MartinusV2

Hello Paul,

We know by now that you use a NUC as main PC. Saw that today : Intel NUCs, Nvidia Shield TV Both Hit With High-Severity Security Flaws

Hope you are not affected

That's a weird form factor phone. Android Police

Hello Paul,

I can say:

NewEdgeBetaInstalled++;

So I guess, I'am 1 million + 1 user. Will install this browser on my mom PC.

I must say, I am very surprised by the new Edge. So far it's pretty stable and works very well. Even replaced the old Edge to the new one as a default browser.

Hello Paul,

Your “Windows programming” series brought back found memories of how much I liked Borland in the MS-DOS era. And like your rant in Windows Weekly about how bad Microsoft was against every competitor made me appreciate Borland a lot more because in my view, Borland was innovating in the software development where Microsoft stole so many ideas that I hated Microsoft very much too.

My initiation with computers was when I was in secondary school (12 to 16 of age) here in the province of Quebec. The computer was an Apple IIe. I was so blown away, that’s was when I decided to be a programmer. The school also had some old IBM PC and that’s where I learned programming in Basic.  And at the time, we also had some weird French made PC clones with Azerty keyboards (that was hell).

Later when I started Cégep (kinda professional school between Hight School and University in US).  I was learning Pascal on a mainframe Vax VMS on serial dump terminals. The editor was ultra basic and I had no debugger. When I complained to my teacher that thing was slow and that we add to use another software to compile and see errors, he said to me: “I may have a thing for you”. He showed me Turbo Pascal from Borland.

I felled in love with the software. It had a great IDE (for the time), had a lightning fast compiler and a basic debugger all inside the same software. Again, I was blown away again.  Anders Hejlsberg was my hero. When I could and I had the money, I kept buying the newest versions.

And Borland kept innovating with Turbo Pascal and Turbo C. They added Turbo Vision. Nice visual framework for MS-DOS. When memory in MS-DOS was becoming a problem, Borland created VROOM, a technology that was able to swap code to fit within the 640k memory limit. It even worked with EMS memory. And then came Paradox database engine. I had the perfect programming environment at that time. I did some cool software for customers at my local computer store. Granted it wasn’t huge projects, but it was fun.

I then started to notice Microsoft copying Borland with Quick C and even Quick Pascal at that time.  Compared to Turbo Pascal, it was slow and was taking a lot of memory.

Then things changed with Windows 3. I had to wait for a version of Turbo Pascal for Windows for building applications and again Borland innovated with the OWL (Object Window Library). It was then easier to build Windows applications. And then noticed Microsoft copying again OWL with MFC.

Later came Delphi, I was again blown away with that programming environment. Compared to Visual Basic, we had all that we needed to create great Windows applications. Great set of Components (VCL). Great database engine called BDE (Borland Database Engine). Was so easy, compile program. Drop the .EXE to a disk and voila. You needed to install separately the BDE if needed.

And then my hate for Microsoft really started when they hired my hero Anders. That’s when I think Microsoft accelerated the demise of Borland that was already struggling with the purchase of Word Perfect and Dbase. Quattro Pro was a great Excel like software, and I liked Paradox too.  

And then the .Net came with C#. I was so astonished by the similarities of Delphi in C#. It had the ease of RAD with a very nice runtime. So, the unthinkable happened. I switched to C#. It kept getting better and better with the years. Eclipsing Delphi that was now sold to Inprise then later to Embarcadero. And now to Idera

I thought Delphi would die but recently I’ve found out that it’s still alive and now we can make Android, iOS, MacOs, Windows, and Linux software with the same code. You guessed it; I am back with Delphi. I am tired of the false promises of Microsoft with WinForms, WPF and UWP and Xamarin. I have been burned too many times to be told to learn this and then this to finally realize that UWP would die quick. If I could rewind time, I would have stayed with Delphi all along.

Delphi compiler is still lightning fast. Can still copy only the .EXE. But the IDE suck compared to Visual Studio  By the way, TmsSoftware created an extension for creating PWA with Delphi. Looks cool.

All that long post (sorry Paul and readers) to get to your rant in Windows Weekly. It awakened some hurt when you mentioned Quatro and Turbo Pascal. This is when you made me realize how bad Microsoft was at the time. They stole Anders and they successfully destroyed Borland. I am sure if Microsoft would had played nice, we would had a lot more fun doing Windows applications today.

I had to get this out of my chest.

Is there a web page saying the softwares / drivers that can block Windows 10 1809 from showing in the Windows Update?

I know there are some case of Intel drivers and AMD video drivers. But is there a list somewhere to see what can block an update?

Saw the new Chinese AI reporter : https://youtu.be/GAfiATTQufk

Then I remembered Eliza Cassan from the game Deux Ex Human Revolution. Never thought to see something like that in my lifetime.

What brand of router you would trust more than another? I have to help find one for a relative. I find that my Google Wifi would fit well but it's kinda expansive. The Linksys, D-Link, TP-Link seems the same to me. So could use some recommandations.

Thanks.

Hell freezing over

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/google/you-may-soon-be-able-to-log-into-windows-10-using-a-google-account/

From Security Now on Twit.tv or Show Notes.

After viewing the podcast, I wonder why Amd and Intel are still allowed to sell vulnerable CPUs knowing that their CPUs are very insecure even with the softwares patches and firmware updates.

And why all the big companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple and OEMs not suing Intel / AMD for putting their cloud so much at risk?

And what about us? Will it need a good hacker that uses our systems for crypto-mining without our knowledge to do something?

Intel, AMD and Microsoft has to sit down to find a way to design a new CPU that will fix this sh$%@!#$t. At this speed, we will return to the dark age in performance with all the firmware updates that disable every speculative features in the current CPUs.

And I wonder if we should require from Intel / AMD to add a warning sticker on the CPU box like in the tobaco industry :)

Every week there is a new Spectre problem that surface. This is getting scary.

I do not know if it's browser related but on my end, it take near 1-2 minutes to show notifications from the icon on the main page. And sometimes it can take a few days to see the badge saying there are new notifications.

I am alone to see this?

This is very strange to me. I have Windows 10 Pro. I played a bit inside the Security Center and Clicked on the Device Security and then on Core Isolation.

Under the Memory Integrity the is a on button and sadly did turned it on. It asked me to reboot and when I got back, I see this message in red :

"This setting is managed by your administrator."

Weird thing, I cannot turn it off (it's greyed) and my account is of Administrator type.

Why can't I reset that thing? Any one knows? Any fix I can use to reset that?

Uninstalled my 3rd party AV for the 1803 update. They tend to interfere when updating windows.

So decided to uninstall and try Windows Defender and activated the Controlled Access Folder feature that helps against ransomwares.

It seems cool but found annoying things, many own Microsoft executables get blocked. When software that is blocked is known to be safe, it's a pain to add it to the allowed list. I thought Windows Defender would have been more intelligent on this side.

Would have been easy to ask in the notifications area to add a button to help add the software to the list.

Instead you have to drill down the event logs to find Windows Defender and find the blocked event. You have to do this since you don't see the full path of the executable in the notifications area.

After seeing reviews from av-comparative.org and av-test.org. Seem that Windows Defender is starting to compete with other 3rd party AVs.

Microsoft just have to improve scanning performance and I think I would not install another one beside Windows Defender.

Just hope they add that button to help with applications needing protected folders access.

Well, just looked at the Edge browser memory level from Task Manager. Boy, that browser maybe good on battery but that thing eats up memory like no tomorow.

Only have Thurrot.com / Neowin / Youtube and 2-3 extensions and I get to 1gb of ram just for Edge.

Compared to other browsers like Chrome / Opera and Firefox, Edge is a memory monster :)