not really possible."

Some people try. But the only way to even partially succeed is to make the input and options so limited that you quickly find the system no longer works as intended because of the innumerable edge case you forgot about.

Re: My favourite error message

"I have screenshots of funny unhelpful errors like the classic "An error as occurred", the plain no-nonsense "Error", and the mildly disturbing empty error box, just with an "OK" button on it."

TRS-80 Level I BASIC error messages:

HOW?

WHAT?

SORRY

Still, that's better than Window 10 with it's:

:-( Something went wrong

Progress? We've heard of it.

Re: Too good to true?

"Think of it like the early days of Time Team as they went from metal detectors to radar and then lidar."

I was thinking along similar lines, but the ground resistivity measurements. The first ones were a bit of wood with nails hammered through and a rope loop for pulling it back out after stamping it into the ground. We say that device evolve and improve over the course of multiple series going from dot matrix printouts that took hours to process and were a bit rough, to almost live video presentations of the mapping data :-)

Re: They've never taken any down

Every single report, the official response was "Does not go against community standards"

Clearly their standards are sewer-low and allow crimes to be committed while blocking the accounts of people who dare to show how to properly breast-feed a baby.

"No matter how many times one reports to Facescam, the ads keep reappearing."

Yes, always report them. Then if/when it gets to court, as it is (again), Facebook Meta can't say they didn't know. On the other hand, considering the huge number of scam ads on all these "services", it's telling that it only ever seems to be actioned or end up in court when 'slebs are affected.

Re: @Disgusted Of Tunbridge Wells

"Final thought. Maybe the reason men will accept a poor environment more readily than women is that, until recently, they were the ones expected to go out and bring enough money to keep the family fed and housed. Just a thought for when you're discussing societal pressures."

Yes, that thought crossed my mind too. Is there still a "breadwinner" mentality such that men feel obliged to put up with more shit for the "security" of a steady income while women might still feel they are not the primary breadwinner and so feel less inclined to put up with the shit and take the risk of moving on and possibly being out of work for a while. I'm speaking in generalities, of course. I know a number of couples who got married young, went to work and then a few years later took it in turns to go back into education and improve their lives and careers, the other working to support the family.

"Nice assumption on the "his", btw :D"

Considering the subject and the experience of most of us in this industry and the fact I'm nearly 60 and have a lot of past influence on my outlook on life, assuming "his" in this context had pretty high odds of being correct. Just stating that you are "T" doesn't make me wrong either unless you care to elaborate :-p

"And again there are far more of us than people think, but I guess stereotypes gonna stereotype."

I completely agree with you. My job takes me into IT departments all over the place and I meet many women in various roles. Few, if any, fall into the TV/film stereotype. But those TV/Film stereotype is what the kids see. Like advertising, many people claim not to be affected by it, but the subtle, subconscious worms are still doing their jobs. Especially on those in their formative years. As I said in a post on a similar topic on another thread, my A level Computer Studies teacher was a woman, a seconded Systems Analyst. She was the best teacher I ever had and the ONLY woman teacher in anything other than Humanities-like subjects. (That may have been influence by the school being an all boys Grammar school, only switching to Comprehensive the year I started and only switching to co-ed as I went in 6th form. There were 6 boys and 2 girls in A level CS :-))

Re: Problem?

You raise a good point, but on the other hand, it should not be a problem on the UCAS form. There may be some "unlearning" to do once reaching university, but it shows the interest in the subject and I suspect anyone doing 2 years of an A level in Law is likely to really want to do Law at degree level. On the gripping hand, of course, there's probably stats to prove I'm wrong and most A level law students fail Law at Uni :-)

Re: Problem?

"The sad part really is that there's very little room in schools these days for anything that isn't linked to an examination or assessment."

Even sadder is that computers are used for almost all of the traditional subjects, but almost exclusively as a replacement for books, pens and paper. When in reality, if all kids were taught programming along with reading and writing, they could then go on to create and use their own programmes in so many other subjects. But no, all they get is Windows and Office. Rarely any database experience and usually not even any scripting. It's not like we want them to especially come up with original stuff, just be able to understand how the tool works and what it can do for them. I'm pretty sure the conversion tables I printed out under software control for my Physics class wasn't original, but I learned how to do it. And the layout was more useful to me than the ones in the textbooks!

Re: re: Trial and Error

"It all seemed very advanced and technical at the time, but now if feels all dry-as-a-bone. Who wants to know about the various ways to depict many-to-one mappings when you can draw yellow and red boxes on a screen using LOGO and turtles and stuff, or make a beeper play Three Blind Mice?

I'd be interested to know what passes for Computer Studies nowadays. Really I would. My son did a BTec in the subject, but he didn't take to it at all. It seemed a mile away from my experiences - all K'Nex and robots... my experiences feel a bit like the nostalgia associated with my old maths textbooks that had entire chapters on the use of log tables and slide rules."

The current fad for making learning "fun" does seem to be detracting from actual learning. AT the early stages of learning, making it "fun" to help the pupils find an interest is very worthwhile. But at some point, one has to knuckle down and actual learn the hard stuff. I did great at biology and chemistry when it was all experiments and practicals and funny smells, sparks and flames etc, but soon lost interest when it got all theory and technical. I ended up doing Maths Physics and Computer Studies at A level because I really got into the theory and technical side of those subjects.

And no, it wasn't the teachers fault either. My Biology teacher was especially upset when I dropped the subject in favour of Tech Drawing because I was top of the class that year. I explained at the parents evening that it was the only way I could get to do Comp Studies. If I stayed with Biology, I couldn't later switch to CS, but I could do so if I did a year of tech Drawing first. The vagaries of school time tabling was to blame!!

"I do wonder how true that geeky stereotype is nowadays but you might be right that it puts children off the subject - maybe especially girls."

Yes, that same stereotype that you still see constantly on TV and in films. You might well see pretty girls doing "tech", but she'll invariably be wearing glasses, have her hair tied tightly back and very probably be single and a bit "weird". The usual stereotype for guys in tech also still apply most of the time too. TV and film casting is almost always "traditional". They are terrified that the audience might be confused. Especially in US productions. Anyway, what else can you expect? They are already struggling to cope with casting female leads and re-writing history to show woman and so-called "minorities" into traditional roles instead of creating new, strong roles. Maybe someone could cast Olivia Coleman as Othello? She's done pretty much everything else al;ready :-)

"May I ask what this assumption is based on?"

By the sounds of his post, the assumption that all kids are either boys or girls. Being an old crusty here, I find we are being told more and more often that this is not the case and there are a number of children who are not boys or girls but are somewhere on a sliding scale between the two. So, by definition, there can't be a 50:50 split anyway :-) LGB are boys or girls but there are T to take into account. I'm less sure about what the Q & + count as, that part seems to be more up in the air in terms of definition.

Re: HTML email is in itself a security hazard

"That's the problem right there. Don't open attachments, problem solved."

We're an IT company and trying to convince our own people, especially marketing and HR, of this is like Canute trying to stop the tide. Just the other day I got another missive from security about being careful of "suspicious" email, quite literally followed 5 minutes later by a company announcement in HTML, the text as graphics (FFS!!!) and a link to a sharepoint document with a URL so long I couldn't see it all on my phone so was unable to confirm it went to our own domain. 10 minutes after that came a request for information sent to ALL staff asking for personal information on a form at www.office365.com/something, ie not even our own hosting. Both were confirmed by my boss as genuine company emails.

Sometimes, you just couldn't make it up!!!

"I believe the ICO has been able to recover fines directly from the Directors since 2018. No doubt they'll all have tried to move or hide their assets but that doesn't work either these days."

And if it comes to it, Unexplained Wealth Orders on their friends and family if they try to hide it that way.

A rogue engineer?

(Or should be a rouge engineer in these forums?)

Re: Douglas Adams would be proud

Same thing caught my attention too. Oh, the irony of upper management being so out of touch that being shown they are out of touch is mind blowing for them.

Re: Can AI make critical military decisions?

At this stage, it's not even AI, never mind sentient. Otherwise, I agree. :-)

Re: GDPR?

Yes, their defence of "it was on the internet in full public view therefore we can copy it" might not sound so useful to them when others start doing it to them with their websites and software, which is also on the publicly accessible internet.

At the very least, they only have to look at the precedence of Google and their scraping, most notably on the image search page where in the past, clicking the thumbnail brought up the original image only. Nowadays, clicking on it take you to the source site. Not to mention all those books available to the public, in public libraries. Can we make our own copies of them too now? Clearview seem to a have bigger and better Reality Distortion Fiend than Apple ever had. Maybe Apple should sue them for copying that?

Re: Support for Ukraine

In the UK, you don't get any tax benefits. However, you can fill out a form and then the charity can claim back the tax you already paid on your donation when you earned the money, in effect increasing your donation by 20%.