Posts by JDX

James Webb Space Telescope has arrived at its new home – an orbit almost a million miles from Earth

Re: thank you

This article and the BBC one are virtually identical.

Although El Reg say it's Nasa's most complex observatory... is that qualification necessary, has someone else got a better one?

Re: ...and "blow" through a "whopping" $10bn in funding

You could try not being triggered by jocular language. I feel you've been baited successfully.

Google sours on legacy G Suite freeloaders, demands fee or flee

Bit of a faff

I own 2 of these free GSuite (for business?) organisations. Problem as I se it is that gmail is still THE best mail interface - even if you don't use the other apps.

CAn you get a 1-person vanity gmail (link to your domain for a single user) cheaper or are the only choices free / Workplace now?

Re: Bait

Yeah after only 15 years they throw the switch on you.

Microsoft rang in the new year with a cutesy tweet in C#. Just one problem: The code sucked

Escaping the apostrophe is weird. I don't know if it even works in C# but it's not normal.

Using braces is quite normal IMO. It's so easy to screw up one-line if/else statements I certainly wouldn't pick fault with it. Without even reading the code, braces stick out like a sore thumb that there is a logic block there.

Mars helicopter mission (which Apache says is powered byLog4j) overcomes separate network glitch to confirm new flight record

I think we can consider this an air-gapped system

Although most of it isn't air.

CompSci boffins claim they can recreate missing lines in log files

Example?

Struggling to see quite how this works. A visual example would be really helpful.

Re: correlates data *from other sources*??

The fact you can't understand it doesn't make it useless. It just means you don't understand it.

You've missed the point.

Re: Using "AI" to amke guesses

I'm going to make a wild 'guess' that the people who worked on this probably know a little bit more about it than random IT people (like me) who lack the context. Otherwise they wouldn't bother doing it.

The dark equation of harm versus good means blockchain’s had its day

Re: We know it has no future

It's clearly not going anywhere anytime soon. It's only just gaining mass popularity, look at the huge increase in sponsorship of major events.

I'm pretty skeptical but to state it's got no future simply seems to be spreading the same kind of unsubstantiated nonsense as all the rabid BTC fanbois "200k by Tuesday", just the other side of the coin.

Regulation does not imply collapse, in fact regulation seems a good idea. Crypto is still very much in Wild West territory. The actual Wild West was a free for all where lots of people made a lot of money, lots of people worked very hard but never made much, and lots of people made their money through crime and scams... doesn't mean there was nothing there worth having though.

The article just seems to be written by a middle-age Guardian reader who wants it to collapse. There's a lot of people out there who would cream their pants to see BTC destroyed. Probably because they're bitter they never invested - it's been "a silly fad" since day 1 but if every time you told someone that you'd put a few bucks in over the years, you wouldn't need to be a journalist anymore :) I imagine most of us techy types are kicking ourselves we didn't take a punt on £100 back in the early days, I sure am, but we shouldn't let that skew our objectiveness.

James Webb Space Telescope gets all shook up – launch delayed again

but those vibrations have been tested for. the vibrations of dropping it have not.

Munich mk2? Germany's Schleswig-Holstein plans to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice

Re: Windows 11

Thing is by the time those PCs reach EOL, a PC which can run W11 will be standard. We've been through this before, companies simply delay mass adoption of the new Windows version.

Microsoft previews Visual Studio 2022 for Mac, but why bother when VS Code runs just fine on Apple hardware?

Re: Why use VS over VSCode? Some experience...

I just find all the stuff I don't use, I don't use. We're still developing C++ & C# desktop software and it's no more complicated than it ever was for that stuff.

I actually use VS for Mac

It has problems but IS a proper version of VS. It is worlds apart from VSCode, asking the question seems to imply a lack of experience to me.

For .Net 5 C# dev, VS Mac is very solid except for quirks and bugs which make it annoying (docking windows is virtually impossible), and differences to the Windows version. If '22 can bring the two to be consistent I would be a huge fan.

The title seems a bit of a click-bait to me really.

Facebook ditches its creepy, controversial robot – yes, its facial-recognition AI

Shame in a way

Internet history is littered with examples "here's something cool... oh no it's being taken advantage of". This is another. As a regular user it is so cool to be able to search for photos of X, or have photos auto-tagged to save me doing it (who can be bothered).

But it so clearly has scope for misuse. And then the PC brigade wade in with claims it's racist and that's the nail in the coffin.

It seems everything that in SciFi is exciting, is only ever bad in real life.

Big Blue scoffs a Happy Meal: McDonald's sells automated order-taking tech to IBM

Automated ordering

I read this as the AI ordering FOR you... "you look a big chap, you get a supersize double-bigmac meal with cheese sticks and an extra burger. And diet coke, got to watch our weight, eh sir"

Microsoft unveils Android apps for Windows 11 (for US users only)

Re: I can't think of any Android app that I want running on my computer

>>I can't think of any Android app that I want running on my computer. Most apps either have better versions for desktop which work natively or benefit from the features of a phone

It'll vary from person to person but lots of games and apps are mobile only, and in fact I'm seeing some platforms ditch their websites in favour of app-first development (WeSwap being the most recent).

I don't really like running apps on my phone when I'm sat at my PC with a big monitor so I can see it being handy if it works smoothly (IF)

Think your phone is snooping on you? Hold my beer, says basic physics

So it seems sending data through cables is in effect security through obscurity. Doesn't this simply mean we should send data encrypted as standard... good security means you can have all my packets and I'm still safe.

Behold the Megatron: Microsoft and Nvidia build massive language processor

Re: Cleansing datasets

I don't think the AI telling you to "go fudge yourself" is really that much better. And it's surely only going to confuse things when people actually use these replacement words... "Skynet tell me about the best fudge you ever had"

.NET Foundation boss apologizes for pull request that sparked community row

"she added support for reproducible builds to the open-source project ReactiveUI"

What a ****. I demand my builds are anything but reproducible.

One-size-fits-all chargers? What a great idea! Of course Apple would hate it

Re: But they're so special!!

In a purely numeric sense, yes Apple are special. They account for something like a third of all phones/tablets sold IIRC, from a single company. It's not the same as 50 companies each with 2% of the market being required to standardise, it's a hugely significant market share.

I'd still be pro standardisation but they are by far the single biggest player.

'Nobody in their right mind would build a naval base here today': Navigating in and out of Devonport

"at least one" means you have excluded precisely one option from the set of possibilities.

Court of Appeal says AI software cannot be listed as patent inventor

Re: The invention itself is irrelevant

>"Test Case" = "How can we manipulate the system today?"

No. The clue is in the words. It's a test. To find out the asnwer.

Re: @Big_Boomer - Too soon

Have they invented many things?

Microsoft releases new Windows 11 builds, confirms running on an Apple M1 'is not a supported scenario'

RIP BootCamp?

Have there been any hints as to whether BC will remain in the Apple-Arm world?

You can have more than one monitor on an M1 Mac Mini.

"Simultaneously supports up to two displays:

One display with up to 6K resolution at 60Hz connected via Thunderbolt and one display with up to 4K resolution at 60Hz connected via HDMI 2.0"

Re: Windows 11 on...

I'm not sure why I would expect W11 running in a 3rd-party VM environment to be a "supported scenario".

Which W10 scenarios are supported?

Banned: The 1,170 words you can't use with GitHub Copilot

So I better hope I don't write code that might cause a "race condition"

I'd far rather it told me it detected such a term, they are bound to get bug reports it simply isn't working when someone inadvertently uses a banned word.

Faster .NET? Monster post by Microsoft software engineer shows serious improvements

Performance on on-Windows platforms?

I haven't had a chance to read 45k words but since the comparison involves .Net Framework 4.8, presumably these tests are Windows-10 specific.

Quite a few of the examples listed - file systems, etc - are very OS-specific, so if anyone has seen reports on how .Net compares between Windows/Linux/Mac and how .Net 6 compares to .5 (or core 3.x) on non-Windows platforms, or even done tests themselves, I would be very interested.

Performance on Linux servers is surely pretty important given the focus on this area.

>>But I still don't like stuff that is mostly tied to one OS. Mono or official linux version or not

Mono? When was the last time you looked at this stuff?

Not only are there versions of Linux and Mac and probably others out there, both .Net and the Roslyn compiler are open source. You might as well say Java is mostly tied to to one OS because most people use it on Linux.

Internet Explorer 3.0 turns 25. One of its devs recalls how it ended marriages – and launched amazing careers

Re: Sadly, there were divorces and broken families and bad things

In a team of a few hundred people, you'd probably expect a couple of divorces in a normal year.

In fact historically as the average working week has got shorter and workers get more rights/holiday/etc, divorce rates have gone up. Of course it's easier to blame your boss for your divorce than yourself.

Re: Sadly, there were divorces and broken families and bad things

Did you even READ the article? Maybe you've never worked somewhere where people actually care about what they're doing but sometimes teams choose to work long and hard without being forced to.

It's hardly uncommon for coders in their early 20s to work a full day, then go home and code until 2am on their own projects or some FOSS project. I've certainly been there, I wouldn't do it now though.

Stop wringing your hands over other peoples' choices. You're clearly not an experienced manager yourself, this just reads like you're regurgitating a blog post.

Microsoft emits last preview of .NET 6 and C# 10, but is C# becoming as complex as C++?

Cross-platform UI?

I've recently been using C#/.Net5 for Mac development. It's annoying how many bits of the APIs simply aren't supported even though present. I've been so far limited to console development, though I'm unclear if there is GUI available or not the IDE is nowhere near as good as the proper Windows one.

A stable, easy to use way to do cross-platform desktop GUI applications would be most welcome. Just an equivalent of Qt/wxWidgets for .Net. Anyone more into this stuff and able to comment what isn#isn't available?

"perhaps the most important new type system capability since Span<T>"

Not sure what to make of that, considering I only discovered Span last year after 10 years using C#, and only needed it for one quite narrow edge case. Actually I didn't need it, it made things marginally easier and it was cool so I HAD to use it.

Stack Overflow survey: Microsoft IDEs dominate, GCP and Azure battle behind AWS

Re: Stackoverflow search

What do developers do when they get stuck? This is of course a Stack Overflow survey; but we learn that Google is their first thought (89.69 per cent) versus Stack Overflow itself at 79.96 per cent. These figures are similar whether or not developers are professionals.

Indeed. 95% of the time if I FIND a useful result in Google, it IS a StackOverflow link. The rest are from MS' own Q&A, you know the one where the question gets repeated every couple of posts and you're not really sure what order posts are in.

We clock what you're trying to do here: El Reg strokes a claw across the OnePlus 9 Pro

£900 Good grief

I remember my first 1+ phone set me back £329, and it was awesome. Apple breaks the grand mark with the X and suddenly anything under that is "budget?"

Wow.

Windows 11 still doesn't understand our complex lives – and it hurts

Re: Teams doesn't work in IE 11, Safari or Firefox

Safari is annoying but why should it work on those other niche browsers? There's a perfectly decent Mac app so why not use that?

W11 has already been released?

Kind of sounds like "person who dislikes Windows deliberately makes using Windows difficult so they can complain about Windows" to me. You see it all the time with various tech, once someone decides X is bad they seem to go out of their way to make it bad so they can get nice and cross about it.

Richard Branson uses two planes to make 170km round trip

If you even half believe Elon, he is genuinely motivated by commercialising space travel - towards eventual colonisation - rather than purely his own profits. Of course he's happy to profit too.

Multiple competing companies is surely a benefit to the industry anyway. Increases credibility and so on.

Microsoft defends intrusive dialog in Visual Studio Code that asks if you really trust the code you've been working on

To be fair

Asking me if I trust the author of code I've written seems quite reasonable.Especially when I work on code I wrote 10 years ago and wonder "what cretin wrote this garbage?"

GitHub Copilot is AI pair programming where you, the human, still have to do most of the work

Re: OpenAI still wasting resources, I see

>>There's no excuse for software developers to be creating boilerplate code

Sorry but this is very naive. Any time you work against someone else's bespoke interface that doesn't happen to use standard web-services, you end up writing this kind of boring stuff. Even if it's only writing a class and mapping property names to JSON so the auto-serializer will do the rest for you.

You can write a tool to do it, but that often takes longer than the drudge-work.

Easy to be cynical but...

... I'll watch with interest how this progresses. Even if it's "only" like a more advanced autocomplete, well A/C saves me a huge about of time and effort on a daily basis.

Go to L: A man of the cloth faces keyboard conundrum

Re: Calling upon a higher power

You don't seem very educated if you think mainstream CofE/Catholicism are cults. I think you got your brainwashing, just from a different source - as we all do.

Were you forbidden because the schools had different faiths, or because they didn't allow boys and girls to mix at all?

Re: Calling upon a higher power

I would imagine even many atheists would admit daily prayers aren't less productive than a typical stand-up.

@macjules did they have a mixture of Christians and normal folk, that's an interesting dynamic if so.

GitHub Copilot auto-coder snags emerge, from seemingly spilled secrets to bad code, but some love it

problems including alleged spilled secrets, bad code, and copyright concerns

problems including alleged spilled secrets, bad code, and copyright concerns, though some see huge potential in the tool

Potential that this is just like the code their humans are already creating?

Hubble Space Telescope sails serenely on in safe mode after efforts to switch to backup memory modules fail

Re: This is starting to look bad

it's 'space' and 'science'. Capitalisation implies deification :)

Douglas Adams called it

There's clearly been a fault in the fault-detection module.

Click, hum.

Nasdaq's 32-bit code can't handle Berkshire Hathaway's monster share price

Re: Use of floating point numbers ?

>>Maybe electronic trading allows fractions of a penny or a cent. But you can't get 1/3 of a penny out of a cash till.

>This is why it is called electronic trading, they don't need cash tills.

But nobody would set a price as a fraction in the first place.

Philanthropist and ex-Microsoft manager Melinda Gates and her husband Bill split after 27 years of marriage

Sad

I don't know why when divorces are two a penny, but this one makes me glum. To have made it this far, and Bill seems a pretty decent guy in his older age (I don't know anything about Melinda), I guess it just came out of the blue from what seemed a very settled family.

Oh well.

Free Software Foundation urged to free itself of Richard Stallman by hundreds of developers and techies

Yesterday's trailblazer is tomorrow's bigoted embarassment

Such is the modern obsession with redefining everything at breakneck speed. No matter how progressive your views today, if you do something stupid like hold the same position for a few years, you'll be the equivalent of your racist grandad to the youngsters.

We already see some of the early LGB activists being rewritten in history as 'unhelpful'. It'll be #youtoo soon.