I'm so making a necklace out of Ctrl-Alt-Delete.

I had to reinstall windows this week, and during the process of figuring out which button takes you to BIOS, my finger slipped and smashed the keyboard twice, then picked it up and slammed it into the desk. Turns out it was a USB keyboard, which the 'older' mobo ignores until after the OS loads. Talk about laugh. Anyway, I collected the buttons, because I would hate to lose Ctrl, and I'm rather fond of Esc as well. Now I'm looking for a code snippet that can be 'hard-coded' using the standard buttons on a single keyboard. The [Insert] & [Delete] buttons are low hanging fruit, but possibly lack finesse? Also the space bar didn't make it. I was thinking of xkcd: Exploits of a Mom[^, specifically: Robert'); DROP TABLE [Students]; -- The core 'DROP TABLE' contains no repeats, and I imagine Randall wouldn't be absolutely crushed if we changed Robert and Students, but we only have one [;] and one [-]. Most other SQL is going to run out of ['] too. Now I'm working on double entendres using [Insert] [End], and thinking about all of the keyboards I've thrown away :'(

I'm not one to hate on VB6, but today's gonna be an exception. Also I want this message to be on the internet so the next poor swine who gets this message might be lucky enough to see this post. I recently added some functionality to an OCX in our legacy VB6 system. The OCX compiled without errors, but any program that used it could no longer load it. When I tried to reference it in a new project, I got the error "File not found: 'C:\Users\???\AppData\Local\Temp\VBB685.tmp'". About a week of tearing my hair out followed. I'd just upgraded to windows 10, I'm still not sure if that's relevant. The thing is, I added a property. Removing it fixed the bug. Adding ANY property broke it again. Eventually I broke compatibility, made two functions which were Public but could/should have been Private .. um, Private, and added my property again. Now it's all good. I can only assume there's some sort of really small limit on the number of exposed properties of a VB6 OCX. If this is/was common knowledge, well then what the hell google :p

Good to know the British agree. Perhaps when they sober up they will tell us what they agree with? ;P

It depends what you call a line of code. When I was 5 or 6, my dad brought home a Burroughs dumb terminal without any sort of storage at all. Later we got a tape drive so we could save stuff, truly something to make you remember stiffy drives with something like fondness. My older brother was the true driver of the process, but we had a couple of dot-matrix printouts of program listings, entirely ones & zeros, pages of the stuff, and if you typed them in without any errors, you got space invaders, pacman, or the like. If you made a mistake later in the listing, you might still be able to recover and fix the mistake, but an early typo was instant death. So, my brother and I would enter this lot over a couple of hours, he would use some arcane trick to make it run, then the terminal was left on for a couple of days or weeks until we lost interest. Then I went on to study chemistry, and only came back to programming in my mid-20's. COBOL, to show my age. Although really when I started COBOL, people had been calling it a dead language for decades.

Exactly this. Consider a car with automatic transmission. Can you tell me how a planetary gearset works? More importantly, will I still be awake when you're done? So work out your technology, drop a couple of throwaway hints how it works, or at least what happens when it goes wrong, but for dogs sake don't explain it to me. A second pet peeve of mine is authors who think future generations will be fixated on what we are currently doing. With all of history to choose from, the odds of anyone choosing to visit 2013 is so implausible that the 4th wall is shattered to smithereens. Take two iconic authors, Frank Herbert, and Iain Banks. Dune. This has to be one of the best Sci-Fi books ever written. Does he explain how the space ships fold space? No, he explains that they need navigators who are permanently high to pilot them. Does he care what their ancestors were doing in the 20th century? Bahahahaha, you probably couldn't pinpoint the second millenium with his calendar. Excession. I would vote this the best Sci-Fi book ever written. Does he explain how they built those defense drones so small? No, he throws it into a fight, and as it dies, he mentions that the entire battle took half a second. Hm, sorry, spoilers :-O

:omg: well now I feel suitably daft, this is ancient history. Thank you :-D

OK, so as I understand it the db_accessadmin role got merged into db_securityadmin in recent versions of SQL server? This is fine, it's better this way. My question is, when did it happen? I try to cater for all reasonable flavours of SQL server in my system, I recently took great joy in removing support for SQL 7 (The last client using it paid me to migrate their data to 2008r2 via 2005). Now I'm trying to set up a login with both db_accessadmin & db_securityadmin rights. Or just db_securityadmin, if appropriate. So I need to know which release they merge in. Google is useless on this, so is MSDN. I could just try to grant the right and suppress the error if it fails, On Error resume next anyone ;P

One day we'll look back on this and plow into a parked car.

I have to confess having lost interest in this type of game, but I have played a few, going back to Dune 2 on a 386. Master of Orion 2 is of course a classic, even if it's not exactly in the mold you asked for. However, I suggest either/both of the Homeworld games. The graphics are pretty cool, and the 3D field of movement was mind-blowing 12 years ago when it was released.

I tend to keep reading and hope for the best. With books like 'A clockwork orange' or 'Feersum Endjinn' that's about all you can do because the words don't actually exist outside of the book. Besides, I have no real desire to learn archaic English. That said, I am reading my first ever Wodehouse! Which is pretty odd, because I've read everything by Tom Sharpe and Pratchett. He's a bit like Shakespeare, you're kinda assumed to have read his stuff, it's like the foundation upon which the language is built.

Well when I 'format' a drive, I first delete the partition and re-create it. Is that enough or should I delete the partition, shut down and remove power for a couple of seconds, and then start again? Then I might as well kill the partition with a bootable linux cd, then boot and install windows.

I hate this darn machine, I wish that I could sell it. It won't do what I want it to, but only what I tell it.

LED projectors are improving rapidly, and completely remove any bulb issues. Although I'm not an early adopter, so I'm gonna give them a year or two to bed down the technology.

Well there is a minimum wage, but it's not a whole lot, and unemployment is so high that lots of people don't get even that. I personally employ 2 domestics and a driver 5 days a week, and a gardener/driver/painter/etc over the weekend.

Makes sense to me, I've noticed that giving my work server a fair bash on the side when it plays up seems to stun the gremlins for a bit, and also makes me feel a whole lot better. Then I go and make tea, and by the time I get back we've both got over our respective issues, and I've regained feeling in my hand :rolleyes:

I watch my startup apps like a hawk. I'm probably a bit gung-ho stopping services too, but generally everything seems to cope.

My experience of the windows OS is that it runs pretty well for 2-3 years, and then sorta slows down for no obvious reason. You can nurse it along by dumping temp files, defragmenting, and perhaps (god help us) running a registry cleaner, but really you're gonna have to format and re-install sooner rather than later. My laptop has reached this point. It's a 3 year old core 2 duo with 2G ram running XP, but boots slower than the 2000 box I've just set up for my kids, even though that's a 6 year old AMD 1600+ with 1G. A pre-emptive disclaimer, this isn't an attack on windows, I know windows, I develop for windows, mostly I like windows. I am about to try a linux dual-boot, but expect to still mostly use XP. So, any comments? Do you upgrade your hardware often enough never to notice this, or do you, like me, nurse what you have for a decade after it's paid for itself? I should probably mention my kid's old box, a Celeron 2200 with 256M ram, is going to my mom, and her Celeron 900 is probably going to my domestic worker. ;P I'd also like to know if Vista, and by extension windows 7, still suffer from this, or if it's miraculously gone away?

We have a control database which stores the desired structure of our application databases. Changes are made to this by the developers using a change program, and then another program pulls the entire control database down and generates a vb file. This table structure has it's own version number. Finally the vb file is compiled into a database manager, which uses this structure to generate or upgrade the application databases. It may seem cumbersome, but at least you don't have to go on site to apply database changes.

I started out as a COBOL developer in 1996, and used it for 5 years. Then I moved to VB, which I have used for the last 7 years. My current company has two versions of the same payroll software package, one pure COBOL, and one mostly VB, but with the core processing still done in COBOL. The VB system is my baby, but ... For a start, most of our customers are highly resistant to moving from the old system to the windows version. Their reasons are basically as follows: Unmatched processing speed. A large payroll run with 20 thousand employees would take all night in the windows system. The old system pumps it out in a few hours. Stability. COBOL just runs. Printing. COBOL prints using the printers built-in text fonts, which print really fast. Plus has anyone ever tried to set up a line impact printer in Windows? Did you enjoy it? Stability v2. Which would you prefer, a system developed over 30 years, starting small and gradually growing more complex. Or a GUI package based on the first system and migrated over 5 years? The second obviously being more dynamic, complex due to the GUI, and with 25 years less beta testing? Data ownership. COBOL data files are stored encrypted on your hard drive. Convincing someone that they should relinquish control to the SQL/network administrator is tough going. Piracy. It's much easier to illegally copy the COBOL system. The Potty 1