06Feb 2015 by richard@baronsoftware.com

Farewell to the electronics part king, RadioShack

Software Events
RadioShack has hit the end of the line. The 94-year-old electronics chain, filed for bankruptcy protection on Thursday after striking a deal to sell up to 2,400 of its stores to the wireless service provider Sprint. What holds for the 27,000 employees, at this point no one knows, how many stores will be left open, once again no one knows but this was one of the major players in the early microcomputer days. RadioShack known for electronic parts and the TRS-80 computer has drastically changed in the last 10 years trying to keep up with the Best Buy and Walmart, by selling phones, contracts and various other things that no one wanted to go to a RadioShack to purchase. When they introduced the TRS-80, RadioShack still had the image of…
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06Feb 2015 by richard@baronsoftware.com

Hardware Review of the WinBook TW801 Black Tablet

Hardware Reviews
Recently the lab decided to test out the Winbook TW801 Black Tablet on a trip to see whether it can hold up to durability, usability and just plain old device use.  The lab is reporting that the tablet performed well on a recent Los Angeles business trip that provided the person with internet usage on a strong wi-fi connection, creating Lazarus Pascal programs on the tablet during the work days and finally checking emails or performing typical duties. The TW801 tablet has a 8 inch screen which is capable of enough space to view videos and documents.  The tablet also comes with a one-year Office 365 package but you have to activate within the time limit which was 15 days based on our research. Multi-Touch Touchscreen IPS 16:10 8" 1280x800…
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02Feb 2015 by richard@baronsoftware.com

Mozilla Firefox v35.0 still has HUGE memory issues on a Windows machine which creates a resource drain.

Computer PC Tips - bits and bytes
The recommendation for users to not to use the latest version of Firefox until they resolve the issues on memory which at times can exceed 2 gigabytes and could continue to grow during any session regardless of open tabbed windows. In the lab the decision was made just to start up Firefox and have the latest updates applied which at this stage is 35.0.1 and open any single browser session to any favorite web site. To conduct the similar test all you need to do is: Start a firefox session and open a single browser session to any web site. On a Windows 7 machine, click on start and enter taskmgr in the search text box.  This will start up a task manager session.  Task Manager provides the end user…
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31Jan 2015 by richard@baronsoftware.com

Memories of Turbo Pascal

Rad Studio Delphi Development
Working with Turbo Pascal back in the early 80's was so much fun that a robust application for DOS could be generated and used by various folks.   The compiler was fast and the language was simple to learn.  The original package was a solid manual as well as the famous diskettes.  Once installed the world was open to generate a single executable that could be used on any DOS machine. At that time I was developing a package for OSHA using DBASE III which was another great product, simple to use and affordable database manager.  I needed to get a dynamic editor inserted so that the DBASE application could shell out to execute it and allow the end user to write documents which were stored in the DBASE database.  It…
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31Jan 2015 by richard@baronsoftware.com

The Tomes of Delphi Algorithms and Data Structures by Julian Bucknall

Book Reviews, Rad Studio Delphi Development
The Tomes of Delphi Algorithms and Data Structures by Julian Bucknall has been revised and is currently selling on lulu.com. Bucknall is the chief technology officer at Devexpress which writes software for Delphi and Microsoft Visual Studio. It does seem that Devexpress is heavily moving towards the Visual Studio product line and will not put too much into the Delphi VCL product line. Their products are very well written but the cost to the development is extremely high where you can begin to spend about $900 for the low end or as high as $2200 for the yearly subscription. Their competition in the Delphi world is TMS Software and that is something Bucknall does not want to speak about since TMS is about 2/3 lower in cost and the components…
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