Posts by 9Rune5

80-characters-per-line limits should be terminal, says Linux kernel chief Linus Torvalds

Re: The real reason for fairly small line lengths

Some of these concerns boils down to good code hygiene.

When I started learning C#, one of the things that felt visually wrong was the "massive" code indentation. Four spaces!

It felt wrong, because once you had nested a couple of levels, you'd need a wider monitor.

But eventually I realized that I do not actually want nesting that deep. It is better to move stuff into separate functions or rework the code (i.e. delete chunks that just aren't necessary). E.g. LINQ can be very effective at eliminating for-loops, thus saving one level of nesting.

I also think that line lengths should generally be kept within civil lengths, but I do not mind a 200+ character long line in the middle of a 200 line code file. However if all the lines are long, then I'll probably quit on the spot. My oldest boy is almost six years old and it is soon time for him to earn his keep anyway.

Linus Torvalds drops Intel and adopts 32-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper on personal PC

Re: Minimum spec?

I don't follow your logic of giving the craftsman inferior tools while expecting superior results.

But certainly, for most of us the profiler is an underused tool. Ironically, one of the reasons is that a profiler tends to be resource hungry on even the strongest of irons we throw at it. (depending on what setting you run the profiler at of course)

A bigger problem IMHO is the way we organize work. Where I work, our new head of R&D feels that one week sprints is the way to go. (go where? Bankruptcy?) Manglement often gets IT horribly wrong and most devs just go with the flow (myself included at the moment).

Re: $$$

Buy a big thermos, create a secret compartment in the bottom, put the threadripper inside and I'm sure you can sneak it past the guar...I mean wife.

The motherboard is going to be less easy. Delivery by drone might do the trick..?

The iMac at 22: How the computer 'too odd to succeed' changed everything ... for Apple, at least

Re: And that means Apple is now 44.

Unless you argue with him in your spare time.

Tom Cruise to increase in stature thanks to ISS jaunt? Now that's a mission impossible

The Scientologists prey on the weak.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Kaja_Ballo

Eclipse boss claims Visual Studio Code is an open-source poseur – though he would say that, wouldn't he?

Re: Not free

Meanwhile... Some of us see VSCode as a bloatfree edition of VS. It even comes with features that I doubt exists in VS.

I still use VS as my main tool, but I enjoy firing up VSCode for 'other' stuff. My biggest reason for remaining with VS is actually a third-party tool: reSharper. Without reSharper I can certainly see myself using VSCode full time.

Employers want people who know how to use the tools they use

I have not even tried to open our main solution file from VSCode and see if I can get any of our projects to build. But I would be absolutely thrilled if a new team member managed to do that.

I suspect the biggest showstopper would be our model-first approach when it comes to Entity Framework which probably dictates proprietary VS functionality (the model browser). Our newer solutions use code first and would fit like a glove with VSCode.

To snub a candidate because they use the wrong editor..? I'm more interested in someone who knows how to code.

'VPs shouldn't go publicly rogue'... XML co-author Tim Bray quits AWS after Amazon fires COVID-19 whistleblowers

Re: Who are the downvoters, in this comment thread

Not really sure why you're so anti-Koala preservation - did one bite you in the nuts on a nudist beach ?

I love koala bears, but I do not encourage pro-koala activism at my workplace. Nor do I mind swimming in the nude, but again: No activism at the workplace please.

According to the article he wanted to strong-arm his employer into taking "climate action". That has nothing to do with standing up for the little man. Just your average run-of-the-mill grandstanding.

Re: Who are the downvoters, in this comment thread

I did not put in any downvotes anywhere, but the article made Tim sound like a political agitator who just wants to stir up trouble.

Most of us hate Amazon for treating their workers like crap, but in this instance I felt Amazon did the right thing. Political activism has no place in the workplace. Bullying your co-workers into "action" is not nice.

"Our workers need to be paid a decent salary" - fine.

"Your company should save the koala bear and put an end to nude beaches everywhere" - not fine.

Square peg of modem won't fit into round hole of PC? I saw to it, bloke tells horrified mate

steal the keyboards

Well... These days, a good keyboard with high quality switches can be quite pricey...

Ride now, ride! Ride for ruin and the world's ending! Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord is here at last! Kind of

Beard

You can play as a woman too

But then the beard is out? No bearded lady?

Faster than reflection: Microsoft previews Source Generators for C#

Re: Many commonly used libraries [snip] also make heavy use of reflection

OBVIOUS performance differences between Win2k server and Win2k3 server on the SAME HARDWARE

I fail to see the relevance?

But presumably you ran Performance Monitor (a part of Windows since NT 3.1) and tracked down the culprit, so why do you not simply tell us what did what?

SQL

SQL does not lend itself to nicely structured code.

Even a simple select has its own set of problems.

You type "SELECT " in the query editor, press ctrl+space and... yeah... what exactly should intellisense show you? So you put in an asterisk * and press on with FROM myfancytable. Now intellisense has something to work with and you can go back and select field names. (I wonder how many people won't even bother at this point?)

Compare that with working with an ORM like EF. myresult = MyTable.Where(t=>t.<ctrl-space>... intellisense presents a nice list of fields, and you can crack on.

Then there is the whole type safety thing. I'm amused to see some people will always go for strings. WHERE Id = '1'. '1'? Really? Yes... :(

SQL is a primitive language that encourages bad habits. (Injection vulnerabilities, anyone?)

I was tempted to flame the rather crude debugger support, but msft solved that in the latest release of SSMS. They simply left out the debugger completely.

No. Do not be tempted to implement business logic using a QUERY language. Just say no. It is an absolute hell to maintain. Your future maintainers will eventually reimplement everything in a proper dev language anyway (assuming the application has a life-span of more than five years). And they will do this while investigating your current whereabouts and contemplate showing up at your door with a baseball bat and duct tape.

Microsoft! Please, put down the rebrandogun. No one else needs to get hurt... But it's too late for Visual Studio Online

Re: One problem with the lockdown

I suspect your glasses are just fine, and that somebody in Redmond is cursing autocorrect right now.

Move fast and break stuff, Windows Terminal style: Final update before release will nix your carefully crafted settings

Re: It's actually decent

Use ctrl+shift+v to perform a plain text paste if the formatted text is a bother.

Is this an ASP.NET Core I see before me? Where to next for Microsoft's confusing web framework...

Re: Web Forms needs to be moved forward onto .NET Core

Isn't that what .NET 5.0 is?

It moves everything into .net core so that, at least when targeting windows, you'll gain access to everything that was part of .NET 4.8.

Re: At its best, it is like magic

I'm not sure what you guys are referring to.

I remember the pre-EF and pre-SSDT days. Our team had way more support incidents with half-baked database schema updates and SQL injection bugs galore.

I welcome any tool that automates the boring bits that all too often goes haywire because in the end they are just boring.

And hey, when using commonly used tools, at least you aren't slugging at it alone. There is, as you point out, a good chance somebody have tripped over similar issues. Using home-brewed solutions: Zero chance.

French pensioner ejected from fighter jet after accidentally grabbing bang seat* handle

Re: Double ejection

he was at our base to lead an inquiry for a jet that lost it's canopy the previous week...

Two words: Duct tape.

Bose shouts down claims that it borked noise cancellation firmware to sell more headphones

Re: @EVP

My experience is that it isn't uncommon for users to lodge complaints shortly after an upgrade. Even for issues that are entirely user errors.

I believe users are more sensitive following an upgrade. Of course, in upgrades past there may have been real issues, so I guess we have done our part in training the users to expect problems.

Absolutely everyone loves video conferencing these days. Some perhaps a bit too much

they've just uploaded a mega-giga-pixel image

Well, I used to be anal about these things, but an avatar that starts out at 64 pixels will eventually look pixelated sooner or later. E.g. Plex running on a TV will show the avatar upscaled, forcing the user to increase the resolution quite a bit.

No excuses for polluting word docs though.

UK judge gives Google a choice: Either let SEO expert read your ranking algos or withdraw High Court evidence

Re: Hobson's choice

Presumably they would have to provide the data/software for the time of the 'crime' - or have they deleted evidence?

Where I work (a very small company) we have changed VCS at least twice since 2006. Only for the latest upgrade (from tfs to git) did we manage to retain the commit history.

Presumably google has more developers to throw at problems like this, so hopefully they actually still have this history intact.

In that case, I would have thought that a simple "this is our commit history for 2005-2006, feel free to look for the smoking gun" would have sufficed. And, since this is 14 year old source, it should not matter who gets to read it. (that goes both ways... find anyone proficient in the dev language google used at the time, and they should be able to make some heads and tails out of this)

That said, it would surprise me if they don't have some sort of blacklists. And that does not necessarily have to be part of the main source repository. It could easily be maintained by a different department. (if so, the code to read said blacklist would still be there)

Cisco rations VPNs for staff as strain of 100,000+ home workers hits its network

Re: Split Tunnelling

I've been told that split tunnelling offers more safety, since... I don't know what their reasoning was, because after I realized I lost contact with my internal network at home (meaning I have to switch to another computer to diagnose local network issues) I reformatted my work laptop and installed our old OpenVPN based VPN instead.

But other jerks in my past have also advocated disabling split tunnelling. Is there a best practices document somewhere that advocates this nonsense?

Exchange some currency you want to? Guess the BIOS setup keyboard combination first you must, young Padawan

Battery

Clock reset to 2017... CMOS battery?

Either way, nothing that can't be solved with ample application of the cattle prod.

Sharp gobbles NEC as Japan's display giants team up to take on Europe and North America

Synergies

This worries me since the article not once discussed synergies.

A merger without synergies or people talking about synergies is surely doomed to fail. Dooooomed I tells ya!

Asterix co-creator Albert Uderzo dies aged 92

The heroes from my childhood

My dad introduced me to Asterix when I was about eight. The gauls followed me through my childhood and stayed with me. One of the very first things I unpacked after moving to a new house three years ago was my Asterix collection (along with the Discworld and HHGTTG books obviously). And then I reread the whole collection of course.

Obelix' words often echo through my mind whenever I visit a country for the first time; "These Norwegians are crazy!".

Venit Vidit Vicit

Microsoft's Bill Gates defrag is finally virtually complete: Billionaire quits board to double down on philanthropy

Re: "Bill founded our company with a belief in the democratizing force of software"

That quote caught my eye as well.

He wanted to achieve that by introducing the world to gw-basic? Ok. The kid had ambitions back then, gotta give him that!

More likely he just wanted to code and get paid for it. Just like the rest of us.

You'll get your money – when this bank has upgraded Windows 7... or bought extended support

Re: I once had

I don't see the problem.

Just do like these guys did: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/oxfordshire/4781344.stm

Problem solved.

Open-source, cross-platform and people seem to like it: PowerShell 7 has landed

Re: Who are you and what have you done with Microsoft?

...and if you want to edit the odd powershell script, why not install https://github.com/microsoft/vscode which is... oh look, another opensource project courtesy of msft. :)

Another, albeit Windows-centric, interesting opensource project: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal It lets you host your powershell session(s) in style. I have mine set up with a shortcut to a ssh session that targets my NAS (OpenSSH now finally included with Win10).

Maersk prepares to lay off the Maidenhead staffers who rescued it from NotPetya super-pwnage

I would scribble the word "pr0n" on the usb stick.

Scottish biz raided, fined £500k for making 193 million automated calls

Re: Spoofing of phone numbers should be limited

Fine. Let them spoof their number, but make it a requirement that they spoof using a number they actually own.

If matching every outgoing phone call is too complicated to perform in real-time, then carry out random inspections on the most active call centers.

Their sacrifice will not be forgotten.

How many times do we have to tell you? A Tesla isn't a self-driving car, say investigators after Apple man's fatal crash

eye-tracking

How does that work when the driver is wearing sunglasses?

Google product boss cuffed on suspicion of murder after his Microsoft manager wife goes missing, woman's body found, during Hawaii trip

Conclusion: Don't marry a googler

Based on a _mountain_ of evidence, such as this story here: https://theregister.co.uk/2020/01/10/alphabet_drummond_quits/

...I think it is safe to conclude that young attractive women should not consort with anyone employed by google. They are much better off seeking out the warm embrace of bald middle-aged Norwegian dudes.

Because statistics.

OK, which Dombås stuffed Windows 10 to bursting at Swedish flatpack flinger?

Re: Wrong country

IKEA sometimes use Norwegian monikers. "STAVANGER" does not sound very Swedish to me.

"BORÖY" is another somewhat curious one. In Norway we use 'Ø' instead of 'Ö' (mostly a typographical difference but still). "Øy" is the Norwegian word for "ö" (island).

And good luck finding "BRIMNES" on a map of Sweden.

So the article author isn't wholly off-base here. DOMBÅS could easily make it as a future product name. (or might have been used in the past for all I know)

Re: Dombås

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Domb%C3%A5s

Re: "Relationship-ending"

AFAIK, it ain't the instructions.

It is the shopping experience itself.

If your local IKEA is heavily visited, you'll struggle from the moment you try to find a parking spot. Next you will be squeezing by perfect strangers, while YSO starts going on about "ooh, we need a new bookshelf" and "look! a three legged coffee table! Great idea!".

Basically it should trigger all your fight or flee instincts.

The actual assembly is bliss in comparison. (unless you accidentally forgot to buy all the components you needed)

I make sure to visit my local IKEA as early in the day as possible. I once managed to go there when the roads were almost closed to to a nasty snow blizzard. I got the entire parking lot all to myself. There was very little friction that day.

25 years of Delphi and no Oracle in sight: Not a Visual Basic killer but hard to kill

Delphi's form designer is the best designer I have ever used.

WinForms appears... I have nothing nice to say about WinForms. (simple test: Press TAB in any user interface that has more than a dozen input controls on it: If the tab order works as expected, then chances are that the thing was done in Delphi, not bloody WinForms)

WPF solves many issues (such as the large/small fonts scaling nonsense), but it is wonderfully complex. There is nothing "Rapid" about WPF. Productivity wise a total disaster (at least initially). The data binding is brilliant, but I'd be surprised if Delphi doesn't offer that as well by now. And if you don't follow a strict MVVM architecture you'll end up with that much more spaghetti.

Re: Still use Delphi

Yes, because they wait for run time to load all the bloat into memory and compile it

If you had bothered to check out the link I posted, you would have run across the following quote: "For a C# app to be self-contained, it needs to include the runtime and all the class libraries it uses. It’s a lot of stuff to fit into the 8 kB that we budget for!"

Eight kilobyte. Eight. Runtime included.

Delphi, at least the versions I used, had similar tricks. You either linked in everything, or shipped the vcl runtime package next to it.

But seriously: Does this matter to you? Do the size of the final executable impair your productivity as a developer in any way? My mobile phone, of the inexpensive variety, has 8 GB storage I think. At least until I plugged in that 256 GB SD card.

I owe a lot to Delphi, but some features ended up mattering less than I originally thought.

Re: Still use Delphi

Anders Hejlsberg's first project was Visual J++. C# 1.0 has similarities. It also has similarities to C/C++.

Since then, C# has evolved somewhat. The .NET framework evolved as well.

Would you judge your current development tool on the features it had 20-25 years ago?

but you need the correct .net runtime. A nightmare.

What do you base that assertion on?

For the past 11 years I have been working on an application that consists of a server part and a client part (and some separate web service parts). We have hundreds of customers. Each customer has several client installation. Nothing big, but enough deployments to confidently say: "No, there is no problem making sure the correct runtime is installed".

Worst case you supply a link to the latest .Net (preferably core...) runtime and ask punters to install that prior to installing your app. It isn't rocket science.

With regular .net, usually the latest OS service pack took care of that anyway.

When it comes to developing an application, deployment is a relatively small piece of the puzzle.

That said, these days the bigger customers seem more walled off than ever. Only web based applications seem to get through. The framework you used is not going to make any difference there (deployment-wise).

Thinking back to 2002-2005, Delphi's biggest problem was a complete failure on improving the language. It took forever to get started on generics support. 64-bit Delphi came years later. Unicode? No go.

One of Borland's developers told me that Delphi was considered a cash cow. Every time they released a new version, everybody would upgrade, and Borland's (or "Inprise") management could celebrate another budget met. Actual features came second. Keeping ahead of the competitors was not on the radar.

I am a little bitter. I think if more of us had spent time with other tools back then, Inprise would have been forced to improve the core product sooner.

I used to hate .NET as well. It was a misplaced anger. And it took me ages to realize that for most apps you cannot squeeze more performance out of your product using a slightly better compiler. You need to work on the core logic first. Heck, 99%+ of the time is spent waiting on a database query... The world's best compiler is not going to change that. At least not as far as the typical business application goes.

Re: Still use Delphi

C# executables are actually tiny.

Check out https://medium.com/@MStrehovsky/building-a-self-contained-game-in-c-under-8-kilobytes-74c3cf60ea04 for some inspiration.

Keep in mind that C# shares a common legacy with Delphi. Anders Hejlsberg (as the article points out) was instrumental designing both languages.

I "converted" to C# 11 years ago and never looked back. At that point I gained 64-bit support, unicode, generics, LINQ and (eventually) async. I was skeptical about the things you mentioned, but C# isn't slow, nor bloated.

I do miss the IN operator from time to time, but I can live without it.

Knocking out a windows service (or two) is horribly easy with C#.You have been missing out.

Tech can endure the most inhospitable environments: Space, underwater, down t'pit... even hairdressers

Re: fondling computers

Remember, many shopping centres have large screens that work like that.

...that are supposed to work like that. (FTFY!)

I've lost count of the number of times I have stabbed away on one of those things, without any response. Then as I return five minutes later the navigation finally kicks in and there is an avalanche of poking stacked up.

On a related note, at home I wall-mounted my TV so it is well out of reach of most kids.

Hear, hear: The first to invent idiot-cancelling headphones gets my cash

Re: Not a lot of people know this ..

Which is exactly why you should keep some free space in front of your car so you DON'T have to slam the brakes like everyone else.

That rather depends on the speed of the flow. If you're doing 50kph or less, the vast space between you and the car on front of you could perhaps comfortably fit another car. Which translates to less bandwidth. If everybody drives that way, you'll end up gridlocked sooner.

What I do is keep an eye on the brake lights further up the road. That way I've already slowed down by the time the car in front of me starts responding.

And I've moved out of the city, so that I'm rarely stuck in traffic these days.

Shouldn't Uber freeze app accounts to prevent spread of coronavirus by drivers and fares? Oh, OK, it already is

Yes! Let them...

...ride the bus instead.

The Foot of Cupid emits final burst of flatulence in honour of fallen Python Terry Jones

Re: Institute of comedy

Your youtube link led me to a longer interview with Palin: https://youtu.be/FKr9sZ8CNx4

Re: i'm more sad

I am not sure what to say that hasn't already been said. Also some of us might need a little time to digest this terrible news or are just busy re-watching all of Terry's great work.

Either way: RIP Terry.

Who honestly has a crown prince in their threat model? UN report officially fingers Saudi royal as Bezos hacker

Re: Hmm....

We don't think anyone would be stupid enough to use their own kit to transmit malicious content.

So the prince was obviously framed.

But nobody would be stupid enough to try to frame somebody by using somebody's equipment to transmit malicious content, so it is obviously not that either.

They think we aren't smart enough to realize that it must have been the prince in the first place.

Seriously though: Bezo is heading back to the mobile phone business. Pointing out a security flaw in the iPhone is his opening salvo. Expect new Saudi-safe Kindle phones in your favorite amazon store within the month. The product logo will be a keffiyeh with a red line running diagonally from bottom left to upper right inside a red circle. Possibly a cruise missile will figure somewhere inside the logo as well, but I'm told (_{by the}^little _{voice inside my head}) Bezo's team hasn't fully committed to it yet.

WebAssembly: Key to a high-performance web, or ideal for malware? Reg speaks to co-designer Andreas Rossberg

Re: WaSm = Unblockable auto-play video ads

If Wasm can not even access the DOM, how the heck is it supposed to be able to launch a video?

Time to burst out graphing: Get the Windows Insider experience... by taping a calculator to your monitor

Re: @boltar

I ran the google query you suggested, and tried to reproduce the first two bug reports (cannot type in search field + cannot paste). Both issues appear to have been resolved in the mean time afaict.

That said, I usually search for files using powershell. gci -recurse <search pattern> and then pipe it to select-string if I need to search for specific text inside the file(s). Part of the reason is file explorer used to (still does?) default to recursive searching, and it is just faster to specify that in the shell rather than click around the UI like some rabid hedgehog on speed.