A couple of rather silly-sounding entries from MSDN…
Visual Basic: Class ContainedControls
Member of VBRUN – A collection that allows access to the controls contained within the control that were added to the control by the developer who uses the control. — What?
Win32 API: DeleteFile (via Josh)
Windows 95: The DeleteFile function deletes a file even if it is open for normal I/O or as a memory-mapped file. To prevent loss of data, close files before attempting to delete them. — uh huh.
So, When Canon introduced the EOS350D, they obsoleted the EOS300D and ran it out at stupidly low prices… well, that’s the justification I used when I bought one last week.
Anyways, I knew when I bought it the 300 runs USB 1.1 rather than 2, and I can live with how astonishing slow it is to transfer pictures.
And the rapid shot buffer is only 4 shots, but I knew that.
And writing to the flash card is slow. Shooting at high resolutions and taking a rapid collection of photos do not go hand in hand. I didn’t know that, but the camera is quite a step up from where I was, so I can live with that.
And the RAW format! Nothing seems to understand it, not even Photoshop. Why have a lossless format if nothing can read it? Just store the things as TIFFs, for the love of God!
But the freak-out thing is the level of OS support for digital cameras. In XP, just plug in random USB memory stick and it works. Plug in a camera, XP says “hey look! A camera! Got a driver?”; if you say “no”, XP says “oh well, forget the camera then. It certainly can’t be anything like all those memory sticks. You’d be wanting to plug that super expensive SLR camera in so you can use it as a web cam, and I need drivers for that. You certainly wouldn’t want to be ripping the images off it to free up the flash card.” XP then proceeds to become unstable, requiring cold boots to get better again.
XP is such crap. So I loaded the drivers, and all the shitty Canon image manipulation software (excluding Photostich; that’s amazing, purely amazing).
On another note, why doesn’t my camera have a built-in MP3 player? How hard would that be? All that lovely flash memory and great thunking battery going to waste…
Oh. Final tip: to claim the GST back on “duty free” (modern equivalent) purchases over $1000, you need a tax invoice with your details on it. Or more precisely, the traveller’s details. Can be a trap for young players.
If like me you’re still clinging to Windows 2000 as the best balance between performance on older machines and the functionality of a newish operating system, you may like to take note that Win2K finishes mainstream support from June 30th.
Yep, only six months after NT4 mainstream finished — hardly seems fair, does it? Yeah okay so it’s almost six years since Win2K was released, but NT4 dates back to… what… 1996?
Personally I reckon it would have been nice to have had an all-encompassing final service pack to wrap things up. Makes things easier when rebuilding machines, you know. Instead Win2K will get a “security rollup” which seems to be code for “we can’t be arsed doing an SP” or possibly “sorry, we’re too busy building Longhorn.”
At last, one of my longest standing tech dreams has been realised. I can finally sync my phone with Outlook. I know you’ve been able to do this for years but up until today I’ve never had the means to. Two weeks ago I got a great new Nokia 6230 so I purchased a connector cable off Ebay which arrived today. I could have used Bluetooth for my connection but this chews through battery life (more of which shortly) and a cable was cheaper than an IR usb adaptor. Now I have all my contacts and calendar information for the next 12 months wherever I go.
“But surely you had all this in your Ipaq?” I hear you ask. I did, but in an effor to simplify my life and reduce the bulge in my left pocket I am increasingly leaving it home in favour of my Hipster PDA. Another reason for relying less on the iPaq is the Pocket PC version of Microsoft Money never really synched with my desktop version and tracking finances on the go was one of the major reasons I wanted a PDA. Now I simply keep my receipts in my wallet until I get home.
While I love my new phone, I’ve even set it up so I can email photos from it direct to Flickr (see my test shot), I am not impressed with the battery. It advertises 300 hours of standby – I get 48. I’ve tried to get it replaced but am having nightmare time as Optus and Nokia shuffle responsibility. All I want is a new battery and they will never hear from me again.
A comment on Scoblecomments:
Last year I went to Chessington Theme Park in the UK, I remember queuing for one particular ride where there was about 10 screens all showing Win 2k screen with a big fat Fatal Exception error tellin us the system was about to shut down! Not a good sight when your about to board a rollercaoster that goes upside down 10 times!
Great.
The weird bounces I was getting a while back are apparently due to a bug in QMail. They’re also causing some mails to be sent multiple times from webmail. Triffic. But I’ve switched webmails from SquirrelMail to IMP, and that seems to help. I don’t like IMP’s “This mail was sent by IMP” footer, but I do like its features, especially the timezone setting, which was never satisfactory in SquirrelMail.
A big batch of Microsoft patches are out. Through as someone at work pointed out, they shouldn’t be due to buffer overflows, ‘cos MS claimed years ago that they’d eliminated them in Windows XP. (Thanks Ian)
Mr 99Zeroes has apparently been sacked from Google. As Scoble remarks, the rule for blogging about work really needs to be: Don’t piss off your boss. The alternative is simply not to blog about work.
C/Net’s new online news/RSS reader/aggregator: NewsBurst. (via Steve Rubel who features on the latest G’day World podcast)
An Englishman was arrested after he used the text-only browser Lynx to donate money to a tsunami fundraiser. Apparently British Telecom technicians looking through the web site logs thought it was a hacking attempt.
Want to grep, sed, awk, ps, kill on Windows? Try Microsoft’s Services for Unix.
(via Raymond Chen)
Well, I think we now have proof that Bill Gates is not a crazed megalomaniac billionaire. If he was, he’d have had all copies of these pictures destroyed, and anybody involved killed.
Apparently these pics were taken for a magazine called Teen Beat, around 1985.
(Via Monkey Methods, whose commenters are debating whether it was 1983 as first claimed, or if the fact that there’s a Mac in the background means it must have been after 1984.)
Update 19-Oct-2005: Snopes says these were publicity shots taken for the release of Microsoft Windows in 1985.
I haven’t tried it yet, but you can get it here. It’s Win2K or XP only, ‘cos damn those NT4 and Win9X users, they deserve everything they get for not upgrading…
(via Patrick)
Tony just upgraded one of the PCs in his house to Windows 2000, from Win98.
“What?” I can hear some people saying. “Upgraded, to Windows 2000?”
Certainly. I’m a bit of a Windows luddite, and I am firmly opposed to trying to overburden old machines with OSs beyond their grasp. I’m betting the PC in question is a few years old. XP may be a wonderful thing, but it doesn’t run well on machines slower than about 1GHz, even though MS claims 300Mhz is okay.
Hell, I have a shiny new 2 point something GHz machine at work, and some functions in XP still run slowly. That’s why my (to be replaced sometime soon, probably as soon as I need to start looking seriously at .Net) 650Mhz machine at home remains on Win2K.
Old machines live on… and on… and on. And if they’re being used by people who only want them for email, web, word processing and so on, there’s no compelling reason to throw them away, no matter how much MS and Intel and Dell might wish you’d keep upgrading. As long as they’re patched up to the eyeballs, virus and firewall protected, they run okay.
For machines from about 233Mhz to 1GHz, Windows 2000 is probably the best. It’s still actively supported by Microsoft (say a thank-you to all those corporates still using it), and MS haven’t gone to the lengths of making the latest Office versions incompatible with it to make people upgrade. (Yeah, sure, convince me there was a technical reason Office 2003 couldn’t run on NT4). While it misses out on the bells and whistles of XP, for a lot of users, it’s all they need.
Slower than that, you’re probably aiming for Windows 98 SE. It may be ancient, but it’s the most stable of all the 16-32-transition Windows versions, and runs well even on a lot of machines going back 8, 9, 10 years. Patch it up with the unofficial SP, then dig out that ancient copy of Office 97 SP2 (which, frankly, does everything for Office that most people want) and non-power-users will be perfectly happy.
Okay, apart from Outlook 97. Give that a miss. 98 was okay if you can find it, but 97 was fawful. Better to give them Outlook Express. And of course you’d need to fiddle the IE security settings from their “wide open barn door” defaults.
Linux? Well, it may suit some people, but most will want a high level of Office compatability, and it just doesn’t seem to quite cut it for that yet.
Okay in theory I’m all for reining in companies when they’re being monopolistic, but this decision of the Europeans to make them ship a copy of Windows without MediaPlayer strikes me as just a tad silly. Microsoft are about to launch this version in Europe, which they’re calling — wait for it — Windows XP Reduced Media Edition.
From the sounds of it, it’s basically XP (in Home or Pro versions) without MediaPlayer. SoundRec and the movie making thingy are still included.
Why would anybody choose to buy this? Unless it’s cheaper… in which case, couldn’t you just go and download MediaPlayer from Microsoft later?
And bear in mind the major competition here is… well, it’s RealPlayer, isn’t it. Ah yes, that mob whose web site sneakily tries to steer you to the paid version when you’re looking for the free one (and there’s no direct URL to the free one), insists on an e-mail address they can send advertising to, defaults to including a useless applet that sits in your icon tray, splashes advertising over itself when you start it, and sends lots of juicy info back to home base. (I do use RealPlayer, for all the BBC webcasts… I really must check out the alternatives at free-codecs.com. Thankfully the BBC have their own licensed RealPlayer freebie download which isn’t quite so objectionable.)
Now the ruling on opening up the interface code, that sounds like the sort of thing that is more likely to level the playing field.
One of the things I find annoying is that when my computer’s busy, it stops doing the niceties. So if I want a little reminder of what the date is, I put my mouse over the clock, and… nothing. Dammit. Likewise, while the computer is busy processing something, I go surfing, so I start typing a URL into my browser and hope it autocompletes… and… nothing. I assume some of this stuff only triggers when the CPU isn’t busy, but maybe it needs to be tweaked, if the user is obviously hoping it’ll kick in. If I’m slowly nudging my mouse around over the clock, then dammit, I want to know the date.
On a similar note, how many people double-click the clock when they want to look at a calendar? I certainly do, at least if Outlook isn’t in the foreground. Alas, on locked-down machines (eg servers, which probably don’t even have Outlook), this gives you an error about not having permissions to change the clock. Dude, I don’t want to change the clock, I just want to look at the calendar.
Oh yeah. Servers. Outlook/Office. Unlikely. But they all come with Outlook Express installed by default. It’s a flippin’ server, why would I want Outlook Express on it?! Like I’m going to go sit in the server room freezing my arse off, reading Usenet and sending mail?!