Posts by sorry, what? 352 posts • joined 27 Apr 2011
Exposing friends and foe alike to naked robots with their innards on show. Not just gmail and YouTube etc. (my son found he could still access YouTube through a desktop browser, just not on his device, so could continue to chortle at those kittens and their antics); gsuite was borked too. Looked like a serious authentication infrastructure boo-boo. I was told that my gsuite email address wasn't recognized at all when attempting to login. Ooof.
I have to disagree. If I have something like:
if (condition) {
something;
something;
}
something;
It is very clear where the block is even though I messed up my indentation. If I have:
if (condition):
something;
something;
something;
and happen to use an editor that doesn't preserve whitespace properly (yes there are plenty out there) then I'm screwed. I have no idea where the condition block finished.
Oh! Look at that! The Register's post editor didn't keep the whitespace! Shame.
"Ey-up. When I were a lad, mi dad used tuh beat us wi' a pro-log tuh get us owt er bed in 't morning. Ee'd then make us wash wi' raw eggs whilst we 'ad a python round our necks. We'd be lucky tuh be allowed owt o' the 'ouse wi-out first licking the toilet clean."
Starting with C and migrating to C++ is quite different to starting with Python and migrating to JavaScript. C's syntax is a sub-set of that needed for C++ and you can compile C with a C++ compiler. This doesn't hold true for Python and JavaScript. The Python syntax is, um, unique to that language and while there are some similarities with JavaScript (enough to let me help my kids with little extra effort on my behalf) the use of shitespace indentation and colons instead of delimited blocks is very different (and totally insane IMHO).
As to being asked to use FORTRAN at uni, you are either around my age or you had a cruel and unusual lecturer. Or both.
As a professional developer I cringe when helping my kids do their programming using this language. To me it's a poor man's lobotomized JavaScript taking a leaf out of the FORTRAN book of stupidity. I really don't understand why educational institutions have adopted it. Can someone explain the appeal?
Apple created the App Store and iOS for its own devices. They provide a service where they verify that your app is "safe" and they provide "advertising" of your app on the App Store. This makes for a "safe place to find and install apps". So far, so good.
Apple already charges the developer around $100 per year for the ability to submit apps to the App Store. Seems to be a fair price for the security review that Apple performs, so OK.
Now you make your app available and either charge a fixed price and/or have in-app purchases. Apple now starts taking a percentage of the money that people pay in either case. Well, if you're using their payment system that seems fair, but it should be similar to the fee levels that credit cards charge - down in the low percents rather than around 1/3 of the value.
However, Apple have stitched everyone up - you have to use the App Store and cannot use a different payment system and they have pegged their fees at a disproportionate level. (Google have done likewise, but side-loading is possible at the user's risk.)
I don't really understand why governments haven't taken action over this anti-competitive, monopolistic behaviour. It's not like app developers have a real choice here.
Nope. I don't need to. I haven't tried to use VSCode in anger, and only in the context of the Salesforce SFDX plugin, but it stinks. The UX is terrible. I did use Visual Studio for several years and found it rather limited in capabilities. The only IDE that really hits the nail on the head is IDEA. It just works so well, with superb refactoring support and brilliant git integration.
As to the "frustration" of re-indexing mentioned in the article - what? Sure re-indexing can sometimes take a while, but how often are you really switching context on big projects? Switching VCS (read: git) branches, sure, but that takes almost no time at all. I tend to have IDEA open 24/7, occasionally opening additional projects in new windows, but there's always a way to use that "re-indexing" time. Even if it's a quick trip to the "restroom" or to grab a coffee from the kitchen.
Those of us in the UK no longer have such protections anyway, what with Brexit and all. When Google shifted all my data to the US back in April I complained to my MP and got a dismissive bunch of drivel back in return saying that my data was just as secure in the US as it would be in the EU.
I went for the TeckNet gaming "mechanical feeling" USB wired UK layout keyboard - the key backlights are ridiculous but the typing experience (I'm a dev) is good. At £22 you can buy plenty of these before you've spent the sort of money these keyboards cost... so even if the keys wear out, it'll be years before you regret it from a cost perspective.
Then the OS can be upgraded without even consulting the hardware vendors - just like Microsoft does with Windows on PCs.
Yeah, I know, not quite entirely aligned with this article, but...
All the vendors would have to do is provide the "drivers" (for want of a better word) and perhaps a partition where they can add their bloatware (to be disabled instantly) and their home screen app.
I'm probably being naive here, but M$ managed it...
That means manufacturers are forced to support products for a minimum of 5 years, be that with spare parts or security updates. I'm rather surprised to find that even the EU doesn't appear to have such a requirement.
I know I'm not the typical punter because I pay up front for my phones and I keep them as long as I can. I'm no "oooh, shiny shiny" waste-ard and look to minimize the amount of landfill I generate. It's a shame that Samsung will be forcing a device change on me just so I can benefit from security and other fixes in a product I bought only a few short years back...
If you're doing serious development, you need a desktop. If you're on a tablet (and therefore unable to use a desktop based IDE) you're not doing serious development. You might review something. You might even do a couple of lines of code to fix something, but you can do that through your cloud-based git repository UI without the need for a browser-based IDE. I simply don't understand the browser-based IDE concept. Unless, I guess, you have a Chromebook. But again, that isn't a serious developer's piece of kit.
As to developing Java - just use the best IDE (IDEA) and be done with it.
Hmmmm. Maybe I'm a fossil, but this seems to be a solution looking for a problem.
I regularly use certain Stack Exchange sites, but was entirely oblivious to these goings-on. The article was, therefore, eye opening and I welcome it.
Personally, I see no need or place for pronouns, at least on the sites I use, and (given current ridiculous social norms) feel I should be offended on behalf of people who see pronouns as divisive. But honestly, meh.
In terms of the Stack Overview/Stack Exchange reputation, it has taken a dent but for me it is almost all about user generated content anyway so really is more about the quality of posting than any mutterings from corporate.
Regarding user reputation, as @jglathe said, it is really, really hard work to build reputation on the sites I use. You find old hands with 8+ years up in the 100000s of points and folk who joined more recently (1-3 years) but regularly post down in the really low 1000s even after what is clearly a really concerted attempt to flood the sites with nuggets of their learning and experience. This is, I suspect, simply down to the fact that the old hands were in on the ground floor, answering the "low hanging fruit" questions that naturally gain additional votes over time. In addition, as the sites have matured the questions generally have become more niche (since search engine(s) results cover those earlier questions well) and therefore attract less reputation, which is a shame.
What's great about git is that it doesn't really matter if the remote repo becomes unavailable for a while because you've still got all those commits in the local clones. Sure it may take a little while to get yourself out of the bind but it is ultimately doable even if the remote repo can't be recovered at all.
It may be a bit inconvenient to be unable to share updates in a team in the normal way but there are simple ways around this (e.g. using generated patches and the like).
I'm not saying I want downtime from that cloudy git, but actually there's no real chance of missing those pulls or losing commits unless you are a complete noob and delete or mess up your clone.
1. They are deterministically computed, not random. Yeah, the likelihood is slim but it COULD still happen. If it does, this language is hosed. My point stands.
2. My point is that the original "function" was referenced by one hash and now it has another. I think you are implying that you have to build/deploy all the code again so that the referer code correctly references the bug fixed code, but I'm not sure. That implies you must "own" all the code in the solution since it all has to be re-built and re-deployed to resolve all those references, so don't even think about models like shared libraries, right?
(And why hide behind anonymous posting?)
A couple of things sprung to mind when reading this (and, no, I haven't gone about finding out any more by reading any of the cited links):
1. How are they going to deal with hash collisions? Hashes are NOT unique identifiers; they are semi-unique at best.
2. How do you ensure that a bug fix, which changes the hash of a function, is correctly applied (updating all reference to the broken function with the new one)?
Yeah, my brain isn't big enough to handle Erlang so I'm guessing it would go "*phut*" in Unison...
All of those things can happen for on-prem data and servers. And you have to employ a sys admin to do stuff like backups, configure/update OS and security, handle disk management etc. And you have the risk that your sys admin is happy to drink coffee in the server room, propping the cup on the kvm switch at head height on the pull out tray in your server rack then absent-mindedly pushing the tray back in and causing a coffee coloured waterfall down inside your rack...
Two years ago I would have said the same thing. Now, having been developing software on the Salesforce platform, I have had to modify my opinion.
There is more to it than simply putting your stuff on someone else's computer. That computer comes with a shed load of software that makes "your stuff" be more and let's you do more with it.
Sure, someone could sell an on-premise version of such software, but (as is suggested by what happened here) it is probably quite complex and difficult to administer and keep up-to-date. That means you probably would not bother to have it and would not be able to do nearly so much with your data.
I still have my concerns about cloud and as a private individual without any real need for clever use of my data, I am more than happy with a personal NAS with RAID to store my files, locked down with no sharing across the public internet.
As a corporate user, however, I can see the value. And I wonder how many outages and the level of cost I would have suffered with my own kit compared with using something like Salesforce.
Americans like Trump would read this and miss the sarcasm. El Reg needs to add special tags to sarcastic statements just to ensure that Trump and the Trumpettes don't take it the wrong way and cite the article as more reason to do some further bashing of "not US so not USeful" companies.
But so many Android users fit the "can't be arsed" profile and just use whatever the default default is that this will have no impact.
This screen will generally be ignored by most, with a simple touch on "Next", so strikes me as a way to placate the EU while having almost zero impact on Google - other than to get more readies from third party search engines naive enough to take part in the bids.
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