ProFox August 2019

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[NF] or not: MS patches break VB 6, VBA and VBScript
by Ted Roche 19 Aug '19

19 Aug '19

If your apps intergrate in with VB or VBA scripts or VBScript, it's possible last week's Patch Tuesday may wreak havoc with your applications: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/08/17/0153225/windows-update-to-fix-crit… In the past, I've shipped some apps with Office or Exchange functionality that used a a variety of techniques that included scripting, Automation and VBScript for Exchange configuration. You might want to do some testing if you're in a similar situation/. Happy Monday, -- Ted Roche Ted Roche & Associates, LLC http://www.tedroche.com --- StripMime Report -- processed MIME parts --- multipart/alternative text/plain (text body -- kept) text/html ---

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Re: [NF] Seeking well-equipped laptop recommendations
by Ted Roche 19 Aug '19

19 Aug '19

On Fri, Aug 16, 2019 at 8:49 PM Ken Dibble <krdibble(a)stny.rr.com> wrote: > > Hm.. tablets. I don't know if this is applicable to your case, but MS > is permitting vendors to ship devices with 32 GB SSD HDDs and > full-blown Windows 10 on them. No, I'm pretty sure that system was mothballed. This client had unusual requirements and the tablets fit the bill for a couple of years until they could transition to something else. They've moved on. > > > Windows 10 now requires 32 GB of space for itself (build "1903"). > Yeah, running "Windows" on anything other than relatively expensive, high-end hardware always seems to end as a losing proposition. Various Windows At Work, Windows Mobile, Windows Lite, Windows RT, Windows Phone efforts have ended up splattering. The new Surface tablets are promising, but they are mid-to-high range in components and price. -- Ted Roche Ted Roche & Associates, LLC http://www.tedroche.com --- StripMime Report -- processed MIME parts --- multipart/alternative text/plain (text body -- kept) text/html ---

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Re: [NF] Seeking well-equipped laptop recommendations
by Gene Wirchenko 19 Aug '19

19 Aug '19

At 17:55 2019-08-16, Ken Dibble <krdibble(a)stny.rr.com> wrote: >>>So modernity expects a person like me to be happy with 256 GB. But >>>I've always been a fan of over-provisioning because the >>>unpredictable and the unexpected is an everyday thing in my life. >> >> What is unexpected about needing more memory and disk space >> on a computer? <BEG> > >Oh, Gene, Gene, Gene. > >Don't you see? We don't actually need *any* memory or disk space on >our computers at all anymore. It's all done in the cloud! Sooo >secure, and reliable, and everything is just taken care of for you, >so you don't need to worry your little head about it! In fact, we >should thank the IT powers that be for condescending to even allow >our localized devices to continue to work for a few more years, so >we can have time to adjust to the brave new world. > ><EBer BEG> IT is just great! It is totally blue sky! Not a cloud in ... uh ... Sincerely, Gene Wirchenko

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[NF] Adobe Digital Editions
by Charles Hart Enzer, M.D. 17 Aug '19

17 Aug '19

WIN 10 build 1803 Adobe Digital Editions not working Library not shown Books won't open: ePub and PDF ACSM does not APPEAR to work -- but book IS found in the directory *Shai / שי **Charles Hart Enzer, MD(Ohio, USA), FAACAP* *Aliyah <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliyah>: Cincinnati to Jerusalem <http://www.gojerusalem.com/items/263/German-Colony/>'s German Colony <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Colony,_Jerusalem> May, 2017* *Volunteer Associate Professor of PsychiatryUniversity of Cincinnati Medical CenterWebSite: **EnzerMD.com <http://EnzerMD.com>* *Publications* <http://www.enzermd.com/CV.html#Publications> *Tiny Country, Huge Dreams* *ארץ זעירה, **חלומות ענקיים* *עם ישראל חי* --- StripMime Report -- processed MIME parts --- multipart/alternative text/plain (text body -- kept) text/html ---

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Timing Issue
by John Weller 17 Aug '19

17 Aug '19

Hi I have an app with a countdown timer to shut down. The code is as shown below (white space removed): LOCAL lcMessageText DECLARE Sleep in Win32API ; integer nMilliseconds WITH ThisForm .cmdCancel.enabled = .F. .Countdown = Control.Countdown IF .ShutdownFlag = .T. lcMessageText = 'Shutting down in ' ELSE lcMessageText = 'Closing the Membership system down in ' ENDIF *&* This is the message that doesn't display .lblTimer.Caption = lcMessageText + ALLTRIM(STR(.Countdown)) + ' seconds' .Refresh DO WHILE .Countdown > 0 Sleep(5000) .Countdown = .Countdown - 5 .lblTimer.Caption = lcMessageText + ALLTRIM(STR(.Countdown)) + ' seconds' .Refresh ENDDO *!* IF .ShutdownFlag = .T. *!* RUN Shutdown.exe /s /f /t 10 *!* ENDIF .Release CLEAR EVENTS ENDWITH My problem is that the message before the DO WHILE loop doesn't display. The code is in the Click event of a button. When I press the button nothing appears to happen for about 20 seconds then the messages in the loop are displayed. It then works as planned. Is there any way I can force the system to display the message? Thanks John John Weller 01380 723235 07976 393631 --- StripMime Report -- processed MIME parts --- multipart/alternative text/plain (text body -- kept) text/html ---

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Re: [NF] Seeking well-equipped laptop recommendations
by Ken Dibble 17 Aug '19

17 Aug '19

> >>So modernity expects a person like me to be happy with 256 GB. But >>I've always been a fan of over-provisioning because the >>unpredictable and the unexpected is an everyday thing in my life. > > What is unexpected about needing more memory and disk space on > a computer? <BEG> Oh, Gene, Gene, Gene. Don't you see? We don't actually need *any* memory or disk space on our computers at all anymore. It's all done in the cloud! Sooo secure, and reliable, and everything is just taken care of for you, so you don't need to worry your little head about it! In fact, we should thank the IT powers that be for condescending to even allow our localized devices to continue to work for a few more years, so we can have time to adjust to the brave new world. <EBer BEG> Ken

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Re: [NF] Seeking well-equipped laptop recommendations
by Ken Dibble 17 Aug '19

17 Aug '19

>One of the coolest FoxPro apps I ever shipped worked on 2 Gb 10" >tablet-network hybrids with 32Gb SSD storage. Taken into the field for data >gathering and docked in the home office to upload data to the mothership >and gather tomorrow's assignments. If they dropped one out of their truck >onto the driveway, we had to spend another $129 to replace it. Hm.. tablets. I don't know if this is applicable to your case, but MS is permitting vendors to ship devices with 32 GB SSD HDDs and full-blown Windows 10 on them. First time somebody is confronted with an MS forced "upgrade", the thing tanks, because there isn't enough extra space to handle the downloading/unpacking etc etc. After many weeks of struggling, the intrepid Susan Bradley (the "Patch Lady" for those who know her) finally figured out how to get an upgrade installed by plugging in a USB drive for extra storage and fiddling around with it (I can't remember the details but she may actually have had to temporarily merge the USB with the SSD as one logical partition; not something your typical user is gonna do). As she said, it shouldn't be that hard, and MS never should have permitted those vendors to ship those machines. > > Windows 10 now requires 32 GB of space for itself (build "1903"). > > That means you need 64 GB in order to cope with the > > download/installation/cleanup process for those eventual feature > > "upgrades" that we, as mere pawns in MS's marketing game, are no > > longer allowed to ignore. And some people have been speculating that > > the OS space is likely to double to 64 GB in the near future. That > > would mean a 128 GB HDD would have no room left at all for anything else. > > > >128 Gb (billions of bytes! sheesh!) was a minimum, absolutely. You spec'ced >machines without customizing. More is better, nearly always. Well, a 256 GB SSD HDD seems to be one of the most common configurations in off-the-shelf laptops these days. > > So modernity expects a person like me to be happy with 256 GB. But > > I've always been a fan of over-provisioning because the unpredictable > > and the unexpected is an everyday thing in my life. > > > >Sure. Are these field machines you expect to be beaten to death in a couple >of years or long-term cubicle machines as investments you plan to keep >alive for 4-5 year? And what do you run on them? That would guide you to >pick between workaday Inspirons vs. high-performance Lattitudes for >example, sticking with Dell as a f'rinstance. We've been able to get 5-7 years out of most of our ASUS and Acer machines up to now. I have one guy who, though he never leaves his office, insists on using a laptop instead of a desktop because he refuses to allocate more space. He's had three hard drives fail on three laptops over the last 9 years. But he also periodically throws tantrums at equipment and has been known to physically break pretty good-quality scanners and even big ol' copiers. So who knows? Maybe he picks up the laptop and flings it at the wall on occasion. We have around 40 laptops (and around 100 desktops). Somewhere between 15 and 20 of the laptops travel constantly; the rest are at the main office and used occasionally for presentations, or by traveling staff who come into the office to do "paper" work on them on a regular basis. I had one of the traveling laptops die due to a controller failure a couple of years ago. But that's about it. We replaced a bunch of them with newer models about the same time as that one, not because there was anything wrong with them, but because New York State, in its infinite wisdom, gave us a bunch of money and told us we had to buy new laptops for that particular contract. Which was good because the old ones were i3 and dog slow for anything other than web browsing, and we replaced them with i7s. Some of these older more-or-less stationary i3 laptops are also dog-slow running my agency-wide Foxpro app. Travelers who need to use that app get to it via RDP, where it is actually quite snappy, because it lives in a VM on a massively-overprovisioned hypervisor/SAN cluster. We'll see if that continues to be the case after we put a VPN on the RDP channel (another one of those fun NYS requirements). As for HDD size (as Arlo Guthrie might say, "Remember HDD size? It's a song about HDD size.") although some of these travelers are fervently believed by the state Health Department not to need to store any highly sensitive PII or PHI on the machines, in fact they do it all the time; hundreds of downloaded partially-completed PDF insurance forms. And we have nurses who do field assessments using an offline system that stores a lot of local data until they can get internet access and synch it with a website. And people in general are packrats. I can tell them to delete stuff they don't need until I'm blue in the face, to little or no effect. I'd rather let them accumulate in peace than have them constantly pester my help desk guys with complaints about running out of room. And my policy is that, regardless of the original purpose for which they are purchased, the devices should all be interchangeable so they can easily be reassigned. So if only a few of them need an i7 and 512 GB of HDD space right now, then they all should have that to meet potential future needs. Thanks. Ken

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Re: [NF] Seeking well-equipped laptop recommendations
by Michael Oke, II 17 Aug '19

17 Aug '19

Can you elaborate on your resistance to HP and Lenovo? The last few Lenovos that I have had the opportunity to work with have been slick units. ----------------------------- Michael Oke, II okeind(a)gmail.com 661-349-6221 ----------------------------- On Thu, Aug 15, 2019 at 11:02 AM Ken Dibble <krdibble(a)stny.rr.com> wrote: > > >SSDs make a lot of sense for speed, weight and less noise and if > >everything's on the network or the internet, 128 Gb SSD is just as good as > >a 1TB HDD. > > Thanks Ted. > > "Everything's on the network or the internet" seems to be a common > assumption and is apparently the reason why it's pretty hard to find > larger HDDs on laptops that also have the other stuff I want. Weight > seems to be a major consideration for marketers, but it isn't for me. > We do not keep stuff on the network or the internet here, with some > exceptions. > > Windows 10 now requires 32 GB of space for itself (build "1903"). > That means you need 64 GB in order to cope with the > download/installation/cleanup process for those eventual feature > "upgrades" that we, as mere pawns in MS's marketing game, are no > longer allowed to ignore. And some people have been speculating that > the OS space is likely to double to 64 GB in the near future. That > would mean a 128 GB HDD would have no room left at all for anything else. > > So modernity expects a person like me to be happy with 256 GB. But > I've always been a fan of over-provisioning because the unpredictable > and the unexpected is an everyday thing in my life. > > Ken > > [excessive quoting removed by server]

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Re: [NF] Seeking well-equipped laptop recommendations
by Ken Dibble 17 Aug '19

17 Aug '19

>Can you elaborate on your resistance to HP and Lenovo? The last few >Lenovos that I have had the opportunity to work with have been slick units. I have boycotted all HP products since they adopted their policy, many years ago, of deliberately breaking perfectly good printers (as well as not-empty ink cartridges) after some period of time in order to force people to buy new ones. I had already read about this policy in several places on the single day when six HP inkjet printers of the same exact model, which I had bought all on the same day at the same place, all suddenly had mechanical failures. I've never bought a Lenovo machine, but their little rootkit episode a few years back convinced me that they are not to be trusted. Ken

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Re: [NF] Seeking well-equipped laptop recommendations
by Gene Wirchenko 16 Aug '19

16 Aug '19

At 11:01 2019-08-15, Ken Dibble <krdibble(a)stny.rr.com> wrote: >So modernity expects a person like me to be happy with 256 GB. But >I've always been a fan of over-provisioning because the >unpredictable and the unexpected is an everyday thing in my life. What is unexpected about needing more memory and disk space on a computer? <BEG> Sincerely, Gene Wirchenko

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ProFox August 2019