Re: Old school
Yes. Please elucidate yourself
964 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Jun 2009
“Buy vPro laptops this year and they will be AI PCs; buy vPro desktops and they won't”
In practical terms, apart from the obvious fact that one is a desktop and one a laptop, there is no difference! The “AI” hardware will be redundant anyway and if you have a machine cursed with such hype then the best course of action would be to find out how to switch it off to reduce power drain
Unfortunately, in the medium term at least, the “AI” elements will just be a tax on an artificially inflated new PC price tag
I’m sure there will be a good selection of fun and exciting projects spring up to do something useful with that lovely “AI” hardware that we’re all going to be paying a tax on very soon.
Of course, none of these projects will be “AI” - hopefully they will be much more useful than that
Where I work, we have recently moved over to using Bitbucket. I asked what the plan was if/when it all goes pear-shaped. One person on the Teams call laughed and said “well that will never happen”
Yea. Right
…and no - I’m still not at all confident that there is any real plan in place. But that’s not my problem :-)
I agree. It never occurred to me that anyone finds installation an issue. As for partitioning confusing people, don’t almost all Linuxes have a “use default” option which would suffice for the vast majority of people that would consider selecting it?
I have heard and read a lot of things over the years about why Linux is a problem to use (and I’m not saying any of them are right or wrong) but I thought installation was done and dusted
You get my vote. I’m being forced to use agile at work after having largely avoided it up to now.
Agile is the king’s new clothes. If it was civil engineering rather than software engineering, it would go something like;-
- let’s build a bridge!
- ok, here’s some rubble
- What? No - we don’t have enough points to develop any cement. Stick it together with glue
- it’s not quite bridge-shaped yet but let’s put it over this motorway. We’ll call it an “alpha” and see what feedback we get
- It fell down and crushed a load of cars, eh? Hey - that’s cool. It’s a learning process isn’t it?
- let’s replace some of the rubble with cheese. Why cheese? Because we can’t make any bricks in the time allowed by the sprint. We’ll revisit it in another sprint and throw away everything we’re doing now and replace it with something else. Maybe bricks. We don’t know yet
- oh and stick some flags on it!! Because that’s a quick win
- ok, try that - alpha 2
- ah. That killed how many? Well that’s ok because it’s not production quality yet
- let’s replace all those flags with different coloured ones
- etc etc etc
I have yet to be convinced that “agile” isn’t absolute and utter bollocks.
As for XP, and “paired programming”, which wanker came up with those ridiculous notions?
Some of the software today is bloated beyond any comprehension. Two that spring to mind (and I’m really not wanting to focus on MS here - everyone is equally blameworthy) are Word and Excel. I don’t know the actual numbers now but their code bases are insanely huge. Why the hell you need hundreds of megabytes (or whatever it is) to do a bit of word processing is beyond me and is utterly bonkers. Compare this to Word (or word perfect, or ….) from years ago that would fit on one or two floppy disks. And for 99% off use-cases the functionally is basically the same (except the newer version is demonstrably much worse)
[see title]
There are a couple of aspects to this.
Firstly, who makes memory access errors like this in their code? I use C and C++ every day (mostly C, which seems to get slammed at every oportunity for being "unsafe" and the work of the devil) and I literally cannot remember the last time I created a memory access fault of the types Rust protects against. If you are writing these sorts of bugs then, quite frankly, you are either inexperienced (no fault of yours, but you need to get up to speed, and quickly) or you are incompetent (in which case you need to go back to school or find another line of work), or there is a serious failure in the program structure (likely, poor division of responsibility/ownership) in which case the program architect needs to go back to school.
It's similar to the argument about 'Garbage Collection' and the fact the C++ doesn't have this "feature". The thing is, GC **ONLY** cleans up dead memory. Nothing else. It doesn't clean up dead file handles, dead socket handles, dead driver handles, etc etc etc. In contrast, C++'s destructor model can handle ALL these things. Yes, C++ is horribly HORRIBLY complicated, but in this aspect, it got it right. GC works. But only for very limited cases.
I don't know if it's of any use to anyone, but I wrote a program that generates Reed Solomon error correction data for any file, plus the means of using that data to recover a corrupted file.
I have used this for several years now and apply it to almost everything I back up to my NAS system
You can find it here - http://knockknock.org.uk/stoprot.tar.bz2
"Microsoft and other cloud vendors promised the cloud would help reduce IT costs, not just in terms of on-premises hardware and software, but also in terms of IT headcount. It now seems that the cloud is the cause of significant new costs."
If I remember correctly, this particular scenario is called "lying"
noun: the telling of lies, or false statements; untruthfulness
adjective: telling or containing lies; deliberately untruthful; deceitful; false
Well not all of it anyway.
When I tap a search term into Google and it returns complete crap, it’s usually got NOTHING to do with SEO or spam. Firstly, Google seems to completely ignore what I have actually type. If I type in “-amazon” (ie, I don’t want any results that include “Amazon”) then guess what results I get. That’s not SEO manipulation, that’s Google completely ignoring what In type. I searched the other day for some git man page or something - I can’t remember now - and the first result was “Buy git man page at wherever”. That’s not because of some spam, that’s because Google are generating some useless advertising with my term echoed back at me.
And I second a comment made above with bells on regarding Google just returning the same half dozen or so usual suspects. Why does EVERY search have to return results from Amazon, eBay, Wikipedia, Every, Github, Quora, and Reddit? Are these the only web sites out there??
I’m sure SEO and spam are an issue but I’m more sure that most of the problem is that Google (and all the others) is just plain crap.
“I still call them directories; they will never be folders”
Oh my. The “folders” thing really annoys me. They are directories. They have always been directories and they always will be directories
As for the “\” DIRECTORY separator, OMFG!! How many millions if days (years?) of work have been lost to dealing with this particular fiasco in pretty much any normal programming language?
I HATE Microshaft - everything they touch is a complete show of shite
I once wrote an entire flight simulator control in assembler.
And by “flight simulator”, I mean a real one - you sit (sat) in it, it had hydraulics, and (literally) cost millions
It didn’t feel the least bit masochistic - one of the very beast and fun jobs I’ve ever done
Oh and it worked perfectly. Never failed
Which bit of this grand plan addresses the “I don’t want anything to do with your ad network and I definitely don’t want your ads stored on my laptop and I don’t want to waste my processor cycles on serving me a load of crap I don’t want” issue?
As an aside, if a website brings in (say) some crap from googly analytics and THAT sets a cookie, is that considered a 3rd party cookie? Or (as the web page specifically linked to googlies) is it a 1st (2nd?) party cookie?
If an OS insists on needing the kind of highly specced machine that W11 does (assuming it’s not actually a supercomputer or something) then one has to ask why? An OS should use the minimum amount of resources it can to leave as much as possible for the applications to run. MS have turned this idea completely upside down. If the OS needs such a powerful machine to run then that’s an excellent advertisement for why you should avoid it at all costs.
MS has always written shite software and (with the possible exception of excel and word) Windows is the shining beacon of steaming this pile of ordure. It always has been and always will be
We have an Amazon telly thing - or more correctly, my wife does; I wouldn’t touch it with Zuk’s if it was up to me) - and it’s a source of constant annoyance for our kidlet that a cartoon he watched last week suddenly requires paying some random quantity of money for. Being asked to pay £15 for a 40 year old film is another fun thing they try.
Amazon is a complete rip off - we (again, my wife!) pays for the Prime thing so it’s taking the piss to have to pay twice).
I like Netflix (for now) - with that, you pay your money and that’s it; you’re not expected to pay twice. Same for Disney+ (though I think that particular subscription might be reviewed next time round - I think the prices have gone up quite a bit - need to check).
It’s no surprise that torrents are still alive and well with the kind of shit Amazon pull, and I’m amazed their shitty piss-taking doesn’t get more press.
“… it might still take a few hours before icons and metadata change”
Why? I mean, in a normal world, it would correct the problem and the fix would take effect immediately (or at least after a reboot - this IS Windows after all). If it takes “several hours” that sounds like the “fix” is negotiating with some remote (MS/HP) machine somewhere. Or some other unnecessary and undesirable nefarious activity
A big congrats to el Reg for succeeding in attracting a more international audience (which was your stated goal when you decided to go all American on us)
Unfortunately the majority of the “international” people you have attracted are American. Which in itself would be ok but you failed to account for half of them being red neck idiots who have to share their one brain cell between themselves and Trump
“… wildfires happen when brush and undergrowth isn't cleared from the forest floor… bla bla bla…”
This is way out of order and I might get thrown off the Reg for it (which would be a shame after 30 years or so), but you are an utter moron.
(I could expand on this but I think you get the idea. Oh. Then again….)
There are two basic problems with people (that’s humans. Us)…
1/ money trumps every other concern
2/ when it comes to the crunch, nobody wants to actually take a hit on anything
Some simple examples - out PM’s official title is “First Lord of the Treasury”. He/she has other titles too but that’s the one that “matters”. Governments (not just ours) are primarily interested in money. This is borne out by the fact that any government tries to solve every problem with money, or (usually in the UK) the lack of it. Much more preferable to actually DOING something.
If there are two ways of fixing a problem - 1) throwing money at it or 2) actually doing something constructive, guess which one most governments around the world chose.
Another very apt example is the utterly obscene idea of “carbon trading” - a “solution” that is worthy of a Dr. Strangelove scene. This involves one (rich) country paying another (poor) country for permission to pollute the world with planet-destroying emissions. You really couldn’t make this stuff up.
The second problem (people as a species, not actually wanting to do anything that might disturb their daily lives) can be very clearly illustrated by the recent arguments about extending the London low emission zone scheme. Everyone would agree (obviously) that being able to breath air that doesn’t carry carcinogenic particles is “a good thing” …. right up until the point where you (and me and everyone else) are asked to take a hit by actually implementing a measure to address the problem. And THEN …hell no!!!
I would add to this that the London scheme (like the one in Bristol and Bath and other places) itself tries to solve the problem with money (see the first point). A REAL solution would be to ban polluting vehicles altogether. But no - we try to “solve” the problem with money; much better to charge people to pollute the city then actually stopping them altogether. Not that this lets the protestors to the scheme of the hook. It’s a crap scheme - yes. But it’s still better than nothing which is the alternative.
So yes. We are doomed. I fear very much for my 7 year old kidlet. I don’t want to think about the horrors we are leaving for his generation - it’s too scary.