Posts by Ross 12

I picked Task Manager 'to see how ready AI is for primetime… or if it would just degrade to slop' – OG dev talks to The Reg

The application started as a 107-page specification that Plummer passed to Fable.

If there's one thing managers are great at, it's giving developers exhaustive and highly detailed specifications

Microsoft says 8 GB of RAM should be enough for anyone running Windows 11

So they're just going to add "and make it more memory efficient" to their AI build prompts?

Model Context Protocol prepares to break with its stateful past

For those who rolled their own MCP engine, some long days of reconfiguration may be ahead. "If you built your own implementation, it's going to be a lot of uplift to make this correct," Parra admitted.

Surely they just have to tell the magic prompt to make it work again

XP-era Windows spotted haunting London's driverless railway

Windows seems like such a heavyweight OS for tasks like this, it just never sits right with me

Anthropic admits Claude Code users hitting usage limits 'way faster than expected'

Re: taxi analogy

..and the taxi driver has never been taught to drive - they've just been forced to watch every film and tv show that's ever been made that features vehicles

Containers, cloud, blockchain, AI – it's all the same old BS, says veteran Red Hatter

Re: He missed one...

Unfortunately XML was too much of an academic exercise, requiring many hoops to jump through in order to actually use it. By the time you get down to XSLT, transforming one XML structure to another, itself an XML based language, the whole ecosystem disappeared up it's own arse

Node & Electron

Javascript was bad enough IN the browser, but somehow it became the language for everything, and Electron meant that every application you run can now be gigantic resource hog because it's basically another separate chrome instance

When AI 'builds a browser,' check the repo before believing the hype

I'm glad people have investigated the claim..

..but who, other than management types, ever actually believed it?

The only thing generative AI can do is respond to human input in a (fairly) convincingly human way. That's it. Sometimes that's good enough. When building non-trivial software though, it really *really* isn't enough.

Ironclad OS project popping out Unix-like kernel in a unique mix of languages

Re: AMOS

Yeah STOS was the original, then the Amoeba games machine wanted in on the action

Uncle Sam floats tracking tech to keep AI chips out of China

LOL

that is all.

Photoshop FOSS alternative GIMP wakes up from 7-year coma with version 3.0

Can anyone explain the humour? Why is it funny?

Who had Pat Gelsinger retires from Intel on their bingo card?

What I'd like to see

They could sell x86 to AMD and become a second supplier, reversing the original arrangement. They'd get a cash boost from the sale and AMD are better at technical and architectural stuff so everyone wins

Transport for London confirms 5,000 users' bank data exposed, pulls large chunks of IT infra offline

Re: It's a large workforce

How the bloody hell did you get 'woke' into it?

Pat Gelsinger's grand plan to reinvent Intel is in jeopardy

They could raise money

by selling the x86/x86-64 IP to AMD. They seem to be better at developing the architecture anyway

Porting the Windows 95 Start Menu to NT

Chuggy

One thing I distinctly remember from the early days of the Start menu was that there didn't seem to be much (or any?) caching, so that every time you invoked the start menu and navigated your way through the program menus, sub-menus would pause while waiting for the hard disk to chug as it looked for programs and their icons in each directory.

I'm sure that in a modern VM it would all be faster than the blink of an eye, but back then even with a whole 96MB of RAM, there was a lot of waiting for the hard disk to catch up

Elon Musk's latest brainfart is to turn Tesla cars into AWS on wheels

Re: Dead cat on the table alert!

Failing that, it's time for someone to drop another crotch-spawn

Building a 16-bit CPU in a spreadsheet is Excel-lent engineering

Any software patches for Excel would be like a microcode update for the processor, I love it!

Clippy designer was too embarrassed to include him in his portfolio

Gotta admit, I always liked Clippy. OK the 'help' was useless and irritating, but having that expressive little guy in the corner of the screen reacting to what you were doing was nice

System76 teases features coming in homegrown Rust-based desktop COSMIC

So they're writing a new desktop from scratch, and it does look very neat and professional, but it also looks really really similar to gnome. Feels like a wasted opportunity to try something visually different instead of creating yet another flat UI

Brit chip company picks RISC-V for next-gen microcontrollers

Most impressive thing

..for me is that they have a CEO who seems to have actual technical knowledge of what their company does, how they do it, and why,

API rate limits at the core of Elon Musk’s decision to ditch Twitter

Anyone else really bored with Space Karen's shenanigans? I don't believe he ever genuinely intended to buy Twitter, partly because it's too well established to be able to later claim that he founded it

Vivaldi email client released 7 years after first announcement

Still using Evolution on linux here. Webmail is handy sometimes, but the interfaces *cough*GMail*cough* are usually atrocious

Microsoft reanimates 1995's 3D Movie Maker via GitHub

Re: inch-by-inch

Don't HP own VMS these days? And there's still big customers using it

GNOME 42's inconsistent themes are causing drama

I get the feeling that a lot of the drive for this stuff is that the current generation of developers are using cheap chromebooks despite many users having desktops with big screens. Hence everything now is tied to keyboard shortcuts and 'command palettes' (because nobody likes using touchpads), and an app's entire UI is crammed into it's titlebar because the devs have little vertical screen space.

And as for theming - Linux and FOSS was always about choice and giving power to users. I'm all for having a really nice default look, but you can't even tweak the colours (apparently Ubuntu are patching in the ability to choose a single accent colour?) Instead of taking theming away, why couldn't they go the other way and design a proper, robust, theming API? In fact, a cross-DE or even cross-OS theming API would be amazing. Users could choose their preferences for colour schemes, rounded/square corners, shadows, transparency, mono/outline/full colour icons, etc and each theme can implement those preferences within its own style. The API could also generate contrasting or complementary colours as needed based on the user choice of primary colour, or pick from the background image etc.

Debugging source is even harder when you can't stop laughing at it

'self-taught Visual Basic programmer'

When you hear those words you know you're in for a very bad time

114 billion transistors, one big meh. Apple's M1 Ultra wake-up call

It still blows my mind that I have a handheld battery powered internet terminal in my hand with an 8-core 64-bit processor, 8gb of ram, and 64gb of storage that I can do most of my day-to-day computing on. When I was a kid writing BASIC on my Speccy, those stats would have been absolutely incomprehensible.

It's hard to get excited about advances now because most of our needs are already met. Pretty much any device made in the past 10 years is 'good enough' to do your every-day web stuff, and most obstacles are in the software - abandoned or deprecated systems.

The gains we get now are really only significant for less common use cases, like video editing, graphics rendering, audio production, VR, etc. Gaming is probably the most mainstream use case that's still pushing hardware forward, but even then, the visible gains are becoming less and less significant, with the latest-gen consoles moving to SSDs providing the most noticeable jump in capability in recent years.

20 years of .NET: Reflecting on Microsoft's not-Java

Re: Memories!

Good thing too! VB UIs were generally terrible

Former Oracle execs warn that Big Red's auditing process is also a 'sales enablement tool'

Why? Why do people still use Oracle?

'Admin error': AWS in dead company data centre planning application snafu in Oxfordshire

Re: Thames Valley Storms

Yes it'll affect the price, so some of your vast wealth can start trickling down :)

You loved running JavaScript in your web browser. Now, get ready for Python scripting

Re: The future will be... special

It's the end of days. Nothing matters any more, so why not install Linux on a Windows partition, or run python in a browser, or mount a live github repository as your home directory

The rocky road to better Linux software installation: Containers, containers, containers

Confusing mess

The problem I have with this is that after years of singing the virtues of 'just apt install it', there's now this confusing mess of packages, snaps and flatpaks.

Just the other weekend I got round to guiding my boyfriend through his first linux install. Ive been a linux geek since the RedHat 5.2 days whereas he's a capable power user and graphics bod, but not an OS geek.

So I advised on Ubuntu 21.10 - it was running on my machine with no problems after all. Perhaps I should have opted for the LTS release but I figured that this was to explore, not installing a safe daily-driver.

After the can of worms that was not having an appropriate wifi driver, we dug up some old ethernet-over-power kit and got connected. So far so good.

Then came the applications. 'How do I install Chrome?' oh... well... normally you'd 'sudo apt install chrome' (or whatever the actual package name was), but now you shouldn't do that because it installs a Snap instead and that's.. 'what's a snap?' oh.. well.. *some time later*

OK looks like the only way to do this now then is to use firefox to go to google and install chrome from there. 'hmmm' so like Windows then?

Then things got worse. 'Lets install Blender' I said, knowing that he uses it a lot on Windows, so it would be nice and familiar. And before I could say 'fire up a terminal and apt search blender' he'd found the cunningly named 'Software' app. Oh, I thought, this isn't going to end well.

So we searched for Blender and there were three results. Blank stare. 'So which one do I install?' Well, I said, click on each one and check the version, see which is the latest. It was the second one. The third one appeared to be someone else's custom build. Why was it there? Was it official in any way? Was it safe? Who knows.

So we installed the second one, which turned out to be a Snap. Installation went ok then he clicked 'launch'. And waited. 'I thought linux was meant to be fast?'. Oh, Snaps sometimes take a few seconds to start. I said. 'Why?' - I'm... not sure.

So when it launched, it was immediately obvious that something was wrong. The whole UI was really sluggish, and this machine powered by an i9 and a 2080ti.

Was it a driver issue? nope. We were using the latest official Nvidia driver. Hmmm.. my instinct was telling me that, being containerised, something was getting in the way of Blender and the gpu. OK, I said, try uninstalling it, and installing the other version, even though it's slightly out of date.

So we installed the repository version and lo and behold, it ran perfectly.

'So how do you update it to the latest version?' - well, you can't. You'll only get bug fixes with this package. Unless we try a flatpak version..

But before we could do that, we needed to install flatpak itself. Oh and gnome-software-plugin-flatpak but that actually made things even more confusing. However, after what seemed like a life-time, we got the flatpak version of Blender installed and it ran perfectly fine.

By this point I was exhausted and quite honestly a bit embarrassed and somewhat regretting suggesting the idea of installing linux.

My boyfriend and I have not spoken about linux packages since.

Replaced several times but still live and kicking: Windows Forms updated for .NET 6.0

Microsoft need to kill it off like they have with IE rather than just politely suggesting that devs move on to something new.

Zuckerberg wants to create a make-believe world in which you can hide from all the damage Facebook has done

The problem with real life is that, despite capitalism's best efforts, there are still human actions and interactions that aren't monetised yet.

That's what Zuckerbot's Metaverse is for. Everything do you; everything you look at; everything you access or interact with, both in work or personal time, can be sold or rented to you or licensed or used to deliver adverts.

And then there's you as a data source... on a whole new level from the already insane levels of data slurping from your web and mobile use.

Amid drama at .NET Foundation, Microsoft's De Icaza reveals it was meant to be like GNOME Foundation

I think what's needed is

a foundation of foundations founded by successful foundations to found new foundations and help all the other foundations to run themselves and behave the way the foundations were founded to

Redpilled Microsoft does away with flashing icons on taskbar as Windows 11 hits Beta

slider

Why the hell don't they have a slider for 'user advancedness' or whatever you want to call it, with 'beginner/casual user' at one end and 'enthusiast/power user' at the other end and 'intermediate user' in the middle.

Then all aspects of the Windows interface can configure themselves around it. I.e. presenting simpler sub-sets of options, doing more hand-holding, etc depending on the setting. Allow applications to also access the setting.

The Register just found 300-odd Itanium CPUs on eBay

"Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing, and its IA-64 instruction set"

Wait, is AMD's EPYC a sly two-fingered salute at Intel?

Sir Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web NFT fetches $5.4m at auction while rest of us gaze upon source code for $0

Backups?

If you shell out stupid money for an NFT like this, then surely you'll also make a backup or two of your 'valuable' possession? In which case you've just made another perfect digital copy. Every time it's transferred over a network, it's copied. The sooner this insanity ends the better.

Beyond video to interactive, personalised content: BBC is experimenting with rebuilding its iPlayer in WebAssembly

WebAssembly, rust, webgl, canvas... just missing the blockchain element

Samsung reveals DDR5 memory module that’s ready for Compute Express Link

Re-invention of the wobbly RAM-pack

Does it come with blu-tak?

Google proposes Logica data language for building more manageable SQL code

No no no no no

The 'problem' they seem to be trying to fix isn't SQL's readability but how it's not componentised. If you want a big reporting query for example, generally a single dev will have to write the whole thing because you can't just re-use little snippets (unless you have a really well designed database and you really know what you're doing).

It seems to me that they want devs to be able to pre-define little bits of logic that other devs can then collaboratively drag and drop into a big query without having to actually understand what they're doing.

Because, you know, having to actually understand what you're doing with code and data is /hard/ and all code should be able to be worked on by all devs *shrug*

As for comparing the two languages, I despair. SQL *is* arcane, old-fashioned, and can feel intimidating and restrictive at first. But bloody hell it's actually easy to follow and is amazingly powerful - well beyond what you expect from first impressions.

So how's .NET 6 coming along? Oh wow, Microsoft's multi-platform framework now includes... Windows

".NET 6.0 is expected to be completed in November. Like .NET 5.0, it is no longer designated .NET Core, though it remains distinct from the Windows-only .NET Framework"

AAARRRGGGHHH! So it's the .NET that used to be .NET Core not the other .NET? What could be clearer

Over a decade on, and millions in legal fees, Supreme Court rules for Google over Oracle in Java API legal war

Re: Wah Wah Wah! Oracle! They don't like the ruling!

Javascript and Electron may not be an improvement, but they've opened up the cross-platform GUI application space that Java spectacularly failed to get to grips with.

It's not entirely Java's fault mind you. The hardware running Electron apps is mindbogglingly powerful compared to what was available 20 years ago. The dreadful and jarring look and feel of Java applications though.. that definitely didn't help.

Google reveals version control plus not expecting zero as a value caused Gmail to take an inconvenient early holiday

Facebook

The thing about Facebook is that because of their size and dominance, people assume they're professionals and know what they're doing. But I get the distinct impression that they're mostly staffed by excitable but amateur coders who think they're pioneers and treat everything as an opportunity to 'do something cool' which amounts to badly reinventing the wheel. The bugs and weird behaviours at occur in facebook's mobile app and web front-end often suggest that the architecture is an unholy un-tamable mess

Asus ROG Phone 3: An ugly but refreshing choice – for gaming fans only

Re: Aspect ratio?

:9 has become the marketing standard for screen ratios sadly. My OnePlus 6T has an '18:9' screen, which is actually 2:1 but that doesn't sound as 'big'.

Reminds me of the old story when Wendy's (or some other competitor?) sold a 1/3lb burger to compete with McDonald's 1/4lb-er at the same price, but most people thought 1/4 was bigger than 1/3

Apple's M1: the fastest and bestest ever silicon = revolution? Nah, there's far more interesting stuff happening in tech that matters to everyone

That was an article?

You may as well have added 'just do your research!!!' to the assertion that there's 'far more interesting stuff happening in tech that matters to everyone'

Visual Studio Code 1.50 goes hard on extensions support, but tackling add-on bloat is becoming more onerous

"If anything can impede the growing popularity of VS Code, it will be when the number and sophistication of its many extensions become a burden."

Ahh yes, the Firefox trap.

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

Some of these features sound like it's taking ideas from Rust

In the frame with the Great MS Bakeoff: Microsoft sets out plans for Windows windows

They still don't get it do they?

Nobody is going to port old code to a shiny new framework just because there's a new API - no matter how much nicer it is. That's simply not the reason anybody writes code. And for as long as Windows supports running win32 apps, people will keep win32 code around, and keep writing new apps in it to reach a wider audience than anything new.

There's 25+ years of Win32 code out there in the wild. Half the developers have probably died, retired, or changed career. Half the source code probably no longer exists. Just as with COBOL, there'll be Win32 code out there running that people don't even know about and that probably hasn't been looked at since Y2k was a thing. There'll be code propping up businesses large and small all over the world who's in-house developers and external vendors have long since disappeared.

Microsoft will never be able to rid itself of Win32 by trying to tempt developers to use something new. The only way they'll do it is to put their foot down and stop supporting it whilst making sure there's a clear and definite stable alternative - something that Microsoft are pretty much incapable of.

I really think that Microsoft need to accept the fact that they're a 'boring' business software vendor - not a hip and trendy brand. They got the corporate world hooked on Windows, Office and VS etc, and that means they're stuck with them for the long term.

Geneticists throw hands in the air, change gene naming rules to finally stop Microsoft Excel eating their data

CSVs

This is another great example of why CSVs are shit and need to be left in the past where they belong.

HP hostile takeover warms up: Xerox queues print job cash_and_shares.pdf, mails it to the board to mull over

Xerox are such a weird company. Outside of the US, they're just kinda known as that american photocopier company. And then you find out that they invented the GUI, WYSIWYG editing, and ethernet.