Posts by FIA 421 posts • joined 12 Jun 2009
There would also have been bonus points for 'Micro$ucks' and 'Windoze'; oh and alluding that anyone who uses Windows is a certifiable moron who can't see the light.
Kids today....
Anyway, you'll have to excuse me, I've accidentally started Emacs and need to go Google how to quit it.
but I'm an active PC gamer. Have been since the late 90s. I paid between 30 and 40 pounds for a AAA game then, and even with access to steam, Epic Store, Gog, Battle.NET and various other app stores, I'm still paying 40 pounds or more for a AAA game.
...and in the late 90s that game came on a physical medium, in a box, and had been transported to a shop somewhere, yet now the digital download are still often pricier than the physical copies.
Oligopolies don't really help anyone it turns out.
December used to be the 10th month (with November the 9th, October the 8th, and September the 7th).
After this year I’m really looking forward to intermission.
You must be retired, because if your boss emails you something important and it takes up to an hour for you to reply you're not goign to be employed very long in today's world.
You must be young. :) If it's important they'll call you or IM you or if you're still in an office simply walk over.
If you spend all your time responding to emails you'll never get any work done.
Everyone thinks their particular issue is the most important thing in the world, it often isn't.
If your place of work really needs emails responded to that quickly, it's probably not a great place of work. Don't stress. Sometimes life and happiness is much more important. (Then you can save the stress for those times when it really does matter). Otherwise burnout is heading your way.
I've worked at the places where everything is always the most important thing and must be done now, and also at the places that will work you hard when needed, but then appreciate the effort afterwards. I know which one I prefer.
Thank you for once again proving PG Wodehouse's dictum about it never being difficult to tell the difference between a ray of sunshine and a Scotsman with a grievance.
The internet today is so confusing. Here was me thinking that mild racism isn’t acceptable. But now it is??
The entire Scots language section of one of the worlds largest website seems to have been made up, the first comment is a broad racial stereotype yet pointing it out is somehow ripe for criticism.
At the time I thought it was an overreaction, but now I understand why they got rid of that Willie character from the Simpsons.
It has the potential to enable better web mail clients
Okay, I can sort of see how this could be a thing, I could talk IMAP or whatever from a web page. That could be useful (and in no way abused ;) ) but…
and apps based on decentralized peer-to-peer routing based on distributed hash tables.
What does this mean?? This just sounds like marketing Kool Aid. (Or do I hand type every nodes IP into the permission box??)
It’s a good job that I can’t see any way the most prolific data harvesting company of all time could ever use direct network access for ‘evil’.
As I say, budget computers are ALREADY coming with Optane. UK PC World are selling them (and that means that they are basically commodity as they only sell junk). 4Gb RAM and make the rest up with memory-speed NVRAM.
Are you sure about this? Amazon seems to suggest Optane is still quite expensive? Are you sure they're just not bunging in cheapo SATA->NVMe based SSDs? (Which will be limited to SATA speeds and aren't byte addresable).
A quick search of Optane on the website only turned up this that fits the bill, but it's not exactly cheap. (I can get a similar spec NUC with 1TB disc and 32gig memory for 460, leaving 120 quid for the windows licence. :) )
Optane does sound great, but not ready for consumer time just yet.
It's easy and common to say such a thing, but have you actually got any statistical evidence to back that up?
Of course not, this is the comment section of a red top, verifiable fact's have no place here. :D
Personally I've yet to see such an example of it.
I've not seen it with sqlite myself, but I've seen it with Access.
Many years ago, I was working for a small dev house and we had a few clients seriously abusing Access databases, usually hosting websites backed onto one (it's free, why pay for SQL server!).
One client had even managed to hit one of the internal row limits which I thought was impressive. (the 'fk knows why, probably a contractor paid a lot' solution was to dump it to an oracle system and clear it down every so often).
Though anyone who's running a 120Tb database on it (presumably one HUGE FILE!), and feels they need more may want to seek help.
This is the modern, open source equivalent of running your business critical db on Access. :)
Both are small embedded DBs that do a fairly good job, but often get used far far out of their designed goals.
(I will add to the 'it generally does just work well' experience with the few times I've encountered sqlite too).
Reminds me of this quote from Paul Fellows about an early Acorn Archimedes:
... we had one of the machines that we just could not get this thing to boot reliably. You could boot it, turn it off, reboot it and sometimes it would work and sometimes it wouldn't. It turned out, it would boot fine if you left it long enough, but if you didn't turn it off for very long then it didn't reset properly, and this was because the fan on the board was still spinning and the back EMF on the fan was enough power to keep the ARM running. And that's why you've got an ARM in your phone today, it would take no power to keep a 3 micron ARM with 25000 transistors would run for 30 seconds off the energy stored in the fan.
I always find it better to think of C as one giant file, as that's essentially what it is after preprocessing, can sometimes help you visualise how it all goes together.
Also, IIRC in C you can declare an empty struct, use it as a pointer member, then flesh it out later, something like:
struct foo;
struct bar { struct foo *fooptr; }
struct foo { int someval; }
However when I just tried this clang was actually clever enough not to choke on the forward ref, so it may just be that being 'clever'and YMMV. (Can't be arsed to fish out a GCC to investigate further).
FWIW, while C can be funny like this (and to be fair it is getting on a bit as a language; I mean an E type is lovely, but you have to accept the wipers don't work well, and you'll be cold in winter), it's not just a C problem, dependency resolution is a right pain. (increasingly so in todays 'Don't write it, assemble it.' programming culture).
I was a Java dev for a few years, it has some lovely build tools, but I've still had the inevitable A includes B, C includes a different version of B and I really need A and C, but the Bs don't like each other.
Also, the 'Why can't the compiler just do what I intend' wish is something we've all had, but as you point out, it's non determenistic, and that's something you really don't want, as it makes things a right pain to debug. (Trust me, been bitten by 'clever' tooling more than once over my career).
You're spot on with Makefiles too, they're just obtuse... however, they are just one of the tools available. It'd be quite odd but you probably could use something more modern. if you wanted. (Personally I've just tried CMake for my latest, that's quite cool). Also used Qt's qmake in the past but I think that's possibly a little crufty for non Qt or bigger projects. There's also things like Ninja. (Which can be targeted by CMake).
... In some projects where I know the code isn't for public consumption, I just have a master header file and include it on every C file, and that master file includes everything else "in the right order". Why not?
Why not indeed. Sounds a bit like 'Windows.h' to me. Perfectly valid technique.
The first sentence has a weird phrase, "Arm-compatible". What's that mean... there have been many ARM micro-architectures
Also, without knowing the version of the ABI, or what coprocessor features are present (NEON for example) it's very hard to say.... Look at the work RISC OS has to do to keep up with various different flavours of ARM SoCs, and they're just concerned with 32bit, not 64.
And the Amazon Graviton2 is a licensed Arm Neoverse CPU, in exactly the same way as the Apple things are and the Samsung Exynos processors
Pedant: Samsung yes, Apple no. Apple and Qualcomm have architecture licences and design their own CPU cores from scratch (eg, 'Thunder' and 'Lightening' from Apple, or 'Krait' and 'Kryo' from Qualcomm), rather than using an Arm designed core and adding the rest like core licencees do. (Samsung, Amazon, et al.)
Ergo yes it is a problem caused by the language because it does not happen in this other language.
No. While it's probably mostly a semantic distinction (shit still happens after all), it's most definatly not a problem with the language, it's mistakes by the programmers.
The issue is the language allows programmers to make these simple mistakes, at the end of the day (compilter bugs aside) C just deals with pointers and does as it's told. It's just this lack of rigidity allows the mistakes to be easly made.
Whilst this is a bad thing, it's not a slight at programmers, everyone makes mistakes. However, having some idea of these mistakes and that you can make them does help minimise them. (Rather than just accepting them as a consiquence).
This will be just as true of Rust as any other language. (It's just that in Rust you've probably not given someone access to kernel memory by making the mistake, you've just caused a panic).
C was from a time when compilers and computers were unimaginably simple by todays standards, it's nice to see we finally have what sounds like a modern system level language to replace it.
Or Mondelez widening the gap between the peaks in a Toblerone bar. Pick your analogy.
Oooo..... Ooooo.... Twix not lying flat anymore to save the few mm of wrapping per bar.*
As for the charger thing, seems like a good idea, less waste and all that.
* I'll be honest I was hoping the comments would've become a list of cuious money saving exploits by now...
I know , lets get rid of a word, that will make everyone feel better about history...
No, let's not do that, but lets also not dilute it by using it as a casual term for things that can, retrospectivly, be much better named.
The use of language, and what's acceptable, changes over time, it's not a huge issue, move on.
Or should we value the offence of those who want it to remain over the offence of those who want it changed? (Because glorifying slavery is good? Intrangience is good?? Not really sure tbh).
I think the latter probably outweigh the former.
Jusy FYI, for those that don't really get it (and I would include myself in this) this might help:
I have absolutely no desire to destroy the UK, I want it to remain a strong world power.
The UK hasn’t been a ‘strong world power’ for about 70 years at least. Although to be fair we did punch above our weight for a good few years afterwards, but even that facade has diminished somewhat.
But be in no doubt, few countries really give a shit what we think these days. (And personally, I’m okay with that. Let others play at empire building. We had our turn and all the good and bad that came with it).
The same can be said of a lot of less expensive kit. I've got a 16 year old HP pavilion laptop that I dragged out of a cupboard and booted up a month ago and it... just worked.
HP....... Wow! You got lucky! :)
SWMBO is always asking me to find hers, for starters. Not helped by it always being switched to silent mode, so have to roam the house listening for the vibrate-noise while ringing it.
On iOS you can assign a contact to bypass silent so they'll always ring. Has helped me find my SOs phone (and the other way round) a few times as we both leave it on silent 100% of the time.
Contacts -> edit contact -> ringtone -> check 'Emergency Bypass'.
It's otherwise great for white people, or people who sound like them.
What do 'white people' sound like? Do you mean 'Americans from a paticular geographical area?'
I'm white, but with a reasonably strong regional (non American) accent and there's quite a lot of things Siri simply can't understand me saying. Ya gets me?
So, erm not English then.
There is no one definition of English.
I'm sure if I used a lot of b*llshit words instead of well established and understood ones, it would have a hard time understanding me.
What's a 'bullshit word'? You seem to expect everyone to talk like you do, the world doesn't work like that. Regional/cultural variations exist; they need to be dealt with.
It still takes the know how, but an engineer won't be stopped by the lack of unavailable modules.
This has really started to annoy me recently. I'm increasingly meeting 'programmers' who seem to not actually want to program.
"So what library do we use?"
"Well, you could just write it??"
"Hmm, but then we'd have to maintain it...."
"YOU'RE A PROGRAMMER!!???"
(I'm not talking about anything particularly complex either, don't re-invent the wheel but sometimes you do still have to actually write code....)
I could re-phrase: people use Chrome because it WAS by far the best browser and they haven't had the motivation to switch.
This could also be it's undoing. Pretty soon most new installs of Windows will come with the new version of Edge. I wonder how many people will simply stick with that now it's good enough?
Actually AMD dropped first the Virtual86 mode in 64 bit mode because AMD doesn't know how to design an advanced chip.
What are you on about? It was dropped in 64 bit mode as it was an opportunity to remove legacy cruft. Virtual86 mode was/is still available in 32bit mode. The silicone is there.
Also, what do you mean AMD doesn't know how to design an advanced chip? The designer of the AMD 64 bit stuff was one Jim Keller, who's previous work included the DEC Alpha. You know, that 64bit chip that was one of the most powerful in it's day?
It also dropped the segmentation model which will need to return if we warn really secure applications at the hardware level and not address spaces where everything is writable and executable,
Unless you set the 'not writable' or 'no execute' bits, both of which are enforeced in hardware.
But AMD can see only "performance, performance!" (and Intel followed, with the Spectre/Meltdown bugs) and so removes any feature to truly isolate applications and kernel.
Eh? Intels first superscaler CPU with cache was the Pentium Pro, in the mid 90s. Spectre/Meltdown was a side effect of this design decision that took YEARS to be discovered, please don't pretend like it's an obvious issue that should've been spotted at the design stage, it wasn't. It was also nothing to do with AMD. (AMD were still making mediocre 486 clones when the PPro was designed).
I have a hard time coming up with a rationale for accounting software to really care that much to take multiple years to "port"
The main issue is probably the data files. Accounting software is quite likely to have a reasonable amount of data that it still has to be able to access. Also, software written that long ago was running on hardware with much less memory and storage available, so it much more likely to be using binary file formats designed for compactness and memory efficency rather than ease of porting.
I'm currently working on a piece of software of a similar age, and whilst the codebase is suprisingly well written it is most definatly not 64bit. Converting the software to 64 bit would just be a recompile in a more modern version of the IDE, however then ensuring that all the data files it relies on, full of packed records that are basically just in memory structures dumped to disk, would be a nightmare.
Doing this with financial data; data that probably has to be correct and has regulatory issues regarding it's quality would not be a task I'd like to undertake lightly. It only takes one customer with a corrupted accounts system to give you a load of grief.
Combining that with most managers aversion to 'risk' when it comes to work that has no new feature benefit and I can understand how it's happened.
They still have had enough warning though.
SpaceX has responded by trying out a darkening treatment to stop the things looking so gosh darn bright.
I wonder if it was VANTA black?
but in the UK we have 'gift aid' whereby you sign a form to say you have paid tax on income that can be reclaimed from your donation.
Gift aid is fairly imoral though, and probably should be scrapped, or at least forced to use different wording. It always implies that the charity gets more money at no extra cost to you, however never mentions that the cost is born by everyone else, which most people don't consider.
If I give a charity 10 pounds, that's money I've earnt and paid tax on and is mine to do with as I see fit, however if I then tick the gift aid box I give a further 2.50 to that charity, which is taken from general taxation, ie, the money that pays for schools, hospitals, the police, etc etc. I am in effect saying that I value the work of the particular charity over the rest of society as a whole.
So whilst I think the motive behind gift aid is noble, actually when you think about it it's probably not the greatest idea.
...Linux can't really change license at this point, so the ball's in Oracle's court.
It isn't though, Oracle closed sourced their ZFS implementation in 2010, the ZFS in question is OpenZFS which contains contributions from people other than Sun.
Oracle could open source their implementation of ZFS under the GPL, but not OpenZFS, without the explicit aproval of all concerned.
Ah but that is not a benefit.
No, it's a choice. The benefits or lack of are pretty subjective. (A BSD advocate would argue it's better to have access to a well tested TCP/IP stack that you can use rather than inventing the wheel again, for example).
Thus the GPL gives you the protection from nasty people taking advantage of you and removing your freedom.
No it doesn't.
If your source code and susiquent modifications to it being made available is important to you use the GPL, if they're not then use something else. For some people this is important, for others it isn't. But to assume someone who choses a different licence is wrong or stupid is fairly disengenuous.
You do understand the word arcane, right? It's easy when you know how...
Why is having to learn such a bad thing these days? Many of the GUIs in the 90s fell into that category too, you learnts how to use them then transferred the skills between apps. (eg, learning that the middle button woukld bring up a context menu for example).
Still a crap solution for those who have typical jobs/purposes
If your job requires you to do a 'thing' then learn to use the tools to do that 'thing'. I want some building work done I hire a builder, they know how to use all the oh so fun but dangerous building tools that I'd merely make a mess with. Computers are complex and sometimes require a bit of knowlage. (ie, if you learn about 'man' you can usually figure out most commands on a BSD...) We tried working with the assumption that everything is easy in the 90s which resulted in Wizzard hell. Great the first time, but those 94 screens to set things up are sure annoying the 1000th time through.
Most people would be better served learning that it's okay not to be able to do something the first time and having to learn isn't a bad thing or something that stops after childhood.
Hence the reference to TreeSize Free, which is an incredibly useful tool.
[cough] WinDirStat. [/cough] :)
NOTE: I dislike systemd as much as anybody, but the old init system was long overdue for improvements, and something like upstart is worse than systemd.
I suspect that was the issue really, the system V init system was always a bit 'weird'. I still prefer the NetBSD and FreeBSD rc system to systemd (although that's probably more familiarity than anything; only used systemd on a debian box I had as a pvr).
Still think 'runlevels' are a thing that sounded like a good idea at the time though; my occasional forray into Linux (and Solaris) always confused me with the weird numbers and odd symlinks. But NetBSD's 'write a simple script then set a variable in rc.conf' seemed to work quite well.
The restarting failed daemons thing was a problem with it though.
Downloading resumed and all was well for another couple of months. Until the day the Security Manager stopped at my desk and said quietly – “Very bloody clever. Now knock it off…” and walked away. I was grateful for how he handled it,
I've always found it a good thing to be friendly and honest with the security/network peeps. I always work on a 'if you don't tell me I /can't/ do it...' attitude with using the works network, although I never did anything like this.
At a previous job many years ago I used to maintain an SSH connection to my home server for reading emails at work (it was never used as a SOCKS proxy... ever....) but was quite honest about it if asked. A few years passed and the network firewall got upgraded and required authentication. Because I'd never hid what I did the network manager actually disabled the requirement for me for a couple of weeks until I found a replacement solution. He said 'There's 4 people who do what you do, 2 of you are open about it, so I ignore your IP coming top of various tables every month; the other 2 think I don't know....'
Treat people with mutual respect and don't be too cheeky and you can get away with a fair bit.
Using non-BT routers is a bit of a faff if you want all the services to work correctly.
Once you get it setup it should be fine. My parents are on BT on a TPLink router (bought a few years ago as the homehub at the time could barely maintain wi-fi for a day without a reboot). Worked when they moved to Plusnet, and then again when they moved back to BT.
They have the BT tv too (although I don't think they do anything 'advanced' with it).
Also, the hub is now serving me as a cheapo wi-fi access point (and late night disco light until I remember to tape over the flashing purple light of 'no internet connection').
So where I'm going is that it's actually a Python problem rather than an OS problem. Or just a "programmer failing to read the manual" problem,
No, it really is just a programmer failing to understand/read the docs problem.
but I think that you can also blame the design of the language routine for not producing deterministic output by default...
That's just a misunderstanding though. The results may not be what you expect, however they are deterministic, it's just that determining requires far too much information about the underlying system in use, hence the ordering is documented as undefined. (If you knew the underlying filesystem in use, and the full info for each file, and how the filesystem stores the metadata, and how it's readdir implementation walks those data structures you'd be able to work out the order the files would be returned.)
It's a comment section of a website!! Most of what's posted is uninteresting and unimportant!!
Plus, the 'Works fine for me' do help to give some balance; and potentially allow a indication of how serious the issue is. (The linked rant was very specific for example).
Sometimes it's good to know the settings on the internet echo chamber.
(Apologies, I may still be upset that it got compared to the Vista release.... you weren't there man!!)
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