* Posts by andy 103

618 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Aug 2009

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Microsoft veteran on how to blue screen your way to better testing

andy 103
Facepalm

Re: Clarification

We're not seriously suggesting Win2K was the first Windows to get PS/2 support, and Vista was the first to support USB keyboards.

Read this sentence out loud:

"PS/2 keyboard support turned up in Windows 2000, USB keyboards were added with Vista in 2007"

andy 103

Re: Better testing

But what happens to the users work in the event of a sudden power c

Then you'd need to test it by killing the power.

A blue screen and a power cut aren't the same thing. You shouldn't be testing them as though they're equivalent events.

In either case all my application could try and do is make sure the data/state were as intact as possible when things came back up for the user. The point about blue screens though is that they're a fundamental design flaw with Windows where everything can be taken down irrespective of whether your app was at fault. There is a better way and that's proven by the fact other OS don't have that same problem. In 9 years of using a Mac I've never encountered an equivalent error state.

andy 103
Boffin

Re: "PS/2 keyboard support turned up in Windows 2000, USB keyboards were added with Vista in 2007"

I also wondered this.

I think what it means is that Windows 2000 was released around the time when people started using USB keyboards en masse. So it had to support both PS/2 and USB. In that regard it had specific drivers for PS/2 keyboards https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/hid/ps-2--i8042prt--driver

Vista was the first OS which "properly" supported USB keyboards out of the box, because by that point they'd become the standard you'd get with a new machine, IIRC.

Would be good to get clarification from the author.

andy 103
WTF?

Better testing

developers seeking a way of triggering the infamous Windows blue screen of death to test how their code will react to the abrupt stop.

You must be joking.

As an application developer my responsibility starts and ends with my app. If your shit OS crashes at will then why should I try and handle that in my application? The source of the error isn't my application, it's the underlying OS, or more specifically it's inability to handle problems without taking everything else down with it.

The only thing I could try and do is make sure the state/data in my app is retained to a point where the user doesn't lose anything critical. If the OS blue screens it's not just my app that's affected.

Better testing? Maybe Microsoft should try it with their own OS before telling other developers to work around Microsoft's own failures.

ChatGPT? Sure, I've heard it. But is AI coming for my job?

andy 103
Mushroom

Resistance to adaptation

"Nearly half (47 percent) of workers worried that AI could replace their role"

Consider some other statements about things people might currently be worried about.

- Dying in a corridor at an NHS hospital.

- How their children will be able to find/buy/afford a house.

- Electric cars

- (endless other things)

As usual the people who are most resistant to change are those who have a vested interest in it not changing. If you consider any of the points above they are really a sign that some things have moved on, whilst other related things have not. The most obvious thing being a big increase in population versus how older models for healthcare, housing and transport actually work in reality.

For instance, those who have invested into property really don't want housing to become more affordable. You can apply similar logic to the other things. Consider who is resistant to those things changing. Often a relative minority at the detriment of the majority.

That leads us to the point about jobs in this article. The people who are resistant to that changing are generally those with said jobs simply because they may otherwise be unemployed. Should they be excused from adapting simply because it affects them personally and bollocks to everyone else? We used to mine coal and some people weren't happy when that ended for them. Does that mean we should have carried on indefinitely so they personally were happy?

The people who are blocking progress on the basis they'd personally be fucked otherwise ARE the problem.

'Birthplace of Amazon' on the market for $2.28M

andy 103

Re: Housing

@doublelayer spot on.

If you're somebody who can't "overcome" a shortage of space then you're very likely to fail when trying to run a startup never mind a fully fledged business.

People of Bezos mindset would never even see this as a "problem". They'd just find a way. That's the difference between billionaires and Joe Average.

andy 103
Stop

Bezos' parents invested nearly $250,000

Bezos' parents invested nearly $250,000 in 1995, and who among us has folks willing and able to drop that amount on our harebrained schemes?

Well it depends. If you have an idea*** that could net you in the 100 billion range, and produce a company valued at over a trillion, I'm pretty sure your parents might find a way to come up with 0.0000025% of that cash! You'd probably be able to give them a decent return.

It could easily have been a failure but it didn't turn out like that.

I'm no Bezos or Amazon fan but being jealous about other people's success is really childish.

*** What's that? Oh yeah you also have to be able to deliver on that idea.

Fujitsu will not bid for UK.gov business until Post Office inquiry closes

andy 103

Re: Vultures?

...but still don't clarify what in your opinion is ridiculous.

Ok to be clear this bit

ANY and ALL software/hardware from ANY vendor performing any value transaction is up for intense scrutiny by people of ignorance in the court of public opinion.

Is just nonsense. That clearly isn't going to happen in future, just as it doesn't happen now.

The only time anything will come under "intense scrutiny" is in cases such as Horizon, or as an example I used, the failure of say a buggy flight computer that leads to hundreds of deaths. On the other hand, a situation such as I'd described with an ecommerce website would never come under such scrutiny because the impact is relatively minor. Despite both of these being examples of software containing bugs.

So your assertion that "ANY and ALL software" is somehow going to be impacted by any of this is frankly a load of bollocks. You need to separate the impact of failures of software and how seriously that might get scrutinised.

andy 103
Facepalm

Re: Vultures?

I specifically stated 'value transactions' . That in my opinion would exclude a presentation issue

Not really sure where you've got a "presentation issue" from. To go back to your point on "value transactions" that is exactly what happened in the case of the website I referred to. The actual issue was that customers were charged £0 for shipping because some buggy code omitted the shipping value when calculating the order total.

The transaction therefore had an incorrect (lower) value meaning the business wasn't being paid enough for orders.

However, in this case it affected 1 business to the tune of a relatively low (in the grand scheme of things) value of money, as I said in the thousands of pounds. That was covered by an insurance claim so the business owner wasn't out of pocket. Effectively it was then case closed. Nobody died, lost their livelihoods, etc. That's very different to Horizon.

Both of these cases involve financial transactions and buggy code. The outcome and impact is extremely different though. That was my point.

andy 103
WTF?

Re: Vultures?

What a ridiculous comment.

It ignores a very basic fact that not all software is equal or has anything like the same range of implications if it "goes wrong".

As as an example, many years ago, I worked at a web agency where somebody made a mess of some code which essentially provided free shipping to customers of an ecommerce website. As in the owner of that business didn't get paid for shipping after they had shipped products. It was noticed within about a month and had cost in the range of low £1000s.

That incident was dealt with as an insurance claim and nobody killed themselves over it. Yet it did quite noticeably impact several people.

It was reasonably serious but in no way comparable to the magnitude of what happened with Horizon. The sheer number of people affected directly and indirectly by it is of a scale where it's quite right it is being treated with the level of seriousness we are seeing.

There's a big difference between software bugs in say a Wordpress website to those in a flight computer. They're still classed as bugs but the ramifications are significantly different. The level of investigation should be proportionate.

Google building datacenter campus on the outskirts of London

andy 103
Joke

Carbon free

It also aims to have its entire UK operations running from about 90 percent carbon-free energy in 2025

That should make up for the fuck ton of emissions from constructing and running their datacentres so far.

Not.

See also - every other mofo who claims to be carbon-neutral.

It's a preview party at Microsoft, but do you really want an invite?

andy 103
Pint

Google Workspace vs Office is a problem for them

I'm posting this as somebody who isn't really a Microsoft fan - but in their defence...

I recently did an elearning course in Azure. We don't use it at our workplace but I was curious to learn about it especially seeing how frequently it comes up in job ads. For the most part I was genuinely impressed and think it does have a lot to offer.

I haven't used Windows in 9 years so can't comment.

But then what else is Microsoft known for? Office. I was quite shocked to find that there are something like 11 times more users of Google Workspace than Office. Is this actually true? If so then surely at some point they're going to ditch that. Is it just the worlds reliance on Excel keeping that alive?

Europe inches closer to insisting gig workers are treated as employees

andy 103
Joke

Re: Not difficult

Sounds very German.

andy 103
Facepalm

Vicious circle with high demand

Read these out a couple of times from the article

28 million platform workers, including taxi drivers, domestic workers and food delivery drivers,

...

services like Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Lyft, and Uber, which classified workers as independent contractors and thus avoided paying for worker benefits and employment taxes.

On the last point there are clear advantages for companies to operate this way and on the face of it, it seems very much in their favour. But then go to the first point. If there were only a handful of people doing this you might question their sanity. 28 million is a reasonable number even in a geographical context such as Europe. Some of these people are no doubt already in some form of employment but choose to do things on the side for extra money, for obvious reasons.

All of those roles listed - and many others - are in high demand due to the number of people who use such services.

There is demand for all aspects of this (including from the companies that want such workers) which is why I don't think it'll just go away very easily. Sick pay, bare minimum pension contributions etc that you get from being "properly" employed aren't all that good in any event. In which case a better solution would be that being employed is so much better that this becomes unthinkable. But that will never happen. There is always demand for this type of arrangement from all sides: companies, workers and consumers.

The 15-inch MacBook Air just nails it

andy 103

Re: Ok, I'll be down vote bait

It's beautiful hardware but I find that MacOS is just a bit too weird...

Not going to downvote but the thing you're not acknowledging is you're the minority.

I'm a software developer and use MacOS as my primary OS. But most people who use it aren't techies. The reason they use it - put very simply - is because it works without fuss. When you say "It's making Linux look simple" you're overlooking the fact that most people don't have your use-cases. Most people aren't installing dev tools and the vast majority of what they do install will come via the App Store. When it comes to updates it either works, or they don't know/care otherwise.

If you have other i-Devices everything works seamlessly. There will always be people on The Reg who'll disagree with this but if you use Apple's offering as a non techie you'll struggle to find anything else that works quite as flawlessly. Arguments about partitions, security etc... nobody cares in the big wide world. They just want a machine that lets them do stuff and gets out of their way.

Back to me using it as a techie. Given how seamlessly it generally works it's a trade-off I'm willing to accept.

Nobody else has really nailed this which IMO is the reason Apple have done as well as they have. Yes it's also down to marketing, but they are marketing this very point.

andy 103
Joke

Headphone jack?

"Apple has made the mistake of placing the headphone jack at the machine's rear."

A mistake? What, as in they included one?

https://www.theregister.com/2019/12/09/apple_lightning_jack/

Pfft... you can't please everyone!

(I almost wonder whether it's some kind of Apple satire "for those at the back"!).

'Return to Office' declared dead

andy 103
Mushroom

Different world

Every few decades there are fundamental noticeable differences in the world, compared to a similar timespan previously.

To me, 2020 onwards has been the start of something new. But something that was discussed *for decades*. Back in the late 1990s / early 2000s there was a view that - since everyone was going to to be online - why couldn't we just WFH? Of course it doesn't apply to every job, but even back then there were theoretically a fair number of jobs where it would have been possible.

A lot of excuses were used over the subsequent years as to why it "wasn't possible" for employees to work remotely. But the main reason put simply was trust. Employers didn't trust employees to do a full day of work unless they could be monitored and supervised. A lot of middle managers realised they wouldn't be needed under this arrangement. The first Covid pandemic gave a lot of them a simple choice: let your workers WFH, or don't have any staff to do anything. They realised which one was more economically viable quite quickly.

The idea of commuting to an office, wearing a suit, commuting back... to do work you could do from anywhere is just archaic. There is literally no need for many people to do that anymore. We're not going back to it either no matter who thinks it's a good or bad idea. The market for work and staff is no longer whatever employers think is appropriate. You want the best employees? You're going to have to be more flexible and offer WFH.

Black Friday? More like Blackout Friday for HSBC's online and mobile banking

andy 103
Unhappy

Re: Death spiral

Decades of various tech that has been glued together

and

What they all need to do is hit the pause button for a few years, rehire their own IT professionals

aren't compatible though. One of my friends made a good - and extremely worrying - point recently. That a lot of critical infrastructure such as banking, airline reservation systems etc, are actually run on decades old technology. Which as you say is glued together to make it work with newer tech.

There could easily be a time where nobody fully understands how any of it works and "the system" collapses. The problem of rehiring the IT professionals who were involved decades ago is exactly that. It was decades ago and they are no longer in employment or in many instances, have since died.

It really is worrying. Neo-banks like Monzo ultimately will need to interface with older systems so they aren't the solution either.

andy 103
WTF?

HSBC - when they laughed in my face when I applied for a mortgage, so I went next-door to a mortgage shop and got..

Why didn't you just go there in the first place then?

andy 103
WTF?

Re: Not everyone is just like you.

gave the UK third world inflation

Tell me you're clueless without telling me you're clueless.

The UK has had nothing like "third world inflation". Some such countries experienced 3 and in rare cases, 4 digit inflation!

Turkey isn't a third world country and had, what, 8 times our inflation rate recently? Germany, Italy and Spain have been in the 8+% territory not too long ago. They certainly aren't third world countries.

andy 103
Facepalm

Mismash

I've banked with HSBC for over 25 years. Of course that includes a good portion of time which was pre Internet banking.

Most recently - and for reasons they've never explained - I was locked out of my banking app despite having it set up with Face ID login which had worked for years. The app came up with a message asking me to set it up as a new user. It then wouldn't authenticate me using other details, which I know were correct. Phoned the telephone banking number. Worryingly they couldn't identify me. The resolution? You have to go into a branch to resolve this and there is literally no other way. But... HSBC closed my local branch years ago. So a car journey and some panic it was.

Now, when I actually got into the branch, super helpful and everything resolved in around 15 mins not including waiting around the same time.

I have other neo-bank accounts from the likes of Monzo which do not have any kind of branch. It did make me wonder what you'd do in a scenario like this with a bank that has no branches. But then perhaps that is part of the problem. If they don't have branches then they can't use the "come into a branch to sort our own mess out" excuse.

It seems to me like their systems are a mismash of preferring people to do everything online in the first instance. But when that inevitably doesn't work they tell you to either speak to somebody that can't help on a phone, or come into a branch that doesn't exist.

Nvidia intros the 'SuperNIC' – it's like a SmartNIC, DPU or IPU, but more super

andy 103
Stop

Or just hardware

Most people:

GPU = graphics = games

NIC = networking = Internet / LAN connectivity

"Specialists":

GPU = specialised algorithms = let's call it AI.

NIC = specialised algorithms = let's call it AI.

If you're using a GPU or NIC to do something other than render graphics or connect to a network, it no longer serves its traditional purpose. At which point you could give it any name.

Best to just call these "specialised hardware components". Or hardware.

Tenfold electric vehicles on 2030 roads could be a shock to the system

andy 103
FAIL

Never going to happen in the UK

There could be ten times the number of electric cars on the road by 2030

Don't make me laugh.

We haven't even reached the 1 million figure in the UK yet. Precisely because people generally speaking have the common sense to know getting one (even if they could afford one) is a shit idea.

We can't produce the electricity required for the UK even *without* more people having electric vehicles. Add in things like: fires caused by batteries, a lack of charging infrastructure, where to charge the car depending on things such as whether your house has a driveaway etc etc. Then there's the cost.

I recently saw a documentary where a journalist who was a massive proponent of electric vehicles got one, then less than 12 months later gave it back on the basis it was an awful experience. The reality of charging a car for 30-40 times how long it takes to fill up with a bit of fuel just isn't common sense.

Ironically it doesn't really matter about the environment. Producing electricity - and all of the infrastructure changes necessary - for this "revolution" isn't environmentally friendly.

Yes we ought to think about an alternative to petrol/diesel. But electric vehicles in their current form are so far off the mark.

It is 20 years since the last commercial flight of Concorde

andy 103

Re: Treasures from a 1991 flight

@Tim99 great stuff. We also have the aforementioned grey vinyl folder!

andy 103
Pint

Treasures from a 1991 flight

My grandparents did a 1 way trip on it from London to Canada in 1991. Returned on a jumbo jet.

They passed away over the last few years and when clearing out their house I found a number of things they'd kept from the flight. Including - stationary (A5 paper, envelopes) with Concorde embossed logos, a branded note pad, the menus from the in flight service, luggage tags (actually just cardboard but nonetheless with the BA World Traveller / Concorde logo) and 2 small models of the plane.

The best thing I found though was a signed certificate from the pilot, which I believe was given to every passenger. Hand signed with a pen, not printed!

I find it mind blowing that 30+ years ago they could make a trip in 3 hours which nowadays is impossible to do in such a time. Especially for... people who were born at a time when nobody flew at all. Mind boggling really.

I've kept it all as it holds a lot of sentimental value to me.

Martin Goetz, recipient of the first software patent, logs off at 93

andy 103
Mushroom

$2 million. The struggle was worth it.

Goetz said: "In August 1970, ADR settled its antitrust suit with IBM with an out-of-court settlement of $2 million. The struggle was worth it.

That's really all you need to know.

The vast majority of "pioneers" did whatever they're famed for, for the same reason. Take the money out of the equation and see how much they give a fuck.

Millions of smart meters will brick it when 2G and 3G turns off

andy 103

Re: Farce

"If the government wants us all to have smart meters and to have the control / influence over how much energy people use, then it's going to have to act seriously to bring that about. "

That is looking at it from the wrong angle. This only takes care of the reporting aspect of how much energy people are using, and potentially using that data to do something useful. It would open up much bigger questions such as

1. How do we actually produce the energy people need in the first place? Is it possible the number of people in the UK and the energy provision mechanisms we currently have aren't well aligned? You can't get rid of the people(!) so you need to tackle that from the angle of how to produce energy ideally without reliance on other countries as we've recently been made very aware. Nobody is close to addressing this one so good luck.

2. Why do people need to use so much energy? Are their homes insulated and constructed to a standard whereby they are able to use energy efficiently? Can they do anything about this if the answer is "no"? At what cost to them? Again nobody is close to resolving that one.

3. "The future is electric vehicles". I'll just leave this bullshit here without saying anything else.

There are far bigger problems to tackle when it comes to energy usage than just how it gets reported.

andy 103
WTF?

cost savings to households from knowing the amount of energy they are consuming

"The benefits in terms of cost savings to households from knowing the amount of energy they are consuming"

Sorry, how does that work?

If I know how much energy I'm using, it doesn't change how much energy I'm using.

I understand the idea that if you tell people they're racking up a large bill in realtime it might prompt them to try and reduce their energy consumption. Has it done that? I doubt it. Not on any meaningful scale.

Some of the energy prices we've seen recently in the UK however... well, that's another way of tackling it, isn't it? Let them freeze to death and they'll no longer have to care about it.

In-memory database Redis wants to dabble in disk

andy 103

Re: to make Redis "more like your classic database,"

"There are probably good reasons why Andy 103 is using Redis and MySQL but he hasn't given us those reasons in his post.

From what he told us he doesn't need any part of the ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) standard set of database features so why he's using a database is a valid question."

I said in the OP that we use Redis alongside MySQL. For very different things.

We use Redis for storing serialized key/value data which is generally only needed on a temporary basis. If we're persisting data or need to query it more broadly we use MySQL, and of course we need the ACID properties that come with that.

They aren't used interchangeably and that was very much the point of my original comment. Redis is good when you don't need the overhead of something like MySQL. The point being that because it lacks some "database-like features" that actually makes it good at least for certain use-cases.

andy 103
Boffin

to make Redis "more like your classic database,"

No no no! Don't do this.

One of the great things about Redis is that it doesn't have the overhead of SQL databases.

I use Redis alongside MySQL to build web applications. Redis is brilliant when you need to store temporary or arbitrary data, serverside, without the overhead of something like MySQL. For us we create Redis keys for users in our applications and then write serialized data into that key. Getting data in and out of that structure is trivial not to mention fast. It's generally always data that doesn't need to be persisted although I believe you can also write to disk if necessary anyhow. I don't want to write an SQL-style query to either read or write data like that. I definitely don't want or need transactions or any of the "safety" features afforded by MySQL for the type of data I'm describing.

Redis is good in its current form and has many, many different use cases. There isn't a right or wrong way to use it except for the fact it's absolutely not a replacement for something like MySQL. Different tools for different jobs.

MariaDB ditches products and staff in restructure, bags $26.5M loan to cushion fall

andy 103
WTF?

Re: LAMP/WAMP

Ridiculous comment which doesn't separate those 4-5 things from what they actually are.

L - Linux. Definitely isn't dead. W - Windows, same.

A - Apache. The predominant web server.

M - MySQL / MariaDB. The former absolutely isn't dead and this story doesn't mean that the second one will die. Many popular open source web applications such as Wordpress or Magento support it and the number of sites running these alone is in the millions. Not to mention many other sites and apps that rely on it.

P - PHP. Might not be everyone's cup of tea but still very common. Often said to be "dead" by people who use alternatives and find their shitty applications being rebuilt in PHP by somebody on more money later on.

If you mean the approach taken 15+ years ago where all 4 were treated as some bundle to build an application then yes that's dying out (although still not totally dead). But in their own right each of these are ubiquitous and the usage numbers for all have only increased over time.

Lost your luggage? That's nothing – we just lost your whole flight!

andy 103
Happy

LIMIT 1 before running an SQL statement

Depends on what DBMS you're using. For me it's generally MySQL. I have a rule that if I ever run something in production and expect it to delete a single row I start by typing LIMIT 1; then move my cursor backwards to type in the DELETE query.

That way if I accidentally hit Enter the worst thing that'll happen is it'll delete 1 row of data.

It gets more tricky if you don't have a "guaranteed" number. But for simple 1 row deletes this has saved me on more than one occasion. You can also use this with things such as UPDATE queries.

Never underestimate your muscle memory that just presses Enter, in any environment ;)

Comms watchdog to probe errors that left Brits unable to make emergency calls

andy 103
WTF?

Ensure uninterrupted access?

"Our rules require BT and other providers to take all the necessary measures to ensure uninterrupted access to emergency organizations as part of anti call services offered. They also require providers to take all necessary measures to ensure the fullest possible availability of calls and internet in the event of catastrophic network breakdown or in cases of force majeure."

This is the typical kind of bullshit spouted by people who have zero understanding of how anything works on a technical level. People who think because something is "regulated" that means everything will be ok.

There seems to come a point very quickly where systems can (will, and do) fall over. Whether their application is something serious like emergency services or banking doesn't make them exempt from this premise.

Whether it comes down to incompetence, mistakes or mis-management - and let's be honest if it involves BT that's entirely possible - is a separate matter. But I cannot stand this naivety that critical infrastructure is somehow 100% fault tolerant. It isn't, and no amount of policies, regulations or highly paid consultants are going to change that. Ever.

It's quite scary how much masking tape and spreadsheets keep infrastructure running in the first place. Add in some human error and nothing is guaranteed.

M2 Ultra chip lands in 'cheese grater' Mac Pro to displace Apple's last Intel holdout

andy 103
Pint

Other things that start at $6,999

- Common sense

- Life experiences. You can have a fair few good ones.

- Holidays. Plural.

- Dining out in nice places. Very plural.

- Upgrading the environment you live in. YMMV depending on what you do.

- Investing in your future / pension provision. I know that's boring...but...

Things you probably don't need to spend $6,999 on? A fucking computer, in 2023. You could spec up a Dell XPS for half that price, and no, your "creativity" wouldn't be severely limited by that machine.

UK tech industry pushing up salaries – but UI devs out of luck

andy 103
Stop

Re: How are these going rates?

Because the UK sneers at technical skills and pays us dirt, sadly.

And then wonders why as a country we don't have a productive economy.

True. But there's actually a much bigger reason. In the UK - at the time of writing - you're pretty much in either one of these two categories (especially when it comes to property).

1. You have rich parents, who helped you get on the property ladder. You had/have some form of inheritance.

2. You don't.

If you're in the former category there's very little incentive to earn more. Because you're always going to be better off than people in the second category.

If you're in the second category you have little incentive to earn more because you're probably never going to be able to retire.

The concept of having a career and reasonable pension provision of the prior to 1990s / early 2000s just doesn't exist anymore. This creates a system where essentially nobody gives a fuck about money as such and that's why "we don't have a productive economy". Because you're either fine financially, or never will be. People - especially under 30's - have wised-up to the fact that working their arses off isn't necessarily going to change any of this. Exacerbated by the fact some teenagers make millions from being social media "influencers".

andy 103
Pint

Re: still not really a difference from 2007

you need to think less like an engineer and more like an executive...because you're not there to produce the latest shiny, you're there to help optimise the business.

100% agreed. You need to think in terms of money and how you can add value.

There are tons of highly skilled software engineers - many of whom are probably Reg readers - who seem to fail to make big money. But it's because they can only articulate things in tech terms, which the people paying for services frankly know little about.

Why are they interested in hiring you? To reduce their costs, or help increase their revenue. There aren't any other reasons.

The case about finding a slow query is a great example. If it's an online business you might charge £1k to find and optimise that. They might save 10 times that in what would otherwise be lost orders from people abandoning their site because of how unresponsive it was. You need to explain it in the latter terms and stop going on about some bullshit in MySQL (or whatever they use) that they know nothing about. It's as simple as "you're losing money, and I can help stop this... for a handsome fee... which is still significantly lower than what you'd lose otherwise".

Microsoft enables booting physical PCs directly into cloud PCs

andy 103
WTF?

The problem with anything requiring a network

Is that sometimes it doesn't work well.

A good case in point is that in our household we still regularly use DVD's to watch films. Why? Here are just a few examples:

- When we moved in we had a few days without Internet. Plus a child that really enjoys watching a film.

- Streaming services are sometimes down

- Internet connections are sometimes flaky

- Both the 2nd and 3rd together with buffering / latency

- We don't care about "recommendations". We can find something to watch from our library of DVDs without anyone else intervening

- We've already paid for everything required ONCE and ONCE only.

That very short trip over a HDMI cable from the DVD player to the TV seems quite simple...and is very reliable. In much the same way... booting an OS from a local disk just seems quite sensible.

MariaDB CEO: People who want things free also want to have very nice vacations

andy 103
WTF?

Re: People who want things to be free . . .

What does it mean for all of the other software developers who want to make a living in a market where competing products are given away for free? It means those people go hungry.

But they're choosing to do that.

They don't have to give away their work for free.

This is the kind of bullshit proponents of "Free" anything fail to understand.

Python still has the strongest grip on developers

andy 103
Joke

Re: One programmer is happy with PHP

*but still mildly amusing*

Cringe.

Joke icon…although not sure

andy 103
Facepalm

Re: One programmer is happy with PHP

Yeah that's right Steve Button. I'm the only person who likes PHP which is how things like Facebook, Twitter, Magento, Wordpress etc came into existence.

Now, I'm not saying I like any of those necessarily. But they seem to have had more success than anything you'll ever have made. They all heavily relied - and in 2 cases still rely - on PHP. Or more specifically programmers who liked PHP enough to have bothered making them in PHP.

Not that I had anything to do with making those of course. So

There are others, and you're not aware of them...

andy 103
Happy

PHP (8)

You can criticise PHP all you want but I fail to see how Python is a better choice for web applications. Although I'd be interested in hearing a rational debate to the contrary. PHP can also be used for back end processes not just limited to running in a browser. We use it effectively for both.

PHP 8 brought a lot of improvements including type safety which it was much criticised (rightly so) for not having back in the day.

Everyone knocks it but then can't seem to suggest an alternative for rapidly building a half decent web application. "It's the programmer, not the language" to re-phrase a Top Gun quote!

As for frontend I don't see any advantages of these trendy frameworks because at the end of the day rendering HTML is all that's necessary and there are a multitude of ways to do that. Yes you can do some nifty UI features with JavaScript but that's not restricted to using a framework either.

IBM's motto is 'Think' – its CEO reckons AI can do that as well as some workers

andy 103
Mushroom

AI is bullshit

sometimes described as "process workers" – folks whose work often requires them to undertake defined activities rather than exercise more abstract thinking.

Here's the thing. Those people who "undertake defined activities" are actually - far more often than some fucktards on a board would realise - also performing "abstract thinking" or maybe even just "thinking".

The only reason anyone wants to dumb down such roles is to suggest these people are worth very little especially when it comes to renumeration.

As a case in point we could have AI cleaners to make sure offices or even homes were spotless. But what happens if, say, a tap is broken? Can this AI cleaner identify that, report it to the right person, see that it gets fixed and then resume their activity? Can they fuck. This is just 1 teeny-tiny example as well. Apply that more broadly and you'll quickly understand why humans are quite underrated.

The fact that even a single human is being described a "process worker" and somehow doesn't (need to) think is a fucking disgrace.

Perhaps meeting with Pope Francis did help iPhone sales

andy 103
Pint

Batteries

Said it before and I'll say it again.

We've got to a point with consumer tech where what you had 2, 3, 4 years ago from a technological perspective is perfectly adequate. I have a new iPhone 14 but it's not as though it's light years ahead of the iPhone XR I had 4 years ago in terms of its capabilities. Not in any meaningful way for sure.

Pretty much the only reason I've upgraded iPhones is because of the batteries not holding their charge, and the frankly dubious options for replacing them.

Consider a company that could provide

1. A high lifespan, very long lasting battery for their devices (whatever they may be)

2. The ability to easily (end consumer can do it themselves) swap out the battery with a replacement, if necessary.

Same goes for electric cars. The majority of the car is absolutely fine. It's _the battery_ that's going to be the hassle.

To me the next line of highly succesful tech will be whoever gets power sorted in some way which isn't currently being addressed. I don't know what that may involve but I'm guessing if it became an issue consumers didn't need to care about whoever tackles that will do very nicely indeed.

MariaDB cuts jobs, repeats 'going concern' warning to stock market

andy 103
WTF?

Money

When MySQL was sold to Sun, Michael Widenius walked away with something like the equivalent of £15 million.

It's interesting how MariaDB is effectively facing financial problems yet the millionaire responsible for its existence doesn't want to help.

He no longer sits on the board for MariaDB? No shit.

If you can't piece together this information to work out how little he cares about any of this (besides the money, naturally) then I really don't know what to tell you.

Lenovo Thinkpad X13s: The stealth Arm-powered laptop

andy 103
WTF?

Re: Now hand it to the FOSS desk....

@Liam Proven - Does "[Author here]" appear automatically when you reply, or are you actually putting that in yourself?

Because, that red badge above, is usually a giveaway.

andy 103
FAIL

long-term Windows users are used to this and will barely notice

"it needed to download umpteen dozens of updates, followed by a restart, followed by another dozen updates, another restart, and repeat until it's going-home time. We returned to it the following day, and there were some new updates."

Yeah, this is the thing I don't miss since switching to a Mac in 2015.

I'd really like to have a Windows laptop but this way it handles updates and annoying UI error messages are enough to make me never go back. Unless they fix that, it's an absolute deal breaker for me.

In the 7 years I've used a Mac I've never seen a single error message. Installing software and updates has been seamless.

The hardware doesn't particularly excite me. But it's interesting - and somewhat amusing - that 7 years on this kind of bullshit still hasn't been addressed in Windows.

Watch Reg vultures wrap their heads around Silicon Valley Bank collapse

andy 103
Pint

Make it harder, please

The vast majority of "start ups" that I see - especially in the tech sector - have 2 things in common:

1. They're full of enthusiasm. Enthusiasm which nobody other than themselves seem to have about whatever they're doing.

2. They fail quite quickly. Usually in 12 months.

They tend to blame (2) on things like being unable to secure funding.

Really the problem is (1). Whatever they were trying to do is something few people give a f**k about. It was a non-starter, but they don't want to admit it.

Personally I want it to be harder, MUCH harder, to get any sort of funding especially if you're ideas are awful. I don't know how that would be policed or who would decide, but my goodness, we need that.

If some bank that offered money to these idiots has gone under, then good. Good.

The Great Graph Database Debate: Relational can't do everything

andy 103
WTF?

Re: Use-case

@elsergiovolador

For (1) I don't think you even need a database at all. You can just use the filesystem and construct filenames as if you were using something like dynamodb and call it a day.

Except all of the code used to read/write data is written in SQL and needs features of SQL such as joining tables of related data.

If you were going to go down this avenue you'd pretty much be doing something completely different. You definitely couldn't swap out a relational database to use files and then expect everything else to just work. It's not even a comparison.

andy 103
Stop

Use-case

Consider these 2 (very common in the real world) use-cases:

1. People using relational databases with all the complexity of MySQL, Postgres, MariaDB etc.... for tiny little web applications like Wordpress or Magento.

2. Companies harvesting a metric fuckton of your data to do nothing except track / advertise shit to you. These tend to go more with the graph database option over relational.

The thing I'm struggling with though is for all the complexity afforded by these database platforms, the actual tangible output and use-case of the systems, is... boring.

If we look at some other apps and services the choice of database is quite moot when you actually consider how worthwhile the end application tends to be. It would be a bit like over-engineering a house to the point where it could withstand a war zone, whilst ignoring the fact nobody actually wants to live there.

TL/DR: it doesn't really matter which you pick because your application for that database is incredibly simple. The database platform used isn't the issue.

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