test please delete

[RichardCranium]

Thankfully, with the desktop PC at the login prompt, it is connected to the network.

So I am currently transferring anything needing keeping onto an external USB drive attached to my laptop, over the LAN.

[zeitghost]

Really? I am of the opposite opinion - I find C an elegant language, beautiful in its simplicity. Hence K&R (second edition) can cover everything you ever need to know about it in just 272 pages.

C++ is to C as Lung Cancer is to Lung...

[zeitghost]

Having installed 60odd Mb of Kaspersky updates on this new POS pc I've just constructed, it then downloaded another 25Mb of additional application fixes and updates.

Then I made a really big mistake, I went on to M$ update site...

IE6.

STOPped during the update download.

Now it's doing STOPS all the time.

And Windoze update won't work on the browser.

Feck feck feckity feck.

And it does them so fast I can't see what's caused the problem.

There's a tick box somewhere that just hangs it when you get a STOP, but I can't remember where it is...

[RichardCranium]

Poxy Tesco's.

Since they were next door to the electrical shop, we popped in for some milk & bread.

Bought two tiger batons.

Got home ... they are rock hard. Completely stale.

Why is everything at Tesco's crap and expensive?

[voodooflux]

That much is true about C++. I recall examples with the STL that made my eyes water.

[voodooflux]

Why is everything at Tesco's crap and expensive?

I am also of that opinion - we recently started going slightly further afield to Morrisons.

Although I am going to pop to Tesco shortly to pick up some beer. Normally I would again favour Morrisons, but I quite fancy some Purity ale and the brewery shop closes at 1.00pm on a Saturday, so Tesco is the only alternative for that particular nectar.

[RichardCranium]

Then I made a really big mistake, I went on to M$ update site...

IE6.

STOPped during the update download.

Now it's doing STOPS all the time.

And Windoze update won't work on the browser.

flip flip flipity flip.

And it does them so fast I can't see what's caused the problem.

There's a tick box somewhere that just hangs it when you get a STOP, but I can't remember where it is...

It's OK, Zeity, I have good news.

It is the next version of Windows that's the good one.

It'll have the security problems fixed, be fast, be small and will simply work.

It's called version 3.1^H^H^H 98^H^H 98SE^H^H^H^H ME^H^H OS/2^H^H^H^H NT^H^H 2000^H^H^H^H XP^H^H XPSP1^H^H^H^H^H XPSP2^H^H^H^H^H Vista^H^H^H^H^H 7.

Yes, 7. That's the fixed one. It'll be fine. Trust me.

[RichardCranium]

Having installed 60odd Mb of Kaspersky updates on this new POS pc I've just constructed, it then downloaded another 25Mb of additional application fixes and updates.

The Missus is considering getting a USB datastick / thumb drive / keyfob thingie / datastor / keystore / whatever-they're-called to keep her college work on and wasn't sure what size to get.

I have 2 x 250Gb external drives for doing backups, so she thought something that big would be needed.

For all her previous college work and everything she has produced since including many years' worth of colour newsletters for two organisations and all her employed work in publishing, 200Mb will cover the whole lot.

My stuff, however, goes back 20 years. All of it, web sites, databases, documentation for clients, photos, client systems, fits in 1Gb. Reduce that to the documents, spreadsheets and other files I have created and it goes down to 110Mb.

So why is my C:\WINDOWS 3.53Gb and containing 21,554 files in 1,038 folders?

[NickFitz]

I decided my inability to grasp the fundamental concepts of Windows programming meant I never did ge my head around it properly.

It never dawned on me that it was the design of Windows that was at fault.

Clearly designed by committee. Also, they had this peculiar insistence on maintaining compatibility with every version back to the first. Raymond Chen's blog is the place to find out why so much of Windows is so ludicrous (although he doesn't quite see it that way)

Aside: I see blogs.msdn.com have managed to break the CSS for all of their templates... again

So I revert to K&R's books on C. C is an abortion of a language. It has no beauty, no elegance. It is assembler with big tits and a collagen arse. How on earth did the world get to take on a language with no memory management and an ambiguous syntax?

I skipped C - when the hiatus in my full-time programming began in 1990, I was still working in assembly language, or occasionally Forth. When I got back into business late in 1996, I went straight into web development

Then there's web development.

When I next looked at web development, I couldn;t believe how mental it had become. A dozen ways of doing the same thing. Basic elements like TABLES no longer worked. Huh? How did that happen? And all over the web there's advice saying you have to code the same piece of page structure multiple times for different browsers. WTF??? "code a piece of page structure"? "multiple times"? "for different browsers?"

WTF are the standards?

Whatever happened to standards?

In the late 90s, the browser war between Microsoft and Netscape led to all kinds of deliberate incompatibilities being introduced. The fact that Netscape had lost its way and soon became a mere footnote to the history of the net didn't help, as it allowed Microsoft to dominate.

However, a number of people didn't like things that way. As a result, the Web Standards Project (WaSP) came together in 1998 - a coalition of web designers and developers from around the world who actively seek to promote adherence to and correct use of the standards that are designed to ensure interoperability and accessibility.

It is thanks to the efforts of WaSP members like Molly Holzschlag, Dean Edwards and Microsoft's own Chris Wilson that Internet Explorer 8 - when rendering in IE8-mode, which it will do by default with standards-compliant content - finally offers support for web standards on a par with that which was previously only offered by such browsers as Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome. (Interestingly, in IE8-mode, the browser explicitly disables a good number of the proprietary mechanisms and properties that MS introduced in IE 4 through 6.)

I haven't produced different content for different browsers in donkeys years, other than a few lines of additional CSS to force IE 6 and 7 to work correctly.

When I worked in DP, programming was an art. It produced works of beauty that could have elegance, style, precision and correctness. You could predict from the style of someone's code whether the program would work.

In any age and any field, there are a lot more crap artists than good ones. Unfortunately, there is such a demand for web developers/designers, and so few people understand what makes a good one, that the shoddy, lazy, and incompetent are still able to thrive

Just read a few web-related questions on Stack Overflow for proof of this - for example this one, which returns us to our starting point.
(Note his claim that "it works in other browsers" - as the only browser in which it "works" is IE, it's obvious that he has done minimal testing, no research, and just wants somebody to spoonfeed him the answer. He will not learn, and he will soon be back with another question.)

I DIDN'T BREAK IT.

We know

Microsoft and Netscape did that between them; but mostly Microsoft

[BrilloPad]

Afternoon all