Posts by captain veg 2624 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2009
Latterly because of a large legacy codebase. But in the first place, because it was the only way to get a Windows app up and running in a sane amount of time. I'm talking about the Windows 3.0 timeframe. There was no Java. C++ was new and didn't offer any help in building graphical UIs.
Having previously made a living writing C and assembler for DOS I invested in a copy of Petzold. I counted 80-odd lines of code in his "Hello, world" program, just to put some text on screen. VB could do that with a few mouse clicks and no code at all. No contest.
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I shall assume that you mean pre .NET (i.e. real) VB.
1. Recurssion isn't a word. Recursion, on the other hand, is trivial in VB. You will probably want to precede your parameter names with the ByVal keyword.
2. Use the AddressOf operator and a suitable declaration of CallWindowProc.
Next!
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Actually manufacturers would quite like to replace the steering wheel with something like a joystick -- it would free up a lot of interior space and make left/right-hand-drive conversion much simpler -- but they are not allowed to. Current regulations require a solid physical connection between the steering control and the steered wheels.
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Item = value, Item-ID = key.
Item composed of zero or more Attributes, separated by Attribute Marks.
Attribute composed of zero or more Values, separated by Value Marks.
Value composed of zero or more Subvalues, separated by Subvalue Marks.
And the really prescient thing is that the codes used for AM, VM and SVM are all illegal characters in Utf8, and so can still work as separators in this post-ASCII world.
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They already have that one covered. All employees in France are obliged to undergo a medical examination every two years at the expense of their employer. This is a make-work scheme for a cohort of médecins du travail who do nothing else -- certainly not general practice -- and would be otherwise unemployable.
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> Also here we pay to see the GP, and get it back later, which does mean that most people that go to see a doctor do, actually, have something wrong with them
By "here", do you mean France? If so then the "something wrong with them" that you mention is almost entirely hypochondria. Honestly, your average French person will go urgently to the doctor because of a sniffly nose in winter (which they will insist on calling "rhinitis"), and won't leave without a prescription.
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The quality of care in France may well be good (I haven't had much cause to find out), but the inefficiencies of a fragmented system are obvious. Every French family has at least one set of crutches in the loft because when someone breaks a leg -- and, since everyone goes skiing here, that's not uncommon -- they are obliged to buy their own set. The purchase is reimbursed, but the crutches remain the property of the breakee, who pretty soon has no further use for them. The total lack of any kind of connectedness between the various medical agencies also means that individuals are responsible for keeping their own medical records and carting them around with them when visiting the various practitioners. X-ray images are pretty unwieldy things to carry on a bus, I can tell you.
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You might then have a legitimate complaint against the Graun. In one of the linked articles it is clearly stated "public spending as a percentage of GDP [will] fall to its lowest level since the 1930s", and that was written by proper journalists that often write on economic matters.
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/dec/03/autumn-statement-2014-george-osborne-spending-cuts
I'm not sure, though, how many people would make this distinction between spending and consumption. The fact that Osbourne is having to stump up an additional pile of cash for (largely in-work) benefits may well be unwelcome and unexpected (to him), but it is a consequence of the same set of policies.
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I think it worth mentioning that the article was not written by any Guardian staff member. This was an invitation piece.
And in an article of over 700 words, Tim concentrates entirely on just ten. Yes, I understand that they are not literally true, but it's still a bit of a straw man. What about the rest? Do you deny that "[t]he Office for Budget Responsibility just reported that the level of public spending will be at second world war levels once this government has finished with its cuts."?
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... and open-source VB6.
OK, it's a bit late, but some of us still have a lot of (real) VB code to maintain, and no easy way to make it run well and look good on current versions of Windows. It is sobering to realise that when VB6 came out, Windows 98 was Microsoft's premier offering.
VB.NET and its successors are just C# with superficially VB-like syntax. Porting really is not that different from a total rewrite.
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The author clearly subscribes to the strangely common belief that all foreigners secretly speak English fluently, and only insist on practising their mother tongues in order to annoy Americans and Brits. It is of a piece with the assertion that France is a socialist country (it is actually deeply conservative; the current president is only the third of that persuasion out of nine since the war) and that House of Cards was created by Netflix, rather than the BBC.
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"Iliad’s Free offering cellular add-on purchases to customers for ridiculous prices, with deals going down to €2-a-month for cellular"
Nope. That's the price for the basic cellular package as a standalone product. If you are an ADSL/fibre subscriber, it is free gratis. The Free/Iliad model is to keep adding new services while keeping the price the same, rather than entering a price war.
"The device uses 802.11N WiFi, so it could follow down the precise same route as Free, offering Wi-Fi First handsets"
Again this strange assertion. I'm a customer, so I should know -- there is no WiFi access to the Free Mobile network. And they don't "offer" handsets at all. They will sell you one, if you like, but at retail price, and they are just bog standard unlocked devices.
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> Apart from 'Microsoft don't know how to do the overlapping ones they promised two years earlier
They could and did do overlapping windows in Windows 1. That's what a drop-down menu is. What they chose not to do was overlapping top-level app windows, partly for fear of litigation from Cupertino and partly because they genuinely thought, backed by observation of novice user behaviour, that it was less confusing.
This belief later gave us the Metro UI. Someone hammer a stake through it, please.
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This is all true. What the author meant to says is "the absence of language features and classes make JavaScript projects hard to maintain for large teams of barely competent (but cheap) programmers who need protecting against themselves." We rockstar coders can continue writing framework-free uber-code using ed.
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Clearly everything he said is bollocks. The only people gaining additional privacy protection by turning on encryption in everyday internet services are their everyday users. Bad guys already know how to use secure channels. or can make them for themselves. Its hardly rocket science. So the real target must be everyday users. Us. Q.E.D.
Now fuck off and find some criminals.
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> That's it. It's value added tax because it's added to the value of the goods, not it's a tax on the added value. Jesus wept.
I care not for your deity's tears, and they don't change the fact that the government only receives nett tax on the value added. Sure, the retailer simply collects 20% but at each stage of supply (except the last one to the consumer) the recipient claims back the VAT that they paid to *their* supplier. So the final cut to Apple is more than 80% and the final cut to government is less than 20%.
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"When I took my seatbelt off, the Caterham 160 didn’t beep at me. I didn’t get electronically reprimanded when I got out and left the headlights on "
You just sold it to me.
Cars should *never* beep at you except possibly to warn that you are about to reverse into something solid. I don't want it to turn the wipers on for me, nor the headlights, nor apply the parking brake. I can do all of those thing just fine for myself, thanks. Better, in fact. I don't even want self-cancelling indicators. I can do that better than the car too. I'm the driver, godammit!
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"Engine friction can be reduced simply by changing the gearing it to run slower to produce more torque at lower rpm."
That is.... illogical, Captain.
Upping the gearing will indeed allow you to exploit the reduced weight and improved aerodynamics, but it won't change the torque curve of the engine one jot.
For urban driving, you can get much the same effect anyway just by changing up earlier.
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"In the world of inclined playing fields, little beats your TV licence fee going towards setting up an online store to compete with online stores that are not governmentally subsidised"
BBC Worldwide is a commercial organisation that is not supported by the licence fee. In fact it subsidises it.
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Bollocks!
> The Office toolbar / menu UI was broken
Yes, it was broken in a previous round of cheap UI gimmickry. Simply unbreaking it would have been the correct action, not wholesale replacement by something even more bizarrely inexplicable.
> It even supports the old menu shortcut keys.
No. It. Doesn't. I don't know how this myth ever gained traction. Almost none of the shortcuts I had ingrained into my fingers work post-2007.
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Not France, alas.
I quite regularly take the train from Paris to Toulouse. There is NO signal at all between the large towns, so you have about 5 minutes roughly every hour to get what communication you can done.
Free WiFi? No WiFi at all on the trains. Or in most of the stations.
On the other hand, a standard ticket costs 55 euros, and I have paid as little as 17 in advance.
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