Posts by Willy Wonka

Help the Macless: Apple’s iPadOS is a huge update that will enable more people to do without a Mac... or a PC

the what of an IPad ?

from the article: "... the safety, convenience and low maintenance of an iPad ..."

Where can I find these three euphemisms explained in full ... other than in Cupertino press-releases ?

Visual Studio Code 1.35: Remote Development, TypeScript and (sigh) another new icon

Re: Some, of course, prefer to stick with the likes of Vim,

Dear Hammer Manufacturer: your latest hammer will not work as a screwdriver, which is a terrible insult to the millions who screw.

Register Lecture: Hidden heroes of Alan Turing's Enigma

Thanks for teasing me with the promise of interesting content I will never be able to access.

Microsoft debuts Bosque – a new programming language with no loops, inspired by TypeScript

what's write/right with a loop ?

You can monitor state and exit/break/return or (if your language supports it) continue.

Coding is more important than Shakespeare, says VC living in self-contained universe

"... when the Economist does glance over their specific topic, the end result may be well-argued and attractively produced, but it is often distilled down to a catchy sign-off and misses many of the critical, finer points."

Unlike the Register, where provocative satire take precedence over such mere ephemera as "facts" ?

Of course, that could be the reason I read, and enjoy, the Register so much, whereas I have not looked at the Economist in ... well ... at least several fiscal years.

:) Willy W

The future of cinema and TV: It’s game over for the hi-res hype

Excellent, article... but is there no chance for something remarkable in the next ten years ?

This article, imho, reflects The Register at its best. Concise information presented clearly by an obviously world-class expert. The absence of the usual convoluted droog-language ornamentation is appreciated :)

The article leaves me with the question of what possible next technology, optical, electronic, etc., could possibly achieve, within ten years some qualitative improvement of the perceived experience of watching film/video with "live" human interaction and motion.

thanks, Bill

Boffins hide cute kitty behind invisibility shield

SPOOROW is going to be all over this

Society for the Preservation of the Optical Refraction of Water are going to fight this gills and claws.

Reg readers tumesce as they get their tongues round 'podule'

in nomine podulum ...

A plethora of podules.

A podule longer than it is wide would be a phallopod; wider than long, a gynaepod. All podules which are circular are, of course, simply, by default, podules, in common usage; to the taxonomist: either unipods, circapods, or, hermaphropods.

A cluster of podules in fixed position is a podorama. Wandering, solitary, podules are vagapods.

in nomine podulum ...

What Compsci textbooks don't tell you: Real world code sucks

Once again The Register discovers: The Obvious !

What is amazing is: that the author of this article actually thinks this article contains "news."

Having been active in the world of very popular consumer oriented (high-end) software (graphic design) for some years, I can only snort reading this article.

In that consumer domain there is often a "feature race" going on in which prime resources are allocated to implementing the "next great thing," so that competitors will be "left behind." Forget cleaning up the code base, forget commenting, forget fixing bugs, forget anything, but: "future glory."

The stock-holders want their pound-of-flesh, the executives want a profitable balance sheet for the quarter, the managers want to "look sharp," and demand meeting unreasonable shipping deadlines, and the programmers: well, we are the lowest animals on the totem pole.

And, in that domain, skilled programmers spend a lot of time doing what I call "dinosaur dentistry:" hacking kludges so the latest version of the application can inter-operate with new/ever-changing platform API's and features, take advantage of new hardware possibilities (GPU off-loading of certain computation for graphics, for example).

Of course you have, in any technical enterprise, opportunity for programmers to create their own "lifetime employment guarantee" by creating obtuse, and undocumented code, that no one else can understand, let alone maintain. "Pathological" cases like that, imho, should be blamed on management.

It has never been a pretty, "algorithmic," world out there, and it never will be: why did the author of this article take so long to "wake up," and, then: decide they had discovered a "brave new world" ?

Adobe demands 7,000 years a day from humankind

excellently written article, but I think an important aspect of "context" is missing

Hi Bob,

While agreeing (paranoiacally) with your eloquent vivisection of the comatose hyperbody of software's death-support system of legal obfuscation:

I think it is critical to keep in mind that, particularly in the U.S., it is the highly litigious nature of contemporary times that is the source of all this disclamatory verbiage. It is the hordes of hungry lawyers, and their greedy firms, that are ready to bring a class-action suit for anything they can imagine might be lucrative.

We (in the U.S.) are in a culture of ever-increasing "patent wars:" that is nothing new under the sun; many, many, years ago Texas Instruments made far more bottom-line profit from IP and patent legal actions than from selling any tangible electronic device.

But, I am not trying to "shift blame" for all this crap in EULA's, and TOS's, just flesh-out the context.

To me the most reprehensible activities in this whole bloody mess involve the harvesting of personal information, on-line tracking, the egregious cunning by which sites like FaceBook get often naive people to share their address books. I lose track of how many invites to FaceBook, LinkedIn, etc. have been sent to me by the inadvertent actions of people I know, and how much effing trouble it is to get off those sites mailing lists.

Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, in an interview with USA Today describing his "vision" of a future Google: "access to everything ever written or recorded, know everything the user ever worked on and saved to his or her personal hard drive, and know a whole lot about the user's tastes, friends and predilections."

from the bitter chocolate factory, to your ears, Willy Wonka