I received a question asking why it was decided to make bytes eight bits in size rather than some other size. I do not know the exact reason why this happened but here is my explanation of why I think that bytes ended up that size.
When your computer starts up it loads and runs a number of programs in the background. Exactly what it loads and runs depends on what you have installed on your computer. Here’s a brief explanation of what to do if you suddenly start getting errors appearing when you start the computer that tell you that one or more of these background programs can’t be found.
All programming languages have a number of words that have special meanings in that language. These are known as reserved words and they can only be used in the appropriate parts of the programming code where they are intended by the language to be used. Trying to use a reserved word for something else will sometimes cause an obvious error and the rest of the time will cause a not so obvious error. Here is a reference to those words that have a special meaning in PL/1.
In this article I look at how you can use the hosts file on your windows computer to speed up access to sites that you visit a lot. How it works is that the hosts file converts that domain name into the appropriate IP address for you so that the request can be sent straight to the correct server rather than having to go to a Domain Name Server first to look up the address from there.
A couple of months ago my ISP did something really strange. They took a perfectly good working home page for their site and replaced it with Flash. Fortunately they left one ordinary web link on their page that takes you to a copy of their old home page or I would have been forced to look for a new host. Certainly this stupidity on their part means that I would no longer consider recommending them to anyone else.As I have a Flash blocker installed in my browser, all I see when I visit their home page now is a big F in the middle of the screen and the single link is concealed at the bottom of the page. That F obviously stands for a four letter word followed by another three letter word which is what most people used to do when confronted with Flash intro pages on the front of sites.
I guess using Flash as a home page to drive people away has become so rare lately because people stopped doing such stupid things that some people have now forgotten how stupid it is. Now I don’t know if their home page is just a fancy intro/go away page or actually contains an interactive page that just happens to be written in Flash.
Windows NT/2000/XP/Vista allows you to schedule programs so that provided that the computer is actually on at the time you can have it run particular programs so that the tasks that those programs perform are handled at the time that you want them to be processed. For resource intensive housekeeping tasks having them performed in the middle of the night when you are not using the computer may be ideal. In this article I discuss the way that you access the Windows Scheduler and how to set up the commands needed to schedule your programs to run at the desired time. Of course many of the programs that you have which involve tasks that require scheduling those programs themselves will include the necessary code to add the task to the schedule without your needing to follow the steps described here.
Star Office and Open Office (which is what the free version is now called) can easily process Microsoft Word documents almost as well as Word itself can. It also has the advantage of running on operating systems that Word itself doesn’t support. This makes Open Office the ideal choice of office suite software for anyone who doesn’t own a copy of Microsoft Office.
Defining a function in JavaScript is rather useless if you don’t actually make use of the function. In this second tutorial on JavaScript functions we look at how to call the functions that we have defined.
My JavaScript Blog
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