Posts by Caspian Prince

Windows isn't an OS, it's a bad habit that wants to become an addiction

Re: I'e already said this

Linux for gaming *as well*. Works great (thanks Valve).

How to stay on Windows 10 instead of installing Linux

Re: Fantasy Linux

I have absolutely no idea. I just install every update that comes my way from the Software Update centre. And then one day it just refused to boot after one of those updates - I forget the exact failure but it was obscure enough that I couldn't actually find a solution on the interwebs.

I have had a lot of trouble with hanging as well - some kernels are not so well tested as they should be perhaps. And don't get me started on Nvidia driver failures.

Re: Fantasy Linux

Even Mint, the go-to replacement for WIndows, has been something of a huge pain in the arse for me, at one point breaking so thoroughly I had to reinstall it completely after a year in use. We have to be honest about it or it won't get fixed: it's difficult, still extremely fragile, and prone to total breakage. When you have to use a mobile phone to trawl Mint forums for obscure issues (on *very* mainstream hardware) because it can no longer boot, you know it's not quite all there yet for everyone.

AI datacenters want to go nuclear. Too bad they needed it yesterday

Re: Thorium?

Not to labour a point but I suspect that in a few thousand years' time that a field full of solar panels uncovered by archaeologists is unlikely to kill anyone unpleasantly.

If only there was some sort of safe solution

... to all that incredibly dangerous nuclear waste. Ah well I suppose the AI can figure out where to hide it.

Photoshop FOSS alternative GIMP wakes up from 7-year coma with version 3.0

Re: Still slightly awful to use

I've not managed to get it to run under Bottles yet. Plus, exactly how hard can it be to port it to Linux, as they're already maintaining a Mac version?

Still slightly awful to use

At the risk of enraging everyone who stands for the GIMP - and good on you, it's worth fighting for - I was rather hoping V3 would have addressed its chronically grim user interface finally. With at least two extraordinarily good competitors from which to crib from - Adobe, for all its sins, and Affinity Designer, a truly excellent piece of software - I had thought the people behind it might have taken a bit of reflection to heart, a bit of deep soul searching, perhaps asked some users of these (very much paid for) tools, why are you paying money to use these things when you could have the GIMP for free? And the reason is, because they are so infinitely nicer to use, that we'd rather give people money to keep making them better.

Well, in the case of Affinity anyway. Adobe can go fuNO CARRIER

GNOME 48 lands with performance boosts, new fonts, better accessibility

Re: Built-in Javascript engine?

It's a bit of a shame that Javascript has found itself in a desktop widget environment in a place where it literally doesn't need to be. Javascript has few redeeming features - in fact the only redeeming feature it has it that by a quirk of history it wound up being the defacto environment for remotely delivered code despite being demonstrably awful at anything nontrivial. Kill it with fire.

Oracle JDK 24 appears in rare alignment of version and feature count

Re: Memory safety

What are those consequences though? In the real world that is?

"We have no plans to reimplement the JVM in other languages or platforms" ... well, except that GraalVM has reimplemented the JVM in Java itself, of course.

Time to make C the COBOL of this century

I currently make my living rewriting ancient C code into Java code. Some of this C code is in control of things that can and would actually kill people in an extraordinarily messy way. It is possibly the worst codebase I have encountered in 40 years, and by happy chance, I don't think it's actually killed anyone yet.

The new code runs at approximately the same speed, not that anyone can tell because the difference between "insanely fast" and "slightly less insanely fast" is hard to perceive of course. What is most interesting though is that for every 1000 lines of C code or so, I can replace it with about 100 lines of Java code, and I now have the added benefits of being able to reason about what it's doing, write easy-to-run-and-maintain unit tests for it, and most importantly I don't have to worry about the enormous number of completely unchecked memory issues that existed in the old C code.

After clash over Rust in Linux, now Asahi lead quits distro, slams Linus' kernel leadership

I actually wrote those programs that everyone copied out that were in those magazines :|

'Maybe the problem is you' ... Linus Torvalds wades into Linux kernel Rust driver drama

if only AManFromMars could wade in with their salient points on the discussion....

Humans brought the heat. Earth says we pay the price

It bothers me that there is continued emphasis on its effects on "the poor"

...and to some extent, "the elderly/infirm/young/other helpless minority" because this leads the main perpetrators of the issue at large - ie. mostly everbody - thinks it's going to hurt someone else and so maybe, just maybe, they'll be all right Jack, and just carry on as they are, forgetting that they might one day also be old, or infirm, or have kids, or - shock horror - poor one day, because there's not an awful lot of need for software engineers when there's no civilisation left to need an internet for because all the poor people who used to work in the fields are now dead and, in fact, so are the fields.

Only 1 in 10 Oracle Java users want to stay with Big Red

Not fooling anyone

And that one guy in 10 always looked suspiciously like Larry, wearing a false nose & moustache and glasses, intoning, "I'd like to stay with Oracle!" in various different comedy accents.

Brits must prove their age on adult sites by July, says watchdog

Re: Age verification

Either you have never had kids, or you are so remarkably naive as to think your kids are angels who would never do such a thing.

How a good business deal made us underestimate BASIC

See Pico-8 for how to do it properly

Without line numbers. Also, Lua is the new BASIC, amirite?

The sweet Raspberry taste of success masks a missed opportunity

Never mind Linux!

...get Pico-8 on it, and rejoice in the joy you once had when you flicked the on-switch on your C64. Yes, really, it's that same hit.

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

Re: In mother Russia...

"In Soviet Russia, you didn't take advantage of TPM, etc"

Oracle's Java price hikes push CIOs to brew new licensing strategies

What sort of CIO exactly has sat on this for a all this time and done sweet FA about it? The move to OpenJDK should have been done a decade ago. There are *no* excuses. *No* reasons not to have done it. Don't come bullshitting about compliance or compatibility - because it is just that, bullshit. Do your goddammed jobs. Or perhaps, GTFO and let somebody who has a clue run the show instead.

Rust haters, unite! Fil-C aims to Make C Great Again

Re: Doesn't help

These are not actually memory leaks, they are object leaks. The difference is a memory leak just soaks away into nothing and becomes untraceable and leads to all sorts of bullshit like use-after-free etc., whereas an object leak is entirely traceable, and the only side effect is an OOME rather than undefined or hackable behaviour of use-after-free.

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

Re: The issue with rust

That would be Java or C# then.

Re: Why?

I don't know if it's Reg readers being deliberately ironic for shits and giggles but as if to hammer home the point, the post asking the question has received 10 downvotes and only 2 up as of the time of writing...

Epic Games starts Battle Royale with Samsung, Google over app store practices

Re: ‘Bout time someone bit back

While you're having fun poking at Tim Sweeney it should be made clear to you that Epic does *not* mandate that purchases are made through EGS - it is purely a convenience. And Epic have actively supported entirely novel mechanisms to manage purchases - eg. digital blockchain stuff (for better or worse - the point is it's not like Apple or Steam or Google where such things are *explicitly banned*)

Re: I said it before and I say it again...

Rather than just downvote this comment it's probably worth explaining why it's nonsense, and this from someone who has supported native Linux gaming for 25 years (as a creator) and exclusively runs a Linux rig now:

Epic have no real need to expand their market share by about 1%, which is the realistic maximum size of the Linux gaming market, at a cost to them that will most likely actually exceed any profits they might have made on that 1%.

The empire of C++ strikes back with Safe C++ blueprint

And it is extraordinarily *hard* to write pathologically nasty code in Java. The VM conveniently provides a sandbox to stop RAM overcommitment snafus, although unfortunately thread creation is still unbounded.

To toss petrol on the fire ... 90% of all the C++ code out there could be rewritten in a third of the time in Java or C# and be just as effective as it was before, but without the memory safety issues.

Google says replacing C/C++ in firmware with Rust is easy

Re: FALSE

You might want to actually look at the rates first before posting. Consistently 2/3rds of the rates for exactly the same skills used making ordinary boring application software. (Which is why I've stayed away from it ... I'd *like* to do it but I can't *afford* to)

That might have been the case 20 years ago but it is definitely not the case now and it still evolves into an ever more performance, ever more efficient, ever more expressive, and ever more concise platform. Where it succeeded is that it made more people happy more of the time than any other language before it, which is why it's now ubiquitous. Unfortunately this means it has also attracted the lion's share of mediocre programming talent as well, but hey, at least they can't write code containing use-after-free...

Re: Embedded? Don't think so

Unfortunately not, for reasons unknown, embedded programmers seem to be paid bugger all. The rates are abysmal.

How to maintain code for a century: Just add Rust

Easier?

I don't think even a seasoned Rust programming is going to tell you it's *easier* than C. Probably safer and more correct, yes. Easier, no. This is the primary impediment to Rust entering mainstream acceptance.

Speed limiters arrive for all new cars in the European Union

As usual the focus is on speed...

...when it is a factor in a very small minority of KSI accidents. But it is a very visible attribute of a moving vehicle, and easy to latch on to, and when it is a factor, it factors rather heavily into the outcome - despite the thing that speed is usually a secondary effect of the real cause of a KSI accident which here in the UK we describe as "DLAC".

We do have some of the safest roads in Europe for one reason or another, and most initiatives that focus on speed have an almost imperceptible effect on the KSI rate in the locations targeted. However, reading between the lines, it is well known that Plod use minor speeding infractions to drag drivers into driver education programmes and re-educate them post test, and this is proving highly effective. I should know, I have attended three over the last 20 years :P The standard of driving knowledge and attitude in the UK is shockingly poor but two things stand out: 1. that it is demonstrably worse nearly everywhere else in the world I've been and 2. motorcyclists are vastly better trained and skilled than car drivers.

YMMV.

Re: Good

There are *very* few circumstances in the UK where this would apply though, and in any case, there are *no* circumstances in which it is permissible to exceed the posted speed limit.

Fragile Agile development model is a symptom, not a source, of project failure

Re: History lessons

And, JIRA. The bane of any project that needs to deliver results.

Research finds electric cars are silent but violent for pedestrians

Re: Pedestrian here

Except that motorbikes make quite a nice sound. Each to their own.

Well, not my motorbike, because it's electric, and totally silent. I have to be extraordinarily careful around pedestrians.

Big Brother is coming to a workplace near you, and the privacy regulator wants a word

We will be monitoring your acti-

"Goodbye then."

From browser brat to backend boss: Will WASM win the web wars?

Re: Welcome back Java promise!!!

You are dead right - it actually did (and still does) deliver 100% on the promise. And 99.99% of all compiled Java code that you will find deployed out there right now *still runs without issue*, 20 years later, because of the extreme care with which the SDK has been evolved.

Forget the climate: Steep prices the biggest reason EV sales aren't higher

Re: Too expensive, too heavy, too range limited

That'll be the huge amount of money they made from selling oil and gas.

Those low-code tools devs love so much? They'll grow 20% in 2023, says Gartner

Code is only the bit in the middle of the job I do

Low code sounds all very useful until managers realise that the coding part is just the fiddly bit in the middle of what we do for a living as software developers. A significantly large proportion of our time is just understanding what the hell they actually want to something to do. Another rather significantly large proportion of time goes on making sure what got made actually does match up, in reality, with what they wanted it to do in the first place, as well as generally not exploding, falling over, producing strange results when there's an R in the month, etc.

C++ zooms past Java in programming popularity contest

Re: Java can’t go away, sadly

We use Java because it's bloody excellent at doing what we want it to do (making games). Haven't found another language that hits so many sweet spots yet, been looking for over 20 years. No, C# isn't any better.

Python 2 bows out after epic transition. And there was much applause because you've all moved to version 3, right? Uh, right?

Re: why python ?

Java is very much alive and well I think you'll find, particularly the JVM technology stack, but the language itself has been hugely rejuvenated. All greatly helped by Java mostly escaping the grasping tentacles of Oracle a few years back.

Re: Repeat Offenders?

Mind you... still using Java code I wrote 20 years ago. Unmodified.

That this AI can simulate universes in 30ms is not the scary part. It's that its creators don't know why it works so well

Obligatory HHT2TG quote

“And to this end they built themselves a stupendous super-computer which was so amazingly intelligent that even before its data banks had been connected up it had started from I think therefore I am and got as far as deducing the existence of rice pudding and income tax before anyone managed to turn it off.”

'Java 9, it did break some things,' Oracle bod admits to devs still clinging to version 8

The update was indeed quite painful from 8 (straight to 11 but all the problems that had to be faced were introduce in 9).

However it turns out that most of the issues were actually caused by Eclipse, which is just plain rubbish in its support of modules, and when it's not rubbish it's just broken. With Eclipse misbehaving at every turn, it made trying to figure out how the module system worked almost impossible. Other IDEs are apparently slightly better.

The module system though is rather hugely complex and overengineered for a lot of Java development. Java's biggest strength was that it was like developing with fluffy Fischer-Price gloves. Any idiot like me could do it, and I have been for 20 years. The upgrade to JDK11 was so difficult I felt like an idiot and couldn't get anything to work. No wonder everyone's sticking with Java 8.

The Java release train is moving faster, but will developers be derailed?

Re: Ugh, another Java bashing thread

Don't bother waiting for a coherent reply, it's obviously someone who doesn't use or understand Java. Same experience as you here: used it day in day out for 20 years, getting real work done, never had a single problem, ever. And I mean that.

ARM exec: Forget eight-core smartphone chips, just enjoy a SIX-PACK

I can quite easily use 4 cores flat out...

... when making games for said phones. Just saying.

Cas :)

Sticky Tahr-fy pudding: Ubuntu 14.04 slickest Linux desktop ever

Have they fixed the irritatingly shit window resizing borders?

Every time I've tried to use Ubuntu, I've been thwarted by the unnecessarily fiddly window edges which make it strangely incredibly difficult to resize windows.

Well, until recently anyway, when fortunately the Unity interface put me off going any further before I even bothered trying to resize any windows.

Plusnet shunts blame for dodgy DNS traffic onto customers' routers

Re: For me there is a basic question

The Thomson routers Plusnet provided were prone to simply seizing and needed rebooting about 2-3 times a day, due to a VOIP scanning issue; a probe for VOIP services would freeze the router.

I discovered this because I had to run up and down two flights of stairs every time it happened, several times a day.

I bought a Cisco router to replace it. Problem still occurred. Most vexed, I turned to Cisco support forums, and discovered the firmware the Cisco router came with suffered from exactly the same problem as the shitty consumer Thomson router.

The crucial difference was *the Cisco router could be patched*. And so all my troubles finished.

Facebook user locked out of account even with ID

Doesn't help to have an unusual name...

I was locked out of my Facebook account a year ago - apparently only "real people are allowed to have accounts on Facebook." I pointed out that I'd spent a fair amount of money advertising through them over the previous year and that though I may have a slightly unusual name it was reasonably obvious I was a real person. My account was reinstated a week later without much of an explanation as to why it was flagged in the first place.

Caspian Prince

Yes, really.

Top Ten Retro PC Games

As someone previously said, those games are just "old"

... these games are retro: www.puppygames.net

Shameless plug! But the register has wasted years of my life so I think they can share the love.

Cas :)

Microsoft's Silverlight 4 - more than Flash envy

Much nerd rage in here

I thought the days of childish Microsoft bashing were long gone as the nerderati have switched their attentions to the Fourth Reich (Apple)?

What's all this pointless Silverlight bashing from anonymous cowards who've never used it (and who also claim to have never installed Flash. Well I suppose it won't run on your Lynx browser anyway eh?)? It does what it says on the tin, it works, people can use it to make stuff. Go and rant somewhere else!

And to think I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Java developer, too, defending it.