Posts by Dan 55

Not content with distorting actual reality, Facebook now wants to build a digital layer for the world

Seems strange that the police don't seem to be aware of that?

Oracle hosting TikTok US data. '25,000' moderators hired. Code reviews. Trump getting his cut... It's the season finale

Re: Why????

"I said I want a cut of the money to the US government because we made the deal possible."

This means:

Trump said Trump wants a cut of the money to the US government because Trump & friends made the deal possible.

And it's been in the news lately that his campaign has been hemorrhaging money.

Hopefully that makes it a bit clearer what he wants out of this.

Ever found yourself praying to whatever deity runs Microsoft Teams? You're not alone

I can't see why people are still pressing ahead with it.

Because MS themselves are pushing people onto Teams. It's basically "manage this transition at a pace that's good for you or on the 31st of July, 2021 you'll wake up and find you're on Teams anyway".

Oracle's Java 15 rides into town, waving the 'we're number one' flag, demands 25th birthday party

Re: More shims, more proxies, more factories, more beans, more frameworks, more annotations...

As Jean-Luc Picard said:

I had a problem so I thought I'd use Java.

Now I have a ProblemFactory.

Re: Still stuck on Java 8

Java 8 update 202 and earlier have "less complicated" licensing, many developers know their customers require that.

Nvidia says regulators will be 'very supportive' of $40bn Arm buy despite concerns about chip designer's independence

Re: How can ideas be controlled?

Here is still a thing on Android and iOS. These apps help keep their maps up to date and obtain with traffic data (I imagine).

Re: and Arm itself will only be allowed to sell to whoever the US says it can

Forbidden licenses? The Chinese ARM will probably declare independence and that'll be the end of ARM.

As if you needed another reason not to use Visual Studio, C++ extension for Visual Studio Code is live

Re: C++

Well, there are IDEs which don't like Makefiles and only work with CMake.

Cops called to Singapore golf club after 'wrongdoers' use scripts to book popular timeslots

Re: Is it hacking?

"Directory traversal attack to go up the tree"? If deleting the last part of a pathname off the end of a URL is illegal I think everyone here should be in the clink.

The site should serve a page or serve forbidden or redirect. Anything else like serving files which aren't supposed to be public is even more idiotic than allowing an SQL injection.

Re: Golf, the opium of the people

I don't think golf clubs anywhere in the world work like that.

Re: Is it hacking?

Then again there was case ages ago where a guy wanted to donate to a charity and used Lynx, the transaction failed, he modified the URL in a pretty standard way to go back, and was arrested for it and I think he lost the case against BT who were managing the website. Can't find a link unfortunately, but it was reported in El Reg.

Re: Why would that help?

That's probably why they've not said that people who turn up to a slot booked by a script will be denied their play, because rich-boy would throw a tantrum and start acting like the current President of the US. Instead it's the urchin who will have their collar felt.

Re: Tell them they've got their tee time...

Please put down your golf club. You have 20 seconds to comply.

Vinyl sales top CDs for the first time in decades in America, streaming rules

Re: You are all thieves

It looks like the VHS recording of that Memorex advert was probably not on Scotch VHS tape.

Now that's a somewhat unexpected insider threat: Zoombombings mostly blamed on rogue participants, unique solution offered

Re: Binghamton

As that ever reliable source of knowledge (Wikipedia) says that Binghamton was settled in 1802 and US independence was in 1776, there's only so much that the UK is responsible for. We gave you a bunch of people and one of the commonly-spoken languages, but when a country declares independence it's generally understood to mean they get on with running their own affairs. That's why it's called Independence Day and not Dependence Day.

So if a country which has been independent for 26 years starts doing strange things with suffixes that are enough to make one's eyes bleed that's entirely their prerogative. Who is the rest of the world to intervene in internal matters? Certainly there's the argument that international action should have been taken on humanitarian grounds, but at that point in time the UN wasn't around.

Re: Binghamton

His last name probably came from Bingham, the town, in the UK.

Now how his last name (and the UK place name) Bingham became Binghamton in the US is entirely a US phenomenon, so it falls upon US commentards for an explanation.

All I can suggest is it's a word in US English that somehow got stuck forever in the 18th century, like burglarize, oftentimes, spelunking, and obligated. At least you didn't call it Binghamtonshire, because that would be too silly.

Re: How to make the experience worse than Skype

Thing is, how do you distribute per-person IDs and passwords to people without Zoom accounts (people with accounts can get an automated email). The more people without Zoom accounts that are invited to the meeting, the more tiresome it becomes for all concerned.

It might be easier just to make everyone have a Zoom account, which is where Skype is.

How to make the experience worse than Skype

One low-tech solution would be to assign unique per-person IDs and passcodes so that credential reuse can be easily spotted and banned in one go.

Would those be in addition to the meeting code and password, and Zoom account and password? Sounds pretty terrible.

What a time to be alive: Floating Apple store bobs up in Singapore

This is what happens when a corp has too much money...

... and not enough philanthropy.

I AM ERROR: Tired of chewing up your RAM? Razer tells gamers where to stick its special gum for the RGB crowd

Re: When I saw gum and RAM in the headline...

Home computing in the Mr T era, surely?

Re: Consumables

Don't eat the drivers that the keyboard tries to install when you plug it in, they'll give you acid indigestion.

I won't be ignored: Google to banish caller roulette with Verified Calls

Re: "if a user sees the business's name then they are more likely to actually take the call"

Enjoy the remaining three months of free NHS in good old Blighty.

Re: "if a user sees the business's name then they are more likely to actually take the call"

That appears to come under "dealing", but there are doorbells and interphones too. If the pizza guy can't use them, they're probably in the wrong job.

Re: "if a user sees the business's name then they are more likely to actually take the call"

If you don't have a business relationship with them, there's no good reason for them to be calling you.

This better not bypass the phone app's blocklist

Bet it does though, the excuse being Uncle Google verified it for you.

US senators propose yet another problematic Section 230 shakeup: As long as someone says it on the web, you can't hide it away

Re: Howza bout the Constitution? Remember that?

They claim they have to because Section 230. Which they lobbied for in the first place so they could immediately publish content from users for free without spending money on moderation and therefore gain more ad revenue.

Re: "People are...

Missed the edit window... By the way, in case it wasn't clear, I used 'censor' as in the typical US usage of the word, whereas other countries consider removal of hate speech as something which isn't worthy of the word 'censor' because it shouldn't be published in the first place, otherwise the impressionable and nutjobs latch onto it and it brings irreparable damage to society.

Perhaps the US view that any removal of text is censorship therefore hate speech must be published is coming home to roost now.

Re: "People are...

The US constitution does apply to non-US citizen residents, the text itself says it does and repeated precedents have clarified that. Obviously it doesn't apply to non-US citizens outside the US, but if US media corporations based in the US are subject to US law then that affects the service they offer to the rest of the world (e.g. the typical case of "so sorry your past has taught you some lessons that we haven't learnt yet, but we cannot censor hate speech for you").

Susan Collins spreads central myth about the Constitution

Re: Censoring conservative viewpoints

There must be something wrong with those figures, there were 10 stories at the top of my feed this morning which said that Big Social Network receives funding from Bill Gates to push his Antifa agenda.

Open access journals are vanishing from the web, Internet Archive stands ready to fill in the gaps

"Newbold said it would be helpful to have the equivalent of youtube-dl [...] for open access papers"

We do, it's the Unpaywall extension for Chrome and Firefox.

Classy move: C++ 20 wins final approval in ISO technical ballot, formal publication expected by end of year

I'm so looking forward to discussing C++23 in three years.

Re: Is C++ becoming too large and complex?

C didn't even exist in the 1960s and neither did Pascal! That link was from the 1980s when both were about a decade old and people had worked out each language's weaknesses.

Anyway, I should move on, as you say. Do keep carrying on talking about the 1950s.

Re: "Competent, core language"

Hilarious. Keep on claiming Smalltalk, ALGOL, Simula, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Pascal, Oberon, etc... are all perfectly designed, that C/C++ is terribly flawed beyond redemption, that C/C++ programmers don't know they can shoot themselves in the foot, that real-world usage which is so little it doesn't get all of these languages combined out of the "Others" column means nothing and certainly not languages which are just of academic interest, and that actual real-world usage to solve real-world problems is populism. Just don't do it while I have my morning coffee please.

Re: "Competent, core language"

None of the languages you cite are getting traction in the commercial world and you miss all the langagues that provide real competition like Java or are up-and-coming like Go and Rust. But apparently I am wrong.

Re: 'you still can't write something like an OS with them'

If it's standard Pascal then units aren't compiled separately but end up in one monolithic executable. You might be looking for library (non-standard).

Re: Is C++ becoming too large and complex?

Pascal came up because you were saying the popularity of C was misplaced. I was trying to get the point across that there was no contemporary competition to C which could do the things C could do. At that time, Pascal was C's supposed competition.

I don't know, if you don't like C++ and even don't like C but cite languages like ALGOL and Pascal in other posts, it seems it's not me who's refusing to move on.

Re: Is C++ becoming too large and complex?

Nope, I was talking just about Pascal.

Apple moved away from a toy language as the moved away from a toy operating system.

The problem is that there is no standard in commercial Pascal implementations, each one solved the many and varied problems in their own way meaning there was no portability, while the language itself remained pristine and unsullied and unusable so the academics were happy.

Meanwhile, in the real world, C and C++ evolved, and all compilers supported the changes (even VC, eventually).

Re: Really?

"auto a1{0,1};" won't compile from C++17 onwards. AC was asking how auto helps.

Re: Is C++ becoming too large and complex?

Pascal could manage a glorified bootstrapper with a GUI, which I guess is an improvement in MS-DOS, but Apple moved away from Pascal with the move towards co-operative multitasking and PowerPC.

See also Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language.

Re: The old problem of the programmer perisope view of the world..

Er, no, my experience of MI is in the commercial world. And it compiled and ran and passed QA and was accepted by the customer and everything.

Re: C++ – never classy

You seem to have searched for "things I don't like about C" in Google and pasted a bunch of links.

Re: Really?

It wouldn't, because a1 wouldn't compile. Your point being that auto is terrible because you can't sprinkle it everywhere or something?

Re: "Competent, core language"

Twas my autocorrect, but Burrows as in head in the stand might be appropriate.

Pascal is nice to teach programming with, but can't be used in the real world. Delphi and Lazarus are not standard Pascal because standard Pascal is too limiting, but even so you still can't write something like an OS with them.

Seriously not getting your complaint about C/C++ being old, stuck in a quagmire, etc... and then going on to quote languages which are fossilised or only of interest inside academia.

Re: The old problem of the programmer perisope view of the world..

If you have learned OOP in a proper OO language like Smalltalk or Java

I stopped there. Multiple inheritence is too scary I take it? Fine, but then don't talk about proper OOP.

Re: C++ – never classy

Can't see why. They both express concepts and change to express new concepts... or die from lack of use.

Re: "Competent, core language"

By Burrows system languages you mean ALGOL. And then you complain that C++ is old and tired.

Re: Is C++ becoming too large and complex?

Well, you've missed what auto is for.

Re: Is C++ becoming too large and complex?

As far as I can tell there was no other language around which was as popular as C was which could cope with software of operating-system level complexity, certainly none of the examples of languages given here. So C was probably the best place for C++ to start.

If you're saying the popularity of C was/is misplaced then you don't understand why C was and is popular. You still can't write operating systems in Pascal, at one time that supposedly was a contender for C's crown.

C++ built upon this foundation. It was not perfect, but it got results, exactly like C, which is why C and C++ are popular. Other languages might have feature A, B, and C but not all of them. If they're useful then C++ will incorporate them and carry on. The other languages certainly won't be in any hurry to incorporate each other's features, let alone features from C++.

C++ does not aspire to be some perfect representation of an object-oriented language. There is no perfect language, not C++ and not the rest. The others either 1) have barely managed to get out the academic stage, trapped in constant debates about the best way to do things with a moribund user base or 2) are scripted or need a JIT VM or 3) are owned by some megacorp. C++ is the only language which is not owned by anyone, compiles into object code, and has new features which the user base are pushing for. The ones that are getting somewhere (Go, Rust) are getting somewhere due to their similarity to C++.

Tech ambitions said to lie at heart of Britain’s bonkers crash-and-burn Brexit plan

Re: Well it's kind of a good idea but...

The answer to all of your questions is it's all about control.

The former Brexit secretary David Davis said: “I would be inclined to repudiate large parts of the withdrawal agreement, because they were agreed on the basis that there would be a trade deal.” He argued that should include ripping up the financial settlement if no trade deal is reached. But Davis questioned the prime minister’s chief aide Dominic Cummings’ focus on securing control over state aid, something No 10 is keen to use to build up the UK’s tech industry, calling it “intrinsically un-conservative”.

There's this industry, it's undoubtedly the future, but it's not under Cummings' thumb. He's a control freak and can't stand that. He needs to be able to shower the right people in the IT industry with money to get that control.