Posts by Stephen 1

Heresy: Hare programming language an alternative to C

Re: No moving targets

You know you're not obliged to use all the new features in C++ right?

The code I wrote 20 years ago still works just fine.

Bank of England ponders minting 'Britcoin' to sit alongside the Pound

£378.8tn? I wish.

By my maths that would be an average of ~£5.4M each for everyone in the UK, including children.

It would also mean the government could pay off the national debt with a one off tax of 0.5% of wealth, so what's stopping them?

Boffins get first measurements of Jupiter's stratospheric storms that show 'unique beast' dwarfing Earth's issues

Chaos

Whenever I read about Jupiter's red spot, it beings to mind an Equinox episode from 1988 that has stuck in my mind ever since. In it they did an experiment which they claim predicts that essentially all large rotating gas giants will have similar spots.

This is the relevant section, but the whole program was amazing

Burning down the house! Consumer champ Which? probes smart plugs to find a bunch of insecure fire-risk tat

Re: Not just smart plugs!

I looked at installing some of those recently since they seemed a pretty handy thing to have. None of them had a separate switch to disconnect the USB circuitry from the mains and that was enough to put me off. It is still a potential fire hazard in case of circuit failure, small though the risk might be, I can't see what difference BS1363 makes to that.

Health Sec Hancock says UK will use Apple-Google API for virus contact-tracing app after all (even though Apple were right rotters)

Re: I might even install it

I had assumed it was all transferred directly to Dominic Cummings election manipulation database.

Ampere, Nvidia's latest GPU architecture is finally here – spanking-new acceleration for AI across the board

Re: OK ok so it's fast

Yeah that's a lot of energy, 1.62e+9 Joules in fact. Then of course you need to run it for more than one hour.

Microsoft pushes out fresh version of '90s throwback PowerToys suite with plenty of fixes – and one nasty bug

Re: "Make it look like Windows 7"

Absolutely, it is only fit, just, for picking a file to look at. The only people that think it is useful are those that use the desktop to store files.

For everything else I would recommend Directory Opus (though it does cost a few quid). I've no interest in GPsoft, but I've been using it for a long time and it is the second thing I install on any new machine, after Firefox.

Windows Terminal and Azure Data Studio both get a tickle from the Microsoft update fairy

Admin Terminal

Will the updated terminal support admin elevated tabs (or even the whole app)? Don't get me wrong, I like it, but until it does it cannot replace cmd and/or PowerShell.

Discussion on the matter here

Microsoft delivers a second preview of Visual Studio 2019 (a Redmond thing we actually like)

Re: multiple monitor support?

I haven't looked at 2019 yet, but both 2015 and 2017 support multi-monitor just fine. Just rip off the tab (code, debug watch window, whatever) and place it on another monitor, I'd be astonished if this had been removed from 2019.

The Java release train is moving faster, but will developers be derailed?

What's the point

With C/C++ doing the heavy lifting, combined with lightweight scripting, be it Python, JavaScript, QML etc on the front and JSON to lash the two together, there really isn't any point in Java, it should be left to die.

Sick of Java and C++? Google pours a cup o' Kotlin for Android devs

Re: "single Kotlin line could accomplish the same thing as 87 lines of Java"

I've written an entire mission system in one line of C++ (since we seem to be ignoring the fact that both Kotlin and Java are just fronts for the virtual machine with its millions of lines of code - much of it in err, C++).

Brexit will happen. The EU GDPR will happen. You can't avoid either

Re: Civil War

@Martin Summers

The world war three statement was made by Boris Johnson, pretty sure he had something to do with the Leave campaign. Of course he was lying, but now you know who said it, it seems rather superfluous to point that out.

Sayonara, Brits! The Irish tech sector could benefit from Brexit

Re: Malta is also English speaking

Could you stop the buggers from slaughtering all the passing bird life while you're there please.

I love you. I will kill you! I want to make love to you: The evolution of AI in pop culture

Re: Nice review of Robots in fiction ...

I'd always thought they need them to process the sonar return data, this is effectively an additional 3d 'vision' after all.

Use of big data can lead to 'harmful exclusion, discrimination' – FTC

Weapons Of Math Destruction

The use of unaccountable algorithms is very disturbing indeed. I would recommend watching Cathy O'Neil's presentation on "Weapons Of Math Destruction".

Boing Boing has a a link and summary here:

http://boingboing.net/2016/01/06/weapons-of-math-destruction-h.html

The ball's in your court, Bezos: Falcon 9 lands after launching satellites

Re: At last!

In "Sun Probe" Thunderbird 3 appeared to fly almost to the sun and back in an afternoon so it must have been capable of a significant fraction of C.

Come on Musk, there's a challenge for you...

(Congratulations though, excellent, inspirational, work)

Oracle laying off its Java evangelists? Er, no comment, says Oracle

Re: About Time

@swm

Might I suggest you take a look at Qt.

Cross-platform C++ with an excellent 2D graphics library and full support for OpenGl should you want it.

Stealth service – Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

Caution left handers

Pretty good game, but another one that suffers on the PC because of a poor console port. This is beginning to get a little tiresome but at least in this case the graphics are fine.

My main bugbear comes from being left handed. You can't map a lot of keys, including the numpad or most of the non-alpha numeric keys (including insert/delete/home/end/return etc). Although you can at least map the arrow keys.

You can't map most of the interaction screen keys at all, you are stuck with it.

So left handers will probably need a gaming mouse with extra buttons you can set up, which just about makes it playable.

All pixels go: World's biggest sky-gazing camera gets final sign-off

What about the Northern sky?

When do we get one of these?

Hyundai ix35 Fuel Cell: El Reg on the hydrogen highway

Re: grrr

She didn't say anyone should stop considering anything, no need to be rude.

She made a perfectly valid point that those of us with on street parking have no real options apart from government support for on street parking charge points.

Since that is a substantial fraction of the population it is a serious issue and one that must be addressed before electric vehicles can take over.

Evil computers sense you’re in a hurry and mess with your head

Dinosaur

No self-respecting tech-head should need a printer anymore.

GNOME 3.12: Pixel perfect ... but homeless

Don't get me wrong, I love C++ over all other languages, but even I would accept that it is probably not the language to use when writing a curry recipe.

Java won't curl up and die like Cobol, insists Oracle

Re: My children love Java

There are lots of jobs, there are few satisfying, well paid careers. Wrestling with the awfulness that is Java supplies very few (if any) of the latter, even though there may be lots of code monkey jobs around.

Leap-day Visual Studio beta provokes 'passionate' response

Internal compiler errors

VS2010 is horribly prone to internal compiler errors in C++.

My one wish for this release is that the compiler gives me a warning rather than falling flat on its face.

Acorn King Moir: BBC Micros, Ataris and 'BS' marketing

I used to love assembler on my 68K based ST. Once I moved to x86 PCs I never 'assembled' again.

Google opens Android music store in iTunes' face

No FLAC, no deal.

Cambridge Audio Sonata NP30 hi-fi streamer

Multi-Room?

It's also hard enough to find CD quality WAV downloads let alone 24bit/96KHz. Where are you supposed to get that source material from?

I use a Sonos coupled with a Cyrus DAC XP+ and matching amplifier, so I could play that resolution if I wanted to, there is just no point, though I can tell the difference between CD WAV rips and 320kb MP3 pretty easily (as could anyone else with that system before anyone starts).

Talking of which, has anyone else noticed that some WAV downloads on some sites appear to sound as bad as MP3, almost as though they are just format conversions. I think someone should investigate.

Microsoft unveils file-move changes in Windows 8

Directory Opus

Surely downloads are done by your browser usually, and it's not like you are going to be using IE is it.

Also, anyone worth their geek wings should be using Directory Opus in place of Windows Explorer anyway, it is simply brilliant, and no, I have no connection with the company.

Google Go strikes back with C++ bake-off

DMA

That's the bit that caught my attention. That isn't just an optimisation, that is the mother of optimisations. If the Go version had optimised memory caching and still didn't wipe the floor with the C++ version that didn't, then they should probably have kept quiet about it.

TomTom sorry for giving customer driving data to cops

Garmin

Very bad behaviour TomTom. However in their defence, I've been reliably informed that Garmin devices store historical route data on the device itself like the iPhone but that TomTom don't.

Oracle looks for love at Java DevJam

D

Go on Google - drop Java and throw your support, and money, behind D. A much more advanced language that we can all use safely, and no lawsuits.

Christians vs metalheads in FB flame war

Satanists ARE Christians

They share the same creation myth. The Christians should be pleased that the Satanists are spreading the word.

AMD to dump ATI brand

ATI Drivers

ATI drivers are undoubtedly still very poor. I risked buying a new laptop with a Radeon 5400 in it and they are awful. Catalyst is crap too.

I have the big cursor problem, the crashes, the system freezes, the inability to resume from hibernate half the time. All these are long known about ATI bugs which remain unfixed after 8 updates of the drivers (now on 10.7). Never again.

If AMD put some effort into sorting this out then great.

6Music in numbers

Lamb has resigned.

So 6 is even better now.

Could still be more diverse though, very little world/electronica/dubstep/blues etc.

Visual Studio 2010 - your chunky new friend dissected

Compiler errors

Our code base, which compiles cleanly at maximum warning levels, on both GCC and VS2005SP1 causes internal compiler errors on VS2010 in template code.

It also buggers up some of the properties macros ($OutDir at least) when you import old projects so you have to tweak them to get it to compile in the first place.

It may have lots of new wizz-bang features, but if it can't compile C++ code properly I think we'll be sticking with VS2005 for a while yet, so that's 100 licences they won't be selling here.

This was the release trial by the way, not the beta.

Times websites want £1 a day from June

Could work

Could work if the BBC didn't exist. Hmmm, Tories win the election in May, destroy the BBC in return for support...

IEEE names 28-year-old woman its new 'Face of Engineering'

Expected better of Reg readers

Is El-Reg now becoming subjected to the same bunch of moaning right wingers that have effectively destroyed the BBC's HYS and infest most other comments sections out there?

Just because you haven't made as much of your life as you hoped you would is your fault, no-one elses, just accept it.

Good luck to the woman, it is evident from the comments here that there is a still a battle to win.

BBC to cull radio stations, halve websites in painful biz review

Save 6Music!

A fantastic radio station, it would be a crime against real music to scrap it.

Open source - the once and future dream

@Sean

What is wrong with developers seeking some credit for an enormous amount of hard work for which they weren't paid? Seems fair to me.

After all, every film has every person that worked on it listed at the end, and they were paid. Perhaps musicians should not expect credit for writing great songs either - all songs could be anonymous and anyone claiming to have written a popular one is dismissed as an ego-maniac. And don't get me started on those authors who actually have the audacity to put their name on the covers of their books.

Windows 7's dirty secrets revealed

Every journey starts with a single step

Most of this sounds good, particularly MinWin and layering. Microsoft have to get from where they are now, not from some ideal and at least they are finally making the right moves. As a middleware designer I know a bit about carrying lots of legacy code bases around, I can't imagine the problems they face.

Dumping synchronous RPC would help to eliminate those nasty dependencies though, so ditching OLE and it's bastard children would be a good place to start.

I've a lot of respect for Russinovich, I suspect the rather good resource monitor in Windows 7 has a lot to do with him.

Bit nervous about the OS trying to disguise bad apps though.

Mozilla plans to tie Firefox 3.7 pigtails in pretty Ribbon

Silver lining

Because Vista's Explorer was unusable without a button bar I had to go and find an alternative. I found Directory Opus (no, I have no vested interests) and haven't looked back, so there are upsides.

Martha Lane-Fox: No broadband, no citizenship

Landfill

Perhaps the anti-recycling people would like to volunteer their gardens as landfill sites.

Mozilla's servers wobble as Firefox 3.5 hits interwebs

Bookmarks OK

Seamless upgrade here, certainly no problem with bookmarks. Works well too.

It did require a reboot though, which on Vista took several times longer than the actual install <sigh>

(And why am I now Stephen 1, when I used to be just Stephen? Who is this new Stephen that has usurped me?)

DataSlide reinvents hard drive

Stuff that moves, breaks

Nice idea though