Posts by pip25

All change at JetBrains: Remote development now, new IDE previewed

Might check it out

I just hope they'll let me turn off autosave this time around. It's one of the things that I always hated about JetBrains' IDEs.

Project Union: Microsoft releases Windows App SDK 1.0, developers try to puzzle it out

Why was this released?

Some project manager decided that it has to be out around when .NET 6 becomes available, otherwise... well, just because? This thing is obviously not ready, even by Microsoft's standards.

Robotaxis freed to charge across 60km² of Beijing

"pick-up and drop-off points"

How's that a taxi? I mean, how is that different from taking the bus?

Remember SoftRAM 95? Compression app claimed to double memory in Windows but actually did nothing at all

Re: "Windows' registry doesn't need cleaning"

He's right though. The registry doesn't need cleaning if you're doing a fresh install of Windows every few years. Otherwise, the amount of crap that accumulates there can be a sight to behold.

There's a reason why all these so-called registry cleaners are so widespread - there's a market for it, because issues with the registry can and do cause problems. This "feature" plagued Windows ever since its introduction, and while it's perhaps less horrible than it was at one time, it's still not anywhere near good by any stretch of the imagination.

Keep calm and learn Rust: We'll be seeing a lot more of the language in Linux very soon

Re: Any good docs?

The language website has decent enough docs in my experience.

You need to shift millions of repos to AWS without any downtime. How? Bitbucket engineering chief tells all

Too little too late

Bitbucket has become so unstable and generally unusable in 2019 that I'm not going anywhere near the provider if I can help it. Plenty of alternatives out there.

IT god exposed as false idol by quirks of Java – until he laid his hands on the server

Re: For the non-programmers amongst us...

You can still allocate memory in Java that the garbage collector can't touch, but it's also no longer used for anything worthwhile. For instance, badly written ThreadLocal code can pollute a web server's worker threads with useless data. Certain hot-reload solutions could leave previous versions of class definitions in memory as well (at least prior to the introduction of metaspace, I'm not sure how often that happens nowadays). I would still call these memory leaks, even if the programmer is not responsible for directly deallocating memory in Java.

Re: For the non-programmers amongst us...

I might oversimplify the problem but it sounds like an ordinary memory leak to me. If that part of the heap was only loaded into memory from the page file for the occasional GC run, that means the data contained within was not used, ever.

Windows Subsystem for Android: What's the point?

Different question: is this better than the existing solutions out there?

I'm forced to use Android emulation because a smart home device I regularly use only has a mobile app. The latest Bluestacks beta works reasonably well; though it's not always 100% stable, it provides most of the things listed in this article: desktop icons for apps, the ability to run them in separate resizable windows, and, unlike Microsoft's offering, also the Google Play appstore. So I'm left wondering, how does WSA measure up to that?

Get ready for full holograms and 6G while living in the metaverse, says Samsung

Holograms?

If that's the best they could come up with as a potential application for 6G, they must be really desperate.

Google deliberately throttled ad load times to promote AMP, claims new court document

Thank you Google

For destroying whatever little doubt I had left for surfing the web with ads and JS blocked by default. Making your ads slower ON PURPOSE goes a tiny bit beyond simple, garden-variety evil.

Electronic Frontier Foundation ousts co-founder John Gilmore from its board

Sounds like something both the EFF and Gilmore would prefer not to elaborate upon

If the quote from the man is to be taken seriously. Though that raises the question of why didn't he simply resign from the board then...?

Apple's Safari browser runs the risk of becoming the new Internet Explorer – holding the web back for everyone

Surfs the web with JS disabled...

...and at the same time complains about Safari's missing features.

What.

I honestly can't recall a time when I've read an article on El Reg that was THIS nonsensical.

It's heeere: Node.js 17 is out – but not for production use, says dev team

Re: Finally a true cross platform environment

You misunderstood my point. I also did not claim that JS is utterly useless in every single scenario. Its lack of scaling simply means it's not the best choice for enterprise projects - where unfortunately most software development takes place. It's great that your SPA still works as required - but if you had to create that webapp with five other devs and with thrice the scope, you might not be so optimistic today. People don't use Angular (or React, etc.) because they're masochistic (okay, so there are some people who change frameworks every two weeks, but those are a lost cause regardless of the JS ecosystem's merits or problems). They use such frameworks to abstract away some of the complexity inherent to JS webapp development, at least for big enough projects. It's exactly JS's issues with scaling that brought these things into existence.

For the record, my 10+-year-old Java webapp, which I did write with a team of fellow devs, still works fine today as well. It uses server-side rendering (gasp) and only a bare minimum of JS, which made it "outdated" by company standards, forcing us to create an alternate JS SPA UI for the same API. Unfortunately that one keeps breaking and has since become likewise outdated due to its reliance on now end-of-life libraries. Go figure.

(Oh, and my Java webapp has zero native dependencies aside from the JVM. None.)

In general, I think we agree: you need the right tool for the right job. I simply say that for most jobs, JS does not work nearly as well as its adherents claim.

(EDIT: Sorry, almost forgot. Alternatives. In the backend, I still stick with JVM languages. In the browser, there are no real alternatives to JS, which is one of the reasons why it's so ubiquitous. I do hope Webassembly will become one soon.)

Re: Finally a true cross platform environment

I'm happy you find the current JS ecosystem to your liking. I wish I could say the same.

My problem with Node.JS is basically the same as it is with Javascript in general: it simply does not seem to scale well, both in terms of complexity and time. I find that even a Typescript codebase reaches the point where it becomes a chore to even understand what is going on much faster than with other languages. As for time, the library landscape for JS changes so often that maintaining anything beyond a year or two can quickly become a nightmare. You'd think at least the server side would be exempt from that, but each Node.JS upgrade we had to push through seemed just as hazardous as, say, an Angular upgrade - stuff WILL break where you'd least expect it.

Oh, and "true cross-platform development"? Sounds nice, until you realize that your dependencies are actually full of stuff written in C and/or Python. There is a reason why Javascript projects build so insanely slowly, especially during the first run.

'Windows 11 has been successfully downloaded,' says update for Xbox version of Microsoft Flight Simulator

They should sue

and seek compensation for the grievous psychological harm suffered

Canon makes 'all-in-one' printers that refuse to scan when out of ink, lawsuit claims

Re: To be fair all *home* printers are shit

In the rare cases when I wanted to print a photo, I've found the quality perfectly acceptable.

(Disclaimer: I'm no photo enthusiast, I only take pictures with my phone when I'm on vacation and stuff.)

Re: To be fair all *home* printers are shit

Same here. Laser printers have been my refuge from all this ink robbery which has been going on since decades, and Xerox's Phaser line works perfectly for home use.

Spanner in the works: The goal is not 100% compatibility, Google says of PostgreSQL interface

Did anyone ever make a serious comparison of these distributed SQL DBs?

Between Spanner, Yugabyte, TiDB and CockroachDB, all I could find were benchmarks from their own developers which ever-so-shockinly favored their own implementation. I'm using CockroachDB right now and I'm reasonably satisfied with it, but I'd be really interested nonetheless how these truly measure up to each other. Fully distributed SQL databases are a fairly recent breed but show a lot of promise.

Jamstack research: Typescript and serverless are the winners

"React (...) ...at 8 years old it should be over"

The above describes everything wrong with the browser frontend landscape today. The trendsetters are incredibly busy always running after whatever new framework strikes their fancy, while here I am, still having to maintain sites written in AngularJS. And I feel very lucky, because at least the (insanely) slow migration to Angular is an option. The disconnect feels astonishing.

Windows 11 in detail: Incremental upgrade spoilt by onerous system requirements and usability mis-steps

"A recommended section occupies about half the initial Start window and cannot be removed."

So Windows is officially adware now...? That's it, to hell with this crap. >_>

Microsoft's .NET Foundation under fire as resigning board member questions its role

Sobering

To anyone who thinks Microsoft can stop "being Microsoft" about open source, which sadly enough included me until now.

More than three years after last release, X.Org Server 21.1.0 RC1 appears

Previous version: 1.20.0 Next version: 21.1.0

Why. Just why. This idiotic versioning scheme is like some cancer that keeps on spreading.

Java 17 arrives with long-term support: What's new, and is it falling behind Kotlin?

Re: Most of these are "screw the coder" misfeatures

Delegation does not help at all if you cannot use your own class in place of the other, which is the case if there is no common interface to implement. Of course, with your own code and sanely written libraries/frameworks, this is not something you'd be forced to do in the first place, but unfortunately a lot of stuff you encounter in enterprise development is horribly written/structured - look no further than some of Oracle's own products. Without the ability to replace an instance with a subclass of your own, you're screwed.

Re: Most of these are "screw the coder" misfeatures

I do fear sealed classes will be over/misused. Everything being final by default is one of the reasons I stay far away from Kotlin.

LTS release + Preview features?

Am I the only one who sees that as a contradiction?

Ghosts in the machine learning pipeline will be impossible to exorcise

Re: For Whenever Taking a Walk on the WWWild Side of Life .......

I get it, I get it!

This is an AI-written post, right?

You can 'go your own way' over GDPR, says UK's new Information Commissioner

"Make privacy easy"

Privacy, like so many other topics involving conflicting interests, is not easy. Claiming the opposite unfortunately speaks volumes of the Information Commissioner's competence, honesty, or both.

McDonald's email blunder broadcasts database creds to comedy competition winners

Honestly, I would also struggle to report this

due to uncontrollable laughter

Docker’s cash conundrum is becoming a bet on a very different future

Docker Hub is not impressive in terms of functionality, but in terms of usage. Basically everyone who uses Docker pulls images from there, if for no other reason than to use them as base for their own. The bandwidth cost of that is quite substantial.

That's exactly my issue with Docker's current stance. Running Docker Hub probably costs a good amount of money, and asking users, especially the bigger companies to contribute to those costs is an entirely fair and reasonable thing to do, in my opinion. But monetizing the client? With, erm, "incentives" like being able to turn off autoupdate? I don't see that paying off in the long run, both literally and figuratively.

A developer built an AI chatbot using GPT-3 that helped a man speak again to his late fiancée. OpenAI shut it down

Re: “The idea that these chatbots can be dangerous seems laughable,”

We also like to think that most human beings, at least after a certain age, can think for themselves. I don't believe it is your job or mine (or OpenAI's, for that matter), to decide what they should or should not be doing with their grief, especially if the only person they may potentially harm with their actions is themselves.

Of course, OpenAI is still free to enforce whatever terms it deems necessary for their model (though I have to say, monitoring people's chats with the bots raises some concerns related to sensitive personal information). In the end, though, they are only delaying the inevitable. The genie is already out of the battle, it is only a matter of time until GPT-3 (and its eventual clones) will not be considered cutting edge, but commonplace.

Why we abandoned open source: LiveCode CEO on retreat despite successful kickstarter

A programming language as a product?

There certainly were times in the past when this was widespread, but nowadays? Maybe I'm simply being ignorant but I'm honestly surprised this is still sustainable, especially for (seemingly) smaller players like LiveCode.

Windows 11 will roll out from October 5 as Microsoft hypes new hardware

That was fast

Windows 11 was announced in late June, and it's already out in October? I understand that it's actually little more than Windows 10.1 under the hood, but this is still unexpected when compared to previous releases. I guess they think they'll iterate on stuff when feedback from their testers (and by testers I mean their users) reaches critical mass.

Docker Desktop no longer free for large companies: New 'Business' subscription is here

Docker seems pretty desperate for income

And it's not doing the software any favors. Are we seeing a variation of NPM's story here? (Everyone uses the technology, but no one wants to pay for it)

Using 'AI-based software like Proctorio and ProctorU' to monitor online exams is a really bad idea, says uni panel

Online exams do not seem like a good idea in general

It's like putting the open textbook next to the exam papers on the student's desk, then asking him not to look at it. These proctoring programs are problematic because they are trying to solve an unsolvable issue - and even as they invade the students' privacy, they still have a good chance of being wrong.

Microsoft, flush with cash, raises cloud office suite prices for businesses

Totally not a monopoly

No, sir. Nothing to see here, move along.

Elastic amends Elasticsearch Python client so it won't work with forks then blocks comments

Elastic is deluded

I cannot think of any other reason why they'd believe that this license change and client shenanigans aren't going to blow up in their faces.

Not to say that OpenSearch is guaranteed to win. The most likely scenario is that everyone will lose. :(

Australian court rules an AI can be considered an inventor on patent filings

"Junk patents"?

I think the real problem here is that such patents can be submitted and accepted by the patent system, regardless of their author. If meaningful innovation would truly be a requirement, then a machine capable of solving such real problems on its own would be a genuine asset, not simply yet another source of income for patent trolls.

Hungarian tech store closed by World War II bomb

It did make the news here in Hungary as well

It just happens often enough that you find such reports around the same place where you see news articles about the latest road closures, bridge reconstruction work, etc.

What's less commonplace is how much the store's web designers seemed to be enjoying themselves. :)

Since it's the only way to differentiate in a Chromium-dominated market, Vivaldi 4.1 introduces 'Accordion' tabs

"it's hard to see a day when I'll ever use anything else"

Watch out, there was a time when I thought the same about Firefox. ;)

Really loving Vivaldi so far though, both on desktop and on mobile.

Windows 11 comes bearing THAAS, Trojan Horse as a service

We have been moving AWAY from standards since years, unfortunately

Remember when Google Chat (or whatever it was called back then) was (somewhat) compatible with XMPP? Around that time, I was using an IM client called Pidgin that let me use most chat accounts under a single interface; you could even force Skype to work with some trickery.

Well, Pidgin still exists, but feels like a shell of its former self. Last time I tried using it, some stuff simply didn't work, other stuff made the program crash. I don't think it's the authors' fault, either: it seems like the big players have gone out of their way to make chat (and voice/video call) interoperability a lost cause. Here's hoping that something will force them to think again, be it the rise of Teams or anything else.

Hole blasted in Guntrader: UK firearms sales website's CRM database breached, 111,000 users' info spilled online

Re: An iframe? Really?

I think an iframe can indeed be employed in certain scenarios to make use of the logged-in user's privileges without their knowledge. But unless that user is an admin, I also don't see how that could lead to the DB getting dumped, at least by itself. There is probably a lot more to this hack that we weren't told about.

Tomorrow's wireless world will be fatter, faster, and creepier

I'm starting to feel like we've long passed CD levels in wireless standards

Yes, the title makes no sense at first glance, let me explain.

Anyone remember DVD-Audio? It offered better quality than CDs, but it never caught on. Why? Surely for a myriad of reasons, but one of particular importance was that "people didn't care". The difference between CD and DVD audio quality was inaudible to most.

I'm starting to get the same feeling with wireless standards, especially those pertaining mobile networks. 4G already covers most use cases for the average consumer, you can watch full HD videos while walking like a zombie on the street if you're so inclined, sites load in a second or less, etc. Unless we find something that people really want and requires a lot of bandwidth (and no, 8K video is not a good candidate, for the very same reason outlined above), this is starting to feel like technological advancement for its own sake. In other words, its return of investment seems questionable.

Windows 11: What we like and don't like about Microsoft's operating system so far

Re: Meh

Every time I see the word "simplified" in a changelog, I twitch with discomfort. More often than not, it's a misguided attempt to make the software easier to use by removing features. Windows 11's case seems no different, unfortunately.

All hands on Steam Deck: Fancy a handheld Linux PC that runs Windows apps, sports a custom AMD Zen APU and a touch screen?

Re: 'Abandonware' written all over it.

They claim you can replace the Steam OS with Windows if you really want to, so it can't be TOO locked down.

Report: 83% of UK software engineers suffer burnout, COVID-19 made it worse

Re: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means

I assume we have both worked on waterfall projects. The scope was set in stone and was part of the contract, everything that deviated from that was a CR that had to be negotiated separately. The contract listed a set of documents the client had to receive for the project to be accepted (and thus we'd get paid).

It is the above practice that the manifesto argues against, and provides a stark contrast to. As much as I have seen Agile being used as a mere buzzword or mutated in horrible ways, it speaks of its influence on the developer community that its tenets may seem trivial nowadays.

Re: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means

When I was first confronted with the above lines during Agile training, I was somewhat skeptical as well, similarly based on past experience. What put things into perspective is the fact that the manifesto does NOT say that there should be no documentation, neither does it say that no contract should be negotiated or no plan should be made.

What is says is that, obvious as it might sound, you should not let the need for comprehensive documentation get in the way of making something that works. That the fact that you have negotiated a contract does not mean that you should never talk to the client again until the software is ready. Or that as good as your plan might be, you should not value it above the actual needs of your client, which may indeed change over time.

The manifesto assigns priorities, it does not want you to throw stuff out and do something else instead exclusively.

Wanna feel old? It is 10 years since the Space Shuttle left the launchpad for the last time

Still feel bad about it

Even today, we don't have a replacement for the shuttle program with similar capabilities. SpaceX is on the right track, but they cannot help with fixing the Hubble space telescope, for instance. A shuttle would have the hardware for it.

Not to mention (to touch on less... tangible reasons :) ) how cool a space shuttle looked. Like a real, you know, spaceship. :) The kid in me (who wanted to be an astronaut) is heartbroken that it doesn't fly anymore.

Android devs prepare to hand over app-signing keys to Google from August

I migrate my APKs between phones

But if the binaries I get are "optimized for my device" from here on, then I guess that's the end of that. Thank you so much, Google.