Posts by deadlockvictim

If my calculations are correct, when Google Chrome hits version 88, you're gonna see some serious... security

Will these changes protect us from the almighty Google slurp?

I think I know the answer.

Plans for Entity Framework Core 6.0 revealed as Microsoft admits it is unlikely to match Dapper for performance

Performance optimisation hell

As a DBA, I loathe Entity Framework (and ORMs in general)

I see it as time stolen from the DBAs so that the developers can meet their deadlines.

EF is performance optimisation hell. SQL Server keeps nice data about what objects are run, how often, what execution plans they use and so on.

If stored procedures have become resource hogs or taking their sweet bloody time to execute, SQL Server provides the data for me to react.

But with EF I get these long ugly chunks of SQL that I have to dissect. And even then, it can't be guaranteed that the next execution of the same EF code will result in the same SQL. So when someone from Helpdesk or a PM says that the x functionality is running slow, I can look at the SQL and hold my head and sigh.

Running baselines for objects is doable with SPs but not really with EF.

It all has to go back to the developers, which means that the problem won't be solved until another couple of sprints.

At least with SPs I can test the code in the object, optimise in and submit it in a sprint myself

Did anyone tell Logitech about lockdown? Biz launches pricey video chat kit for office conference rooms and 'huddle spaces'

Spanish Flu

If the Spanish Flu is anything to go by, we will have a third wave and it should be the epidemic should last about 18 months.

Given that many countries are in lockdown and that the first wave of vaccines have started to be rolled out, I don't think that it is unrealistic that the epidemic should be a shadow of its former self by teh end of summer. If the Spanish Flu is anything to go by.

And if I am right, Logitech should be nicely poised with these huddle spaces to enter office spaces. It will be a thrill to meet people again (not to mention actually sitting next to them). People in continental Europe will have the thrill of kissing each other again. Nor will the experience of video-conferencing will not have been forgotten as it has been become a normal part of people's lives.

Until the epidemic started earlier last year, when one team wanted to talk to another team, the large standard tables in a meeting room hindered rather than helped video-conferencing. Either everyone was too small or everyone was in the picture. This offering from Logitech does look veyr appealing in a world where video-conferencing has become a new norm.

Four women seek release from forced arbitration to sue Infosys for widespread gender discrimination

Re: Typical Indian male behavior

AC: More notable though is that not a single one of my team was born in the UK, which speaks volumes about the ability of the UK education system to produce people with the right skills to be good developers. I'm not saying that they don't exist, but other countries seem to be doing much better here.

I have worked with 3 female DBAs (one of whom was my boss) and they were all from BRIC-countries: Russia, India & China. I can count on my hand the number of female developers that have worked for us and we have about 20 programmers.

In the European country where I work now, the only technical roles women seem to voluntarily take on are those of requirements engineer or data scientist.

Now, it may very well be that the company isn't offering a high enough salary and that the women who do apply know they can get more or that they get weeded out by Personnel for whatever reason, for anecdotal evidence suggests that very women come to interview with us.

Decades-old UK government papers show that they tried to roll out a 'Cab-E-Net' system in the '90s. It was crap

John Major

For those who miss John Major, a time when it was hard to have strong feeling about the PM, here is Rory Bremner:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Eqr44ytH30

Come, chant with us over a sacrificial goat and predict 2021's biggest tech stories to a high degree of accuracy

Microsoft Watch

You forgot to mention the upgrade cycle that causes it to be unavailable for almost a day and to make sure that 32GB is always free on it even though everything on the phone is stored up in the Cloud somewhere.

Women are 40% of Indian STEM grads and in just 14% of tech jobs. Not good enough, says VP Naidu

Emigration

I wonder what percentage of the 26% used their degrees and skills to get the hell out of India and find a job in a country whose society respects them.

India, from I have heard and read about, is not at all a woman-friendly place. And while many First World Countries aren't especially women-friendly either, India could do a lot, lot better.

Wait ages for an antitrust battle and three come along at once: Google sued by 38 US states over search monopoly

Re: Where were Google management in the 90s?

Doing postdocs?

Except for Eric Schmidt, of course, he was in Novell.

Ad blocking made Google throw its toys out of the pram – and now even more control is being taken from us

Article» ...although why no home router makers have put ad and track filtering in their products is slightly mystifying.

Maybe, just maybe, the reason for this is as hinted by the investigations & law-suits from the US DoJ, namely that Google (and others) are leveraging their weight and fat checkbooks to ensure that said devices do not have these things built in.

Adios California, Oracle the latest tech firm to leave California for the wide open (low tax) Lone Star State

Re: improve our employees’ quality of life

California, from what I read about, has become neo-liberal hell.

The auqifer in Central Valley has been drained so low that ordinary wells are no longer deep enough. All so that we can have inexpensive almonds. This madness with the driving of bees thousands of miles for the aformentioned almonds. The yearly wildfires that surely have something to do with the very low auqifer levels. The reports of smoke this autumn were not good.

And there are the obscenely high property prices, NIMBYism on a grand scale, people living in camper vans and the general homelessness problem.

I've long thought that America has a fundamental problem in its categorisation of people as 'winners' & 'losers', which is often called 'zero-sum thinking'. The fact that such a massive percentage of the population is $400 away from disaster. The massive lack of solidarity within American society has shown how rotten America is at heart.

Or am I wrong?

75% of databases to be cloud-hosted by 2022, says Gartner while dishing on the weak points of each provider

Magical Thinking

When dealing with Gartner's Magical Quadrant, I reckon that it was put together with magical thinking.

Probably in Excel too.

Amazon’s cloudy Macs cost $25.99 a day. 77 days of usage would buy you your own Mac

But is a cloudy Mac actually a Mac?

My guess is that people who want to use a Mac will want the actual bare-metal at their side, rather than the Mac as a Service online.

Adobe's Creative Cloud has cheered up Photoshop-botherers no end.

Mysterious metal monolith found in 'very remote' part of Utah

Re: Film set

If you want to see truly intergalactic scenery, you just need to visit quarries in the south of Wales.

A sheep with a star on its back

Or here even.

Plaque

I shouldn't be taking this seriously and I should be commenting on what the rock formation behind it reminds me of, but I won't.

It looks like a plaque holder awaiting its plaque. A plaque for what I can not say though: rock formations maybe?

The GIMP turns 25 and promises to carry on being the FOSS not-Photoshop

Hmmm

I'm happy that GIMP is here but I never got used to it.

Indeed I bought a 10-year-old Mac Pro 3,1 some years back which came with Photoshop on it when I wanted to have a dedicated machine to make DVDs and edit photos. I got it for the equivalent of £20. It has Mac OS X 10.6 on it and I keep it off the Internet. 4x 3,2GHz cores and 32GB RAM is grand. Apple make hardware to last, or at least they used to.

I have Ubuntu on my main Internet machine and I could have downloaded GIMP but I never got used to it. But then again, I am someone who uses graphic programs so rarely, it never seemed worthwhile to get used to GIMP. I got used to Photoshop between versions 2.5 and 5.5 and all that I need was there.

Bloated middle age beckons: Windows 1.0 turns 35 and is dealing with its mid-life crisis, just about

folklore.org

Read what Andy Hertzfeld (and others) have to say about the birth of the Mac. They were there and made it happen.

https://www.folklore.org/

Billionaire's Pagani Pa-gone-i after teen son takes hypercar out for a drive, trashes it

The French

Or simply that they are mad.

When I worked at a chantier some 30 years' ago, one of the French guys in charge was fond of driving at 10Km/h ( 6 mph in old money) on route nationale 10 just to annoy other drivers. He also may have been trying to kill us. I hadn't considered that option yet. It is one of the main arteries in the west of France. He was also the type of person that went around roundabouts 4-5 times before turning off.

Driving at 10Km/h on a main road is hard.

Apple Arm Macs ship, don't expect all open-source apps to work without emulation – here's what you need to know

Rosetta El-Reg-style

El Reg» El Reg isn't allowed within 100ft of Apple review hardware for reasons you can guess...

You need to take a leaf out of Apple's book: Rosetta.

El Reg publishes articles that conform to Apple Marketing (aka propaganda) and you provide a Rosetta-Stone-like icon (e.g. the one from Civilization I) that translates into Regspeak. That way El Reg slowly becomes the most favoured altar boy while we get the gossip from the presbytery.

New lawsuit: Why do Android phones mysteriously exchange 260MB a month with Google via cellular data when they're not even in use?

Satknaves

I have satknaves in my car before but I prefer to call them 'backseat drivers'.

Let me get this right...

Let me get this right, people who chose the operating system of their smartphone from a known data-hoarder have had massive amounts of their data from the hoarded by the aforementioned company.

Can we have an article from people who bought Apple gear complaining that it was unncessarily expensive and that it is not right?

Apple now Arm'd to the teeth: MacBook Air and Pro, Mac mini to be powered by custom M1 chips rather than Intel

Re: Confusing much?

Mac OS 9 was named as such for marketing reasons. It was originally Mac OS 8.7.

I'm fairly sure that Mac OS 9 came about as a bridge between Mac OS 8.x and the new Mac OS X.

I still believe that the X in Mac OS X is primarily UNIX. Until XML came along, X is a name meant UNIX.

Re: Confusing much?

I had always thought that the X in Mac OS X originally stood for UNIX.

That it is also the Roman numeral 10 was merely wordplay.

What's for Christmas, Google? Oh, you're taking away free phone calls from our Nest speakers

Calling

Article: place calls to mobiles and landlines

Landlines are, like, a retro form of Whatsapp, but, like, you can only talk on them, and to, like, only one person and from only one place. They are, like, VHS, or like, desktop computers (remember those haha).

Calling mobiles? Who calls mobiles? That's, like, a live form of leaving a message. Eww.

SNAFU: Clairvoyant train brings warning of what was coming down the line for 2020

SBB CFF FFS

My nephews were greatly amused to see the letters FFS written on Swiss trains.

The Swiss may think it means 'Ferrovie federali svizzere' (thanks Wikipedia) but my nephews were having none of it.

Wait until they find out that everyone in Lausanne has VD (on their licence plates).

What a time to be alive: DB Admin raps about Microsoft SQL Server and he ain't even paid to do so

Weird Al is ahead of you

I'm almost at the specs of his computer at home too.

Weird Al — It's All About The Pentiums: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpMvS1Q1sos

That being said, I'd like to see SQL Server Crysis Edition. When I have to kill a session, I want to have a choice of weapons.

Ed Snowden doesn’t need to worry about being turfed out of Russia any more

Snowden for President

If as it seems from the posts of commentards that both Republicans & Democrats hate him, then we have our perfect compromise candidate.

Snowden for President!

Love Minecraft: Java? You'll have to learn to love your Microsoft account as well – it will be required next year

We have Minecraft on a standalone Wii U. We have a couple of consoles for multi-player use and no Internet connection. The children have to be told to stop playing it so I'm happy that they are enjoying it.

What does everyone make of today's Google antitrust action? Only the stock market is happy with the status quo

Re: Alphabet is evil

Point taken.

Re: Alphabet is evil

Why the downvotes? The poster is almost certainly correct.

Of course, it applies to the Republicans too. What are the chances that a new Republican administration will do anything to force the telcos to do anything about the appalling state of broadband in the US?

Google screwed rivals to protect monopoly, says Uncle Sam in antitrust lawsuit: We go inside the Sherman parked on a Silicon Valley lawn

Re: Democratic AGs are on board with a separate effort

El Reg» The Justice Dept's lawsuit is joined by 11 state attorneys general – all Republican, reflecting the dire state of partisan politics in the US.

I'm not sure what to make of this sentence. Is the problem that there are so few state attorneys general? That they are all Republican? That the Democrats are doing their own thing?

Honestly, my first (cynical) reading of the sentence was: Google is contributing too little to Republican coffers and this is an election year. You haven't paid the protection money, see, so come and meet Luigi an' the boys.

When you tell Chrome to wipe private data about you, it spares two websites from the purge: Google.com, YouTube

Flash

I love you Flash but...

I have to watch this film again now. I thought it was cheesy when I was 10. God knows how this has aged.

Hopefully the Queen video isn't the best bit.

Pakistan restores TikTok, says it needs to crack down on video nasties, and anything else outside 'societal norms'

I'm sure that the Pakistani authorities will have no problems with anybody expressing sympathies for the neighbouring muslims to the east & north then.

Microsoft: After we said we'll try to promote more Black people, the US govt accused us of discrimination

Re: Just do what I do.

Jake» Hire on merit alone. Simples.

I completely agree with you. I went to a good school, got a CS degree and may be whiter than white. My preferred pronoun is 'he' and 'him'. I certainly think of myself as open-minded and diverse.

And, as teamleader, when it comes to new hires, I pick people who will get along best on the team, people whom I understand, people who understand the culture.

Indeed, Sir Humphrey put it so eloquently here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhZRDoGZg00

Not the Southern Rail of the stars: Rocket Lab plans frequent, regular trips to Venus from 2023

Re: 'Night'Flights to Venus?

Oh, those Russians!

satellite

Would a satellite in Venus' atmosphere be able to send signals to Earth when the two planets are relatively near each other?

If so, would a satellite be a better option as a first step than the lander? The satellite could be powered by the sun and, as long as it built to withstand the upper Venerian atmosphere, it could broadcast for decades.

What could it monitor? Could radio-waves be used to map & monitor the surface?

Amazon gets its tax excuses in early amid rising UK profits – but leaves El Reg off the press list. Can't think why

The rising tide lifts all boats

Good people of England, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and the supply-side economists have you covered. Didn't you realise that it is a good thing that the money is all going to Amazon and not to the Government? The Government will only waste it on healthcare and the like.

No, the rising tide lifts all boats and as long as you have a boat (better still a yacht), you'll be grand. It's all for the best. Whose best, they didn't say, but I'm sure they meant you and me.

You won't need .NET Standard... except when you do need it: Microsoft sets out latest in ever-changing story

Re: .NET is still a thing?

Our programmers at work are obliged to use it.

The application servers are slow and the Entity Framework queries it generates mean we have to wait 3-4s for each webpage page to load. You won't be surprised to learn that we have about 30 deadlocks per day.

Re: There was an xkcd about competing standards...

https://xkcd.com/927/

You mean this one, don't you?

I thought of it myself while reading the article.

Wow, you guys have so much in common: Oracle hotly tipped to power TikTok’s operations as Microsoft deal rejected

TikTok & Oracle marketing

Well, I, for one, am looking forward to watching teens and pre-teens extol the virtues of Oracle in 15s to some tune from Billie Eilish.

Enterprise-level databases and analytics tools just haven't been that hot a topic with teenagers recently.

IBM repays millions to staff after messing up its own payroll

Incompetence or Evil

El Reg» IBM appears to have erred, rather than to have intended to underpay staff.

Yes. That is what must have happened. Senior management wouldn't have allowed the organisation to develop a culture of wrong-doing, merely just a culture of incompetence.

Apple commits to support human rights - 'We believe in the critical importance of an open society'*

Ireland & Hollyhell

It's now quite common for Apple employees to refer to their workplace in Cork as Hollyhell (instead of Hollyhill). A former employee liked the situation to a digital chicken factory with long well designed bank of cages. That's since they have removed the cubicle floor design at the facility to introduce a more "transparent workplace". Employees were ordered to remove all personal items from their desk spaces during a visit by Tim Cook to the Apple European HQ in 2015.

Taken from: https://politics.ie/threads/hollyhell-whats-it-like-to-work-for-apple-in-ireland.255372/

Amazon spies on staff, fires them by text for not hitting secretive targets, workers 'feel forced to work through pain, injuries' – report

Trump & Bezos

And to think that The Don doesn't like Jeff Bezos.

I'd have thought they'd be bosom-buddies.

Forget Fortnite and FIFA: India wants to develop games based on local legends

Modi

Maybe I'm being cynical, but two thoughts come to mind:

1. In the same way that MAGA translates as 'Make America White Again', my guess is that Modi's comment means, 'Make India Hindi Again'.

2. On that first point, there are many, many traditions & cultures on the Indian subcontinent. I wonder if Mr. Modi would be happy with an epic game that celebrates one of the non-Hindi cultures. The Tamils must surely have a rich mythology. They do have a lot of good programmers and an entrepreneurial culture. So, Tamil Nadu, take Mr. Modi's words seriously and pronounce for us a killer game rich in Tamil culture.

Here's some words we never expected to write: Oracle said to offer $10bn cash, $10bn shares for TikTok US – plus profit share promise

Re: Buy It

My hope is that Oracle will make it as user-friendly as their main product with lots of add-on products as well. TikTok will then become the default video-sharing site of governments and large corporations and have a licence structure as easy to understand as that of Oracle.

Keeping it local

Is the logical follow on from this, that the Chinese government can oblige American multinationals to sell off their profitable Chinese operations to Chinese companies whenever the Chinese government wishes?

Microsoft sides with Epic over Apple developer ban, supports motion for temporary restraining order

Re: Meanwhile, in other news

I don't understand the downvotes.

Go read Andy Hertzfeld's Folklore.org (or 'Revolution in the Valley' if you can find it) for some of the early days of Microsoft. Go watch the 'Pirates of Silicon Valley'. Apple & Microsoft go way back.

Look at all of Apple's OS releases and watch how Microsoft rendered their interpretation of them.

It is no surprise that Microsoft Excel was first released for the Macintosh.

Office too first appeared on the Mac.

That Bill Gates gave his public support to Apple at a time they were written off by most (1997) is no surprise.

Re: Meanwhile, in other news

To be fair to Microsoft, Microsoft has been a fan of Apple for a *very* long time and their histories are entwined. They both had a rich uncle Xerox, for example.

Re: Cupertino getting notions of apotheosis again.

Well, the root- and savage pruning Apple got in 1997 certainly did force them to be fruitful then. I do miss the crop of '98-'99.

However, what do you with a fruit tree that has become so invasive and parasitic that it drains 30% of everything it wraps its branches around. It seems to be more like ivy, if anything.

UK national debt hits 1.46 Apples – and weighs as much as 2 billion adult badgers

Standardisation

El Reg» UK debt is therefore equivalent to 22,441Pb...

Shouldn't this be 22.4 KPbs, that is, 22.4 Kilopogbas?

What with the U.K. leaving Europe and all of that, isn't it time to reject decimalisation and all of its works?

The U.S. has shown that how easy it is to live with Imperial measurement system. You need something truly intuitive like LSD — pound-shillings-pence for those too young to remember. The Sixties, well, the early Seventies really, were a time of experimentation with wacky new ideas.