Posts by Mostly Irrelevant

World of Warcraft Classic lead dev resigns to protest 'stack ranking'

Things like stack ranking are the desperate acts of failing management. The board needs to get rid of the real problem, and that problem is sitting at the top of the heirarchy. Fire Bobby Kotick and probably all of his VPs as well.

Games Workshop once again battles scariest monster of all: ERP gone wrong

The Horror

I've had to work with Microsoft Dynamics before, it's designed to burn money...

That said, Epicor is worse.

Taiwan to Foxconn: Selling stake in Chinese chipmaker? We’ll still fine you

I think for lack of clarity El Reg should use the official names of both countries at issue here.

The People's Republic of China

and

The Republic of China

Server broke because it was invisibly designed to break

Re: A service provider that doesn't bill because their attempted fixes failed?

Quebec does a lot of things to sabotage themselves. The only people it hurts is people and businesses in Quebec. Stuff like the contest rules that mean all national Canadian contests are "excluding Quebec" and you can only use computer systems that support the assinine "tax on tax" system. All it does it hurt Quebecois.

San Francisco investigates Hotel Twitter, Musk might pack up and leave

Re: No, way, they beat us?

All of America is pretty bad for zoning rules. Try building an apartment building next to one of those sprawling wasteful suburbs and you'll find you can't because of the restrictive zoning. Red states have just as many annoying nimbys, they just have more guns.

Microsoft: Whoops, Patch Tuesday might screw your database connections

Re: JFC! do they actually test anything these days

Yup, and it's what people want. That's why Windows and Mac OS (which is nearly as bad) are the biggest desktop OSes.

Re: JFC! do they actually test anything these days

Only ODBC, so very old programs only.

I was worried when I read the title, then I read the article and noticed it only affects the 30-year old ODBC interface and laughed. We don't use that and never had, hell I didn't work in development when it was current. I was in elementary school.

Windows 11 still not winning the OS popularity contest

I've taken to totally ignoring the start menu on versions of Windows >= 8. All I do is click the button and type what I'm looking for. Works fine, although on old Windows 10 releases you need to manually disable Cortana searching the internet FIRST for some reason, Windows 11 works better in that regard.

You clearly didn't have to use Me because it was practically unusable. Constant blue-screens made you yearn for 98 (which wasn't exactly stable itself).

Killing trees with lasers isn’t cool, says Epson. So why are inkjets any better?

This is just Epson slowly leaving the printer market. Which is fine, their printers are terrible. I hope Canon leaves too.

FTX's crypto villain Sam Bankman-Fried admits 'I made a lot of mistakes'

Re: Fortunately he took out some insurance

The Democratic contributions aren't as big an issue because they weren't secret. Donate in the public and no one cares (even if they should).

Google frees nifty ML image-compression model... but it's for JPEG-XL

Re: Progressive loads prevented by front-end designers and coders

It's extremely easy to progressively load in scripts, webpack supports it natively. I don't understand why everyone isn't doing it.

Additionally, there are a lot of reasons many sites are going JS only. Two big ones are that it reduces the total data transfer (if done right), with the scripts coming off a cheap and fast CDN instead of an app server. And the second being that you can do things to support complex UI interactions that would be difficult or inefficient with server side rendering.

P.S. I also hate the "grey blobs", which the UI people call skeletons, they take longer to load than the real content most of the time

Google says Android runs better when covered in Rust

I believe they're talking about in the kernel and system services, not running on top of the Android runtime. The core services in Android are all native code.

.NET open source is 'heavily under-funded' says AWS

Web forms is no real loss. That runtime is based around making websites similar to programming windows applications. It's extremely limiting and you need to do a bunch of things that make no rest from a stateless perspective. Just let it die and build new applications, it's not really practical to build a modern web app with it anyway.

Nvidia faces lawsuit for melting RTX 4090 cables as AMD has a laugh

Re: Do wot?

This is a bad example, because you can sue anyone for anything in the US. Yes they could definitely sue the government for that (despite that not being a thing that actually happens because you don't hold US plugs by the contacts). People regularly slip on ice and sue the property owner successfully. It's definitely a thing to sue someone else for your own stupidity.

GitHub's Copilot flies into its first open source copyright lawsuit

Re: "Open source is a cancer"

"I am not too happy with such AI writing code. I see gross obvious junior-coder mistakes in THAT future."

How would that be any different from now?

Heavy, man: Tuxedo puts out 2.2kg Stellaris AMD Gen 4

Looks like they just slapped Linux on a standard Clevo notebook.

Microsoft ships non-Surface PC: a cheap Arm box for devs

Re: Windows RT 2?

I've got Windows 11 running on VMWare Fusion on my M2 Air so that's another data point for you. Nothing is really stopping Windows from running on M-series processors, Apple just needs to provide a way for their proprietary bios to boot Windows.

Crowds not allowed to leave Shanghai Disneyland without a negative COVID test

Isn't that the wrong way around? Shouldn't they be testing on the way in, not out?

Apple exec confirms iPhones will switch to USB-C because 'we have no choice'

Re: Thunderbolt 4?

There is no Thunderbolt 4 connector. Thunderbolt 4 is an alternate signalling standard that runs through a USB-C cable.

Re: But what about Brexit ?

The UK went from being a big player in the big EU market to being a totally separate, smaller market dependent on the EU for it's existence. Everyone will comply with EU laws and if the UK's laws are different those products will either not be sold there or an inferior version will be available at a much higher price.

After Brexit the UK is no less beholden to the EU, it just gets no say in how the EU is run.

More than 4 in 10 PCs still can't upgrade to Windows 11

Re: Nothing much against Win11 but can't see the point!

Windows 11 doesn't have an upgrade cost. Windows 7+ licenses can install 11.

Is it time to retire C and C++ for Rust in new programs?

Re: Wait a minute ...

We're past due for a revolution in operating systems. We're still using designs from the 70s (Unix\Posix) and 90s (Windows NT). Sure people have extended them with things like microkernels, but we haven't seen any ground-up OSes get major usage. Maybe Google Fuchsia will gain some traction. It's the most likely candidate in the modern OS category, and although Google isn't my favourite company it is at least open source.

'I Don't Care About Cookies' extension sold to Avast

Re: Or

Where are you finding cookie notices with a "no" button? They almost always just have "accept" buttons and the checkbox for required cookies forced on.

Don't want to get run over by a Ford car? There's a Bluetooth app for that

Oh great, now you'll need 25 apps on your phone just to keep every brand of autonomous car from murdering you.

Don't say Pentium or Celeron anymore, it's just Processor now, says Intel

Re: Who talks like this?

I feel like they get paid by the word.

Ad blockers struggle under Chrome's new rules

Re: Konquerror

The original KHTML engine is tremendously out of date. Even Konqueror uses Webkit now.

Salesperson's tech dream delivered by ill-equipped consultant who charged for the inevitable fix

Autoresponder tennis is something I know all too well. One year when I was in university I set up an auto-response when I left school for the summer and when I returned in September found I had many thousands of emails. I had been sent at least one email from the school with an invalid email address that returned a "invalid address" message from the email server which then elicited an auto-reply, repeat forever. This was particularly stupid because both actors where the same email server.

The webmail system the school used was only capable of deleting emails it was displaying and it could only display 50 at a time so I had a choice, contact IT and wait forever to be ignored or just figure it out myself. First step was obviously to disable the autoresponder, then I had to figure out how to get rid of the emails. Eventually I found how to log in to the system via pop3 (no instructions given) and I wrote a program to connect to pop3 in indiscriminately delete said emails without downloading them first (my first attempt with outlook yielded a download progress bar that stretched out into infinity). It took about half an hour, but I was free after that.

The crime against humanity that is the modern OS desktop, and how to kill it

Re: It does suck

Once you go into the taskbar settings and turn off the stupid centered taskbar Windows 11 is basically just WIndows 10 reskinned, which is to say basically where you expect things you be. But I think I'm a lot more accepting of minor changes than most people because I use Mac, Windows and Linux all the time so small changes don't throw me like they seem to with some people.

One man's battle to get patent rights for AI inventors in America may be over

AI is a tool, this is like claiming a chisel should be given a design patent on statues a sculptor creates with it. It's nonsensical because of two major issues:

1. The tool is only being used by a human who provides all the creative input.

2. The tool is not a "natural person" and therefore has no rights anyway.

BOFH and the case of the disappearing teaspoons

Re: Not Just A British Problem.

Australia is just upside-down England.

This is such a British problem. a US company would just buy flimsy disposable plastic spoons (or those terrible stir sticks that don't work) and no one would bother stealing them because they have no value.

Microsoft finds critical hole in operating system that for once isn't Windows

Chrome OS isn't so much an OS as it is a Linux distribution that's locked down to only run Chrome.

Attention Microsoft-oriented Linux devs: .NET 6 is on Ubuntu 22.04

Re: Nice one Cyril

I'm using .NET 6 in Linux containers at work all the time. It's convenient because the containers can be very small and there is no worry about OS licensing. For development you can build on Windows, Linux or Mac so it's super convenient.

For developing web applications .NET is really first class and it performs well on production. Front-end is all JS, not using Blazor.

General Motors charges mandatory $1,500 fee for three years of optional car features

Re: Other car manufacturers are available.

That's been true of GM for a long time, friends don't let friends buy GM vehicles.

I'm pretty sure that mandatory subscriptions are illegal by Canadian law. They can increase the price of the car if they like but it's not a separate line item it's just part of the vehicle cost and they'd have to advertise that higher price.

Your job was probably outsourced for exactly the reason you suspected

Re: And yet

In my experience, writing specific-enough specs for the average outsourcing company to produce a half-usable product is more work than building the entire application yourself personally. Communication over space, cultural divides and experience is very difficult.

British intelligence recycles old argument for thwarting strong encryption: Think of the children!

There are only two types of encryption. Encryption that's very hard to crack and encryption that might as well not exist. Lawmakers don't seem to realize that sometimes there just isn't a way around certain technical problems no matter how much they moan and cry about it.

You can liquid cool this Linux laptop to let the GPU soar

I think it depends on what you want, if you want earth-shattering performance then a laptop is never going to do. If you want something you can carry around when necessary and still play the latest games, this sort of thing makes sense. I personally have a tiny little laptop for travel and a fire-breathing desktop under the desk, it's a great combination for giant nerds like me who want the best and can afford two computers.

Not everyone is us.

P.S. I think water-coolers that you attach and re-attach regularly are ill-advised.

Weird Flex, but OK: Now you can officially turn these PCs, Macs into Chromebooks

"Flex does not support Android apps or Google Play."

This is a real feature removal, with little reason for it's existence other than to make these devices worse.

FTC urged to protect data privacy of women visiting abortion clinics

Re: None vote for Kyrsten Sinema

This is where a parliamentary system massively outperforms the American system. In a time where people are really upset, then can vote for secondary parties, which splits the votes so that no major party has a majority and compromises need to be made on everything. In the American system you end up with a very close position where a single member of the ruling party can derail everything, but the agendas are still set unilaterally. This, the electoral college and the overpowered executive branch (which wasn't even in the original design) are the three major things that make the American system much less democratic than most democratic systems.

A lot of the time, which I watch coverage of the swamp that is US politics I heard a lot of orientalist arguments. Like "It's not constitutional". These are patently ridiculous because your founding fathers did not think the laws should be set in stone. They made more amendments than anyone! They realized that over time, things change and right now the American people suffer because of the institutionalized old ideas.

It's not my country, so it's not really my business. But I look at this slow-motion train-wreck and I really feel for the people caught up in it, especially those the poor people working thankless jobs for nothing while they're being told they live in the best country in the world.

We've never even built datacenters using robots here on Earth

I think the main reason they have funding is that many venture capitalists are not well versed in science and have a very opportunistic mindset.

Start your engines: Windows 11 ready for broad deployment

Re: I returned to Win 10

It's Windows 11 or switch to a different OS once support ends. Staying on an old OS is not an option if you're not going to airgap it.

Windows 11 feels like Windows 10 with a fresh coat of paint. I like the improved dark mode support, more UI consistency and better window tiling but overall there isn't a big difference. What does annoy me is that my laptop with an 6th generation core i7 isn't supported, despite it still being quite powerful. I've upgraded it to Ubuntu 22.04 but it's annoying to have to do that just because Microsoft thinks I should have TPM 2.0.

Arm, Microsoft at pains to say this CPU arch can be trusted with real server work

Microsoft has yet to produce a ARM version of SQL Server, that's a big stumbling block for the idea of Azure on ARM.

Elon Musk 'violated' Twitter NDA over bot-check sample size

Well, if Musk violated the NDA then I guess the takeover is void /s.

Demand for GPUs used to mine crypto 'disappearing', says ASUSTeK

My worry is that this happens again when the next generation of GPUs launches.

User-built low-code apps tipped to dominate analytics by 2025

I keep hearing about "low-code" apps written by "average users" but every time I see the results they're either far too hard to use or just the WYSIWYG editor for parameters on top of a mountain of code that does the actual work.

This idea that "average users" are going to be setting up complicated functionality has been proven a fiction many times before, so colour me skeptical.