Posts by SoulFireMage

Moving to Windows 11 is so easy! You just need to buy a PC that supports it!

Work PC fine. Home PC? Waste my hardware!

Why should I waste really good hardware that was top the line in 2019,for a purely arbitrary decision on their part? My home PC kit still runs the latest games, at 4k, at near the top of the graphical tree acceptably. Cpu and mono wise, the advancements, whilst benchmark able of course, are absolutely not worth burning money on still.

They're not getting a big surge because so many folks have good kid to high end hardware that is good for another five years and, like me, resent the idea that a purely arbitrary choice on their part means windows 11 refused to run on it. The start menu and task bar nonsense is icing on the cake.

Who on earth remove flexibility and features, and dares to call it an improvement?

'What's the point of me being in my office, just because they want to see me in the office?'

Mandates hahaha

Authoritarian crap is hopeless nonsense in this day and age.

It's obvious various roles could never be done remotely, or are difficult at best.

For the ones that can, treat staff like trusted people you are doing business with. Given that a company is relying on its collective staff to work in a manner that ultimately allows the company to thrive and profit, this should be self evident.

Oppressive mandate style leadership, well, isn't leadership, its mindless dogmatism and needs booting out.

Yes, sometimes you need to handle a difficult or struggling employee - this is a skill, and many managers don't have it. But what you don't do is treat everybody as if they're likely to misbehave and be unprofessional each day.

You treat them as if you take for granted that, where ever they work, they'll perform.

As for traps like working too many hours, or remote micro managing via spyware - the former should be within the employees grasp to change and the latter, like the authoritarian crap, needs booting out and throwing away.

It has no value even if it pretends to.

Windows 11 runs on fewer than 1 in 6 PCs

Unnecessary change

When I heard abiut it, it felt like an unnecessary pointless hassle that surely wasn't needed.

Couldn't they have just gradually updated Windows ten forever instead? I dislike the whole nonsense of big reinstalls and managed to skip it for a few years now.

My own plan is Windows 10 until I can't do what I want and need to do on it safely. But I definitely feel Microsoft should learn that actually the world isn't universally welcoming of regular OS reinstall upheaval and risks of bs changes that aren't useful.

Privacy watchdog urges companies drop emotional analysis AI software

Stupid buggers

Who are the stupid sods relying on this without a ton of solid evidence that it's worth using?

Most Metaverse business projects will be dead by 2025

Decade or two too early

The Zuck is easily a decade or two early. And that's being optimistic.

1. Graphics:

The vr cartoon verse certainly hasn't the fidelity of even middling flat screen games from the last decade. Just that alone is off putting. Never mind that many folks find current vr less than ideal (motion wise) for anything longer than half hour.

2. Headsets: weight, size and resolution - as the owner of a g2, I can see raw resolution and ability might be only a couple of generations out from ideal. However, I was a vr enthusiast and yet more than an hour using any vr, and I need to stop. It doesn't feel like something for extended, detailed and concentrated work.

3. Touch: to mean anything, we need to touch this world. Otherwise it stays very flat, boring and sterile. No matter how good looking, if we can't feel it, it won't have longevity. It differs from flatscreen games as they aren't asking you to immerse yourself into a replacement 3D world. Vr does.

4. Compute capacity: related to the point about graphics really. An ordinary bargain basement business pc will actually require, routinely, rtx 4090ti level gpu capacity to deliver 90fps with unreal engine 5 like detail on vr. I may be being optimistic.

The point is, hardware tight IT depts will buy won't be high end rigs. If this is to be mass business use, then very ordinary boxes need to be able to use it.

5. Use cases: outside of virtual design work (gravity sketch is lovely for example) and virtual tours, what is the business case that isn't covered by video and phone, email and slack and... Gasp... Live in person? FYI I wfh :P.

Hardware wise, we are about a decade early, maybe more for a good mass adoption of a great meta verse. And even there I'm being optimistic.

And ignoring security, privacy and safety issues.

I don't believe Zuck has this right and I'm a vr enthusiast and loved Snow Crash and other tales with those concepts in.

Replaced several times but still live and kicking: Windows Forms updated for .NET 6.0

Accurate

This is me.

They kill their darlings and its annoying and dispiriting. Even now I do not trust their commitment to Wpf because of all the strange noise around uwp and previously some weird mess they made with html.

Same goes for the Web stuff - still on asp Web forms as it's worked for a long time. I know there's better out there but my work isn't Web focussed so I ain't invested the hours to learn it.

Winforms solves business problems that earn my living :)

No - I challenge that, needs context

"It is not a good choice for a GUI application today, being Windows-only and a weak option even on Windows,"

That's bullshit without more context.

For developing custom applications used by one company with a limited user base yet complex business requirements, it's still ace. I can use a visual designer, I can code just on the back of the form, or I can use business classes and layers of architecture.

Where is the weakness here?

I did try Wpf but Microsoft wobbled, messed around and left me with the impression it was going away. It hasn't but when it takes a lot of time and effort to shift a project from one UI to another, why would I change if I think they're gonna chop and change.

I disagree with the whole "must throw away and jump on the latest thing" mindset. For businesses they need stuff to be stable, predictable and relatively easy to maintain.

Having constant new UI technology doesn't deliver that.

I like the idea that I may be working with a refined winforms technology in .Net 6. I'd loathe the idea of being told I must change to a different one, when for what we need, this works.

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

Closed minded and over cautious

That's how OpenAi, paradoxically named, is portrayed here. Sounds like a dead end with a promising technology.

Happy with your existing Windows 10 setup? Good, because Windows 11 could turn its nose up at your CPU

Foot meet bullet

Really?

How f'in stupid can they get?

They're meant to entice more users, not kick out and exclude a majority. Someone needs their heads looking at.

Encourage a mass ditching of either perfectly capable hardware OR a perfectly incapable new os. Either way, it's a dumb strategy.

And I'm a long term reasonably happy user of Windows ten.

Given over Microsoft, such draconian nonsense hasn't worked well before, why try it now?

Now Nvidia's monster GeForce RTX 3090 cards snaffled up by bots, scalpers – if only there had been a warning

Hope each scalper loses their business

Never had sympathy for predatory scalpers, of any kind. They're just parasites on any economy.

Of course, they would exist unless there were idiots dumb enough to let their impatience rule them and pay the stupid excessive prices too. So, both sides are wrong, and one lot are idiotic.

Don't feed the scalpers and they'll eventually have no business.

Not sure what people like nvidia can or even will do to prevent it as excess demand is good for them really.

I'd like one of these cards, but maybe the delay will give me time to see if their opposition has a better deal.

I'll wait till I can have one via next day delivery. Until then screw queues and scalpers. There are more important problems in everyone's lives, this is just a nice to have really.

I'm slightly ashamed I did have some impatience about it, because really in context, this is just buying another toy. Nothing more.

Coding: 'suitable for exceptionally dull weirdos'

Creativity, logic, critical thinking

I'm guessing Willard doesn't value these in children.

To learn to communicate your vision, clearly and correctly to a computer, in any programming language means learning all the above in a very concentrated focussed way. You've to argue your way through, foresee-logically- the future and account for problems.

In the process tapping into maths, linguistics and a variety of other skills. This is ignoring the possibility of team work in a complex project.

I'm guessing that for Willard, there aren't many industries and activities that would also benefit from this?

If I had kids, I want them coding just after they read or add up; not because they should be programmers, no more than readers become authors by default, but because the skills it teaches are becoming very necessary, very human and very useful outside the computer.

A fact that anyone with a bit more sense than this fellow quickly sees.

It's NOT an iPad - but that's FINE: I learned to LOVE Microsoft's Surface 2

No reason to swap from

Android or IPad.

These have single programs filling the screen, curated stores, all the usual restrictions but well done.

Only reason for mobile Windows, for me, is to code where I want or try to look cool in the pub..ok maybe not so much.

So real desktop apps not despot apps is what I prefer. As I'm biased towards freedom over security, at least on anything I'm willing to code for.