* Posts by nijam

1885 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Nov 2011

Mixing Rust and C in Linux likened to cancer by kernel maintainer

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> "For the sake of security and reliability, the industry should declare those languages as deprecated," Russinovich said.

"For the sake of security and reliability, the industry should declare Microsoft as deprecated," I said.

US datacenters in for shock as Canada mulls cutting the juice over Trump tariffs

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Re: allowing them to bypass the grid, which he described as "old" and unreliable

> ... which he described as "old" and unreliable.

Two of the (not very many) things he's an expert on.

Trump’s tariffs, cuts may well put tech in a chokehold, say analysts

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Re: Shaking

> I suggest a new vulture unit: the Truss.

He's probably got one about his person, somewhere.

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> With Musk's DOGE working through a considerable list of potential changes

I believe you mean "working through an ill-considered list of potential changes"

You're going to do what to the feature? Microsoft defines what it means by 'deprecation'

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I deprecated Windows (all versions) about quarter of a century ago.

AI pothole patrol to snap flaws in Britain's crumbling roads

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Re: Depth measurement

> A pair of cameras should be able to estimate depth.

... or a single camera from two different vantage points, e,g, on a moving vehicle.

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Re: Or...

> Makes it easier for the 'A.I.' to spot them...

Yes, that's how Artificial Insemination works...

Trump's freshly minted meme coin passes $10B market cap

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Re: What's in a name

Was that a typo for Strumpet? Surely not?

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Re: I despair for Humanity...

> Most of those "investing" are complicit and fully on board with the scam.

Given that quiff-boy often reveals how ill-informed and dim-witted he is, could it be that in fact he's the one being scammed?

OTOH he has a track record of successful scam himself, so I think probably not.

UK government tech procurement lacks understanding, says watchdog

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Re: Qualifications?

> *B.Sc., Ph.D. in mathematics, plus over 20 years IT security experience - a no-hoper, really.

Too right, how do you still even have a job?

It's not just Big Tech: The UK's Online Safety Act applies across the board

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Re: Just another example...

> In this case it's pretty minimal.

Only in some government fantasy world.

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Re: Just another example...

In the limiting case, even a site with zero users still has to jump through the bureacratic hoops.

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Re: Just another example...

I recently had cause to look intor the "working at Height' regulations. They are are so draconian that under some readings, even a passer-by who happens to witness a breach might be considered to have to some responsibility.

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Re: Just another example...

> Health and Safety at Work Act applies to all organisations above a certain level of employees.

Again, do you really belive that would prevent an actual prosecution?

A breach of the H&S regulations could for example be used as supporting evidence, even if the H&S legislation weren't applicable in a particular case. Servo-assisted prosecuting...

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Re: Just another example...

> The degree to which one must comply is proportionate to the risk of harm.

Fallacious, I'm afraid. Leaving aside any custodial sentences that might yet be built in, one incident would bankrupt our small sports club. From our point of view this is a bulldozer to swat a gnat.

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Re: Just another example...

> If these small hobby sites are so useful to their members then their members won't mind paying a nominal fee to use them and that fee could be used to pay for compliance.

It wouldn't be a small fee, that is why it won't work. The only way to comply with this legislation (which is itself both malicious, and an unnecessary duplication of existing protections - albeit regualtions which the government has decided it's not worth enforcing) is to charge a very substantial amount or shut the site down.

UK government pledges law against sexually explicit deepfakes

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Re: Wrong move

> I think this not well thought through.

The purpose of legislation is to provide future employment for lawyers, with the secondary effect of facilitating legal harrassment of anyone the government takes a dislike to. Any claimed benefits are purely incidental.

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Re: Installing equipment?

> ... I'm confused as to what exactly the new law adds

Nothing. It's another piece of knee-jerk publicity-grabbing legislation, the like of which we've already seen altogether to many times.

Zuck takes a page from Musk: Meta dumps fact-checkers, loosens speech restrictions

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Re: America's compulsory freedom

> ...there's going to be a bit of a culture war.

War? I believe the correct term is genocide.

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Re: All those billions can’t buy a spine

> ...challenge the orange fatso to a cage fight

Who makes cages in his size?

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Re: Money for nothing, and ...

> Except people can opt out.

Can they? Really, can they? So many sites and services hook you in willy-nilly to one or more of these "social" cesspits.

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Yes, it's the modern disease - an inability to distinguish facts from ideas, insults from opinions, and so on.

The USA is now a clear example (sadly not the first, nor I fear, the last) of the degenaration of democracy into demagogery.

Windows 11 24H2 can run – sort of – in 184MB

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> ... happily uses as much as it can

Yes, it's a cache, that's what it's for. Unused cache is just wasted cache.

The latest language in the GNU Compiler Collection: Algol-68

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Re: I would try it, but...

> no way I'm going to spend time continually typing those words in full all day

You could have used ( - ) pairs instead of BEGIN - END, at least in Algol-68R.

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Re: I still have the book...

> Any guesses as to what the ENTIER keyword does? No cheating!

Clue: it was a sop to a French committee member who couldn't abide all the reserved words being English.

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Re: Lead to a bunch of stuff at what was RSRE Malvern

> Algol 68 was so damm complex it used what looks like 2 level BNF, which I think was too much for anyone but hard-core theoretical language specialists.

No, the language definition uses level 2 BNF, the language itself doesn't (my MSc was in the use of 2-level grammars). Algol-68 was a great step forward in exposing some of the abstract concepts underlying progamming, but most people were put off by (little-founded) horror stories about its complexity.

> I think it also ... didn't flag type mismatches and tried to do something "Sensible" when they happened.

"Sensible" being the operative (pun intended) word. Converting integer numbers to floating-point numbers being an example, and one we all use in everyday life. Apart from a few instance like that, it has a strong type system.

As for Pascal, it's something I think Wirth should have been embarrassed about. Just my opinion, but to me it looked like a dead-end that took another decade or more to become a viable language for non-trivial projects.

Shackleton's Endurance sets sail for polar peril in Lego

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Another excellent Lego model ... but could you perhaps throw in a comment now and then about Lego's inability to supply their products in reusable packaging?

Boffins carve up C so code can be converted to Rust

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Re: Weird?

> There's a certain challenge you get with writing C code in avoiding those segfaults, buffer overflows etc.

Not really much of a challenge, I'd say. The actual challenge is knowing the language well enough to use the features you need. In that regard, like every other language...

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Re: I like Rust but...

As soon as you're using crates, your program should be marked as "unsafe Rust", of course.

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Re: “Minimal adjustments”

Easier outcome:

But hey, once you've patted yourself on the back for having great C code by auto-translating it into Rust you may as well go ahead and throw away the Rust code.

China's homebrew Bluetooth alternative is on the march as Beijing pushes universal remotes

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Very much like Logitech universal remotes which were so successful that ... Logitech gave up on making them.

Australia lays fiendish tax trap for Meta – with an expensive escape hatch

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Re: One issue...

Megacorp and Twitter (and its like) will want to be sure that no-one ever hears anything from Dave. Just the same as 'old media' always did.

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Re: They should take the hit.

> ... Already happened in the UK with local press completely dead.

That happened long before social media. Sure, the corpse has only just stopped moving, but it's nearly half a century since I abandoned local newspapers.

Alibaba exec trashes his own staff and customers, quickly apologizes

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> ...sometimes I don't know how to control the scale, so I have been criticized for this for many years...

HR should have got rid of him many years ago, then.

Europe's largest local authority settles on ERP budget 5x original estimate

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Re: Business Process Documentation?

> Director from foreign owner asserts that two computer systems are "fully integrated".....and is shocked to see evidence that this assertion is completely false.

No.

Director from foreign owner asserts that two computer systems are "fully integrated".....and refuses to see evidence that this assertion is completely false.

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Re: Care

All bureacrats produce is bureacracy. How is that surprising to anyone?

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Re: Pretty much every large software implementation

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Or Oracle's version of that: If it is broke, don't fix it.

Altman to Musk: Don't go full supervillain – that's so un-American

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Re: re: people who irritate Musk's fragile ego

To quote (approximately) from a UK current affairs program a few weeks back, in respose to the Florida Man's shitshow:

We should just sit back and enjoy this election, because there won't be any more of them.

Windows 11 24H2 rolls out to more devices – with a growing list of known issues

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> "new stage of availability."

Really? More like a new stage of disability.

Google DeepMind touts AI model for 'better' global weather forecasting

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We might feel more confident if it could explain how the forecasts were acheived. But it can't.

Microsoft confirms there will be no U-turn on Windows 11 hardware requirements

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> This is lining up to be the Windows Phone 7 debacle all over again.

If only...

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ISTR that TPM is simply a new set of insecurites anyway.

Wubuntu: The lovechild of Windows and Linux nobody asked for

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Re: Some use cases

> Doesn't Windows itself change some of the UI behaviour between each major version?

i.e. Doesn't Windows itself change lots of the UI behaviour between each version?

Are Copilot+ PCs really the fastest Windows PCs? X and Copilot don't think so

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Re: Got the daughter a Lenovo "Copilot+ PC"

> "... and she does not use it"

She'll soon be forced to, I suspect.

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> "Microsoft changed computing history by inventing a new category: the Personal Computer or PC."

Well, long before all those little personal computers, PC (in the computing world at least) meant Plug-Compatible, as in mainframe products from IBMs competitors.

Security? We've heard of it: How Microsoft plans to better defend Windows

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Re: "security is our top priority,"

> I do wonder how many 'top priorities' there are, and how swiftly they get replaced by the one next in line

There can be only one (as somebody once said). It lasts only until the end of that PR presentation.

Microsoft goes thin client with $349 Windows 365 Link mini PC

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Re: But but but

> Good luck with that - "speaking to Microshite directly".

To paraphrase Shakespeare (in The Tempest): You can speak to Microshite, and so can anyone - but do they listen?

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> sounds like they've put a fair amount of effort into preventing them from being repurposed

Hmmm... "sounds like they've put a fair amount of effort into preventing them from being used", surely.

Trump's pick to run the FCC has told us what he plans: TikTok ban, space broadband, and Section 230 reform

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Re: Tiktok ban

Not least the commentards on IT news websites ;)

Et tu Brute!

The US government wants developers to stop using C and C++

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Re: The issue with rust

> ...rust is memory safe...

Rust is mostly memory-safe. But not entirely, of course.