Posts by P.B. Lecavalier

Google reveals new schedule for 'phasing out support for Chrome Apps across all operating systems'

Typical Web Development

Big change! Rewrite everything! In other words, the usual state of affair in that domain. I believe that web development is a leading bullshit job generator in the IT world (bullshit jobs: read this for a starter).

20 years ago, in web development, perl was a big thing. 10 years later perl was quite gone from web development. Now ruby is not looking so bright and it gets (along with python) tough competition from weirdos who believe in JavaScript as a server-side language. And that's just languages, don't get me started on frameworks, with a new one every five minutes. You start to learn a brand new one that seems to have a promising future? By the time you are becoming proficient, it's already deemed "old school, nobody should use that anymore" or got so many changes all of a sudden you need to relearn from scratch. Add to this so many organizations that reinvent their website for no reason, and is often a clear regression from before (harder to access information, though perhaps intentionally). Dilbert on this. It seems nobody is learning from amazon: A rare case of a website that certainly changed, but very slowly, incrementally, and usually with actual feature improvements that I agree with as a user. Pointless design changes? Can't recall any.

20 years ago, the top free GUI development frameworks were GTK and Qt. Today? GTK and Qt. How boring for PHBs! Of course those frameworks evolved, but much of the skillset remains valid.

Hey kids! Ditch that LCD and get ready for the retro CRT world of Windows Terminal

"/" in paths?

Am I the only one who noticed that paths have "/", rather than the usual M$ "\", like "C:\"?

This is not retro. This is futuristic!

Firefox 72: Floating videos, blocking fingerprints, and defeating notification pop-ups

Re: Creepy, Crappy and FF

Looking at desktop only, I think. Hold on... You are quite correct! How things have changed

Creepy, Crappy and FF

Recently I looked at some estimates of browser market share. To see M$ IE around 70% was quite a shock. Ok, it used to be much higher way back (in the period from Netscape 6 to M$ IE 6 SP1), but still so high?! Yeah I know, it's all about users who don't know and are quite content in their misery.

Now the choice is clear: You can go with creepy (Chrome), crappy (IE) or Firefox.

I learn here that the release schedule is going to 4-weeks. It looks like they are converging toward daily builds and abolish altogether the notion of a release version, following what's done in experimental channels. I've been using Firefox Nightly at home since 2012, with very little problem. It's a new browser everyday.

Stack Overflow makes peace with ousted moderator, wants to start New Year with 2020 vision on codes of conduct

Re: They

"we revoked privileges for one Stack Exchange moderator when they refused to abide..."

English is not my first language, yet it is very painful for me to read this!

Intel unveils Project Athena: Chipzilla tells lappy makers how to build their own kit

I smell desperation in this move. My HP laptop with a mere i3 is now in its 9th year of service, and I'm certainly not alone in that situation. This is so unlike machines from pre-2006 vintage. Took out the optical drive and put instead an SSD from day one, with Linux on that (for some reason Windows 7 on the HDD is very slow, but it's a non-issue). I can't think of a reason to change, other than being limited in games I can play. But I take this as an advantage, as I get to do other stuff with my time. Else, dosbox works fine!!

RIP Hyper-Threading? ChromeOS axes key Intel CPU feature over data-leak flaws – Microsoft, Apple suggest snub

Re: Sueballs ready ?

You raise an interesting question on Intel + systems "specifically purchased for"...

You see where that takes us? Does it affect... Itanium systems?!?!?!

Itanic strikes again!

Looking forward to revised price of refurbished Xeon workstations on ebay!

Re: What about AMD cpu's?

Well done, chimpzilla!

Japan's mission to mine Mars' moon is cleared – now they've filled out the right paperwork on alien world contamination

Re: Heck no, it shouldn't go!

> bad ship happens on Phobos! Where's my BFG-9000?

No BFG on Phobos, nor Deimos. Only introduced in Inferno episode.

> surely everyone knows it should be a super-shotgun.

Introduced in Doom II, therefore only available on Earth.

Pedantic icon for a reason!

Japan on track to start testing Alfa-X, fastest train in the world with top speed of 400kph

Re: Well....

Yep. Meanwhile in US and Canada the number of miles of operational high-speed train is the following: Zero (hey same thing in km too!!). Montréal--New York, by train? 10 hours. With a car or bus? less than 6 hours.

And we are told that we are "advanced" economies.

Why Qualcomm won – and why Tim Cook had to eat humble Apple pie

Re: 5G - beyond the hype

You beat me to it, was going to post the exact same question. Nobody is raising the question about what needs it fulfill or what "problem" it will solve. Unless 5G allows to have the same (and more) as 4G or LTE at a fraction of the cost (skeptical of that), I don't see any merit to it. Well, that's like the media buying the BS of Hyperloop, without doing any check whether this thing and Musk wild claims make any sense at all.

I heard stuff like "5G will make autonomous vehicles a possibility". Oh yeah?? Welcome to Newfoundland. What happens when you lose your network connection? Or "people want to stream on their phone!!!". Oh yeah?? In Canada, a medium-large data plan is a mighty 2 GB. With 5G, you get to enjoy a salty surprise by the end of the month.

Foldables herald the beginning of the end of the smartphone fetish

Small is Beautiful

Let's say that you have normal-sized pockets, normal sized-hands, and like to hold this device in just one hand. Also, you are not into the cloud Kool-Aid and want plenty of storage (say microSD). With decent specs, great lifespan. We are talking about 5 inches at most. It's getting hard to find that in Android land. Bigger is not better.

Human StarCraft II e-athletes crushed by neural net ace – DeepMind's AlphaStar

professional

I don't know which one is the most depressing. Is it that a machine beats humans, or that there are humans whose job is to be a "professional SC gamer"?

Wow, fancy that. Web ad giant Google to block ad-blockers in Chrome. For safety, apparently

Re: Google are cunts

You sir have summarized how to KonMari your browser: get rid of what does not bring joy.

Michael Howard: Embrace of open source is destroying 'artificial definitions' of legacy vendors

BS Ahead

"cloud native technology"

WHAT does that even mean? Does it work on a computer in the basement? Yes. In a data center? Yes. So, moving on?

"adaptive scalability"

That's like saying "strategic leadership". scalable == adaptive, no?

"professionalising people and technology"

I'm sorry... what?!?!

IBM's Red Hat gobble: Storage will be a test of Big Blue's commitment to open-source software

open source, default choice?

"Open source is the default choice for modern IT solutions."

The statement is true, if you pay attention to the word MODERN. Unfortunately, modern solutions are not so prevalent. Look at government. Look at just about any large organization that has been around for a while (long enough to be infiltrated by PHBs, dancing around in a macabre mockery of what that place used to be). Those are not using open source as they are far from being receptive to the concept "modern".

Remember MySQL?

>> In other words, IBM's proprietary storage software will still

>> effectively see Red Hat software as competition.

Remember when MySQL was the one database everyone was flocking to? What has Oracle done with it? Right. It doesn't make sense to support development of a lower (or zero) cost product eating into your high margin one.

Wi-Fi Alliance ditches 802.11 spec codes for consumer-friendly naming scheme

Let's Cook!

Your brain on Wifi 6:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FtNm9CgA6U

Microsoft: For God's sake, people, cut down on the meetings!

Office 365?

"[...] those who are fully bought into the Office 365 platform and ecosystem"

You know a place where everyone got M$ Office slapped on their computer? <yes>

You know a place where this Office 365 is used? I heard of this thing for years, and unless it's a buzzword, I've never dealt with someone using this. I have no idea what it looks like and what it does, but from what I hear, it's made for people who (once upon a time) thought that the Palm would revolutionize their productivity.

Freshly baked storage: Take a pinch of Intel Skylake silicon, some flash powder, sprinkle into IBM's FlashSystem

x86 really?

And I thought that IBM was completely out of the x86 business. Silly me.

Meet the Frenchman masterminding a Google-free Android

What about Replicant?

Not a single mention of Replicant in this article? Replicant is based on Android, minus the non-free components. And that's hardly new, though I never did anything with it other than know it exists (I've the feeling I'm not the only one!).

The main problem facing its use? Proprietary drivers, what else?! Phones and all SoC devices are very unlike the generic PC x86 boxes, with just about every necessary drivers for the latter already built in the Linux kernel.

Oh but wait even with Android, drivers are a massive problem. If there's a new version of Android, it seems the drivers need to be ported to it if the phone is to receive an upgrade (How hard is it to recompile sh*t? Is it all written in assembly for specific micro-architectures!?!?). On my computer, I don't need to get new drivers in order to receive... a new version of KDE or whatever I fancy. Conclusion: Android is a pitiful design.

Microsoft loves Linux so much its R Open install script rm'd /bin/sh

Re: Today's story...

The people who don't make mistakes are the people who don't get any work done.

That being said, that is not the fundamental issue here: The sheer stupidity or incompetence behind this code. It's not even about testing. It's how can someone even write that?!?! That's even worse than the "rm -r *" of Valve's Linux Steam a few years ago, because this time the target is very deliberate.

When you go on the web page of "Open R", you see a drawing of a monkey. Thank you. Now we know what MVP stands for! Most Valuable Primate!!

Re: EEE play

> R language is extended atm with incompatible M$-only features

I use R very much, and my first reaction to this article: WTF is that POS "Open R"??

The question is not what, but why? And the answer is simple. M$ brings forward their toxic commits to GNU R, which are rejected for very obvious reasons. Then they create their own thing. Relax, the abomination is contained.

By the way, I would like to thank M$ for aptly naming this creature of theirs.

Open R == open source

GNU R == free software

Even though the source of this "Open R" is out there, its sole purpose is to facilitate the integration of proprietary technologies.

Nadella tells worried GitHub devs: Judge us by our actions

Re: @Updraft102 - If GPL is that toxic

M$ can claim that they "love open source", and that is absolutely not reassuring.

open source != free software

By the way, does M$ still wage war of bogus patents?

Re: Opportunities

Also exactly this in Dilbert:

http://dilbert.com/strip/2009-09-24

Java-aaaargh! Google faces $9bn copyright bill after Oracle scores 'fair use' court appeal win

Re: Oracle has probably managed to kill Java also

But unlike those other projects, Java is the only one that has not been forked. Why? Simple. Nobody likes Java.* No sane person will produce code in Java unless you have a gun on your head. That gun could be an adequate compensation or just some PHB asking for "enterprise" stuff, whatever that means.

(*): People who know nothing outside of Java possibly love it. Many "computer science" programs are more like "Java science" programs.

Kill Java

Google spokesperson: "This type of ruling will make apps and online services more expensive for users. We are considering our options.”

Not unless you STOP MAKING STUFF WITH JAVA!

You GNOME it: Windows and Apple devs get a compelling reason to turn to Linux

Drinking the Koolaid?

Why would anyone rely on GTK3 when those behind it take weird decisions, such as removing menu icons and mnemonics? And why? Because... it is not cool enough for them? Because you don't have that on most phone apps, you should not have that on a "desktop app"? (app: crappy and embarrassing piece of software)

I heard over the years lots of rant against GTK3 and praise for Qt5 (because it seems it allows people to do what the f*** they want to do, without being judgemental).

10 years on, Amazon CTO reflects on DynamoDB launch

Re: A giant?

First time I ever heard of this Dynamo thing...

Dome, sweet dome: UAE mulls Martian city here on Earth ahead of Red Planet colonization

"wants to train a new generation of scientists and engineers"

From one of those countries where scientists consider woman as a mammal but can't say whether it is a human.

Manchester plod still running 1,500 Windows XP machines

RE:

And I'm sure that they will be keen to rewrite things heavily grounded in proprietary technologies like .NET, just to enforce a stronger enslavement.

RE: complex technical requirements

"complex technical requirements from a small number of externally provided highly specialised applications"

So I guess they are talking about stuff made with VB6 that does not work nicely past XP. Or would it be one of Pascal or COBOL? Let me guess, they "acquired" the license to use that software, but the provider ceased to exist ages ago.

Listen, in France, they developed GendBuntu to get the police to move from XP to Linux. How about they get in touch???

Farewell Cassini! NASA's Saturnian spacecraft waves goodbye for its Grand Finale

Solid Proof

If it dies, then we can deduce there is something hard enough in Saturn. It if does not die, it comes out at the other end, and we are very puzzled (or just blown back by the wind?). Would need to send additional vehicle to probe that!

What's your flava? Ooo, tell me what's your flava... of Ubuntu

Re: I must be missing something ...

I missed very much KDE 3.5, then finally accepted KDE 4, as it became more mature. Now I find KDE Plasma 5 too experimental (last time I tried: 10 months ago maybe) and I absolutely despise how it drank the FLAT Kool-Aid. It's about time to let KDE4 go (lxde-qt not quite ready), so I might as well return to KDE3 through Trinity.

It's official: Users navigate flat UI designs 22 per cent slower

RE: KDE

Which version of KDE are you talking about? Past disappointments with an early version of very unstable KDE 4? Or disappointments with _any_ version of KDE 5 (or whatever they call it)? KDE 5 is one example of a flat-inspired design, with hard to distinguish monochrome icons (extremely stupid), and countless idiotic decisions. For some "traditional" features, you must now use the thing called "Activity", which I never figured out (it's easier to compile your own kernel, really, that says it all). I managed to stay on KDE 4, for the time being.

Confused about KDE? Try GNOME 3! I gave it a try, and binned it relatively quickly. Eventually, the developers of GNOME decided that what makes a desktop UX as we commonly know it must be completely stripped from the gtk library, enforcing people to have a program looking like a phone app. Unsurprisingly, I heard that gtk does not have the following it used to have. There seems to be a convergence toward qt.

Insanity just about everywhere.

The future of Python: Concurrency devoured, Node.js next on menu

python and JS, apples and oranges

I don't understand that alleged competition between python and JavaScript. One has been designed as a general purpose language, the other is a web development creature. Whenever I hear about someone using JS outside of web development, that just sounds very, very wrong. Forget about perl, ruby and every other scripting language that have been developed. Let's just expand JS... because!

One thing the author of the article pointed quite correctly: the packaging system in python. It's a good one I believe, it works, but it is so complicated to penetrate for the simplest package! You got "source distributions" and "built distributions", you got "eggs" and "wheels"... And when you try to figure out what any one of those is and what you should use, what you face is one heap of techno babble. The book on python project development and packaging has yet to be written, probably because if it was written, it would amount to say "It's all one big work in progress".

Red Hat banishes Btrfs from RHEL

JFS!

My attitude toward BTRFS has long been: "This is very promising. We can use it now? It doesn't seem like it's a simple drop-in replacement for ext4... I'll wait for others to try this Kool-Aid." Seems like it does not taste so good after all.

In the mean time, I'm happy with JFS on my system. And will take the label odd-ball.

Dirty data, flogged cores: YES, Microsoft SQL Server R Services has its positives

Hard is a Good Thing

"For all the criticism of the R language – it's hard to understand, slow and a memory hog"

If you find R hard, then you need to spend some time with SAS, which consists of 4 or 5 languages patched together because individually, each of them is utterly inadequate to get you anywhere. Then whatever you do in R with 1 or 2 lines of code will take at least five times that in SAS, and forget about the concept of "package". R is made for smart people by smart people, and it better stay that way to keep Excel and VBA kids at bay.

The article mentions python as a great language (I agree, it is), but R's internal documentation is so much better than python. Why? Because it always features examples for simple things! Whenever I look into the standard library reference of python and look for a module that could be of some use, I have to look somewhere else to figure out how to do anything with it (i.e., ok, so this is some instance of a class, then what do we do with that?). Without Google, most people using python would have a really hard time (myself included). Without Google, for R, it would be an inconvenience, but I could still find my way around.

Should it be a "memory hog" on a server (never had any issue with it, but never run it on a production server either) is not surprising because it's development did not focus on making it a daemon.

Coming to the big screen: Sci-fi epic Dune – no wait, wait, wait, this one might be good

Re: Make something new

> > There comes a point where you've seen all future films before they are made.

Prescience! Given such oracular faculties, I see that the Bene Gesserit breeding agenda worked well for you.

Think Complex != Big Screen

To make a non-brainless and non-disappointing movie out of Dune is like making one out of K.S. Robinson's Red Mars, that is to say highly unlikely. Both books are complex in nature, where the plot is almost secondary to exploring the underlying narrative universe, interspersed with various essays from the authors.

I have come to believe that such works cannot be satisfactorily rendered by movies, period. Further, keep in mind that the vast majority of movies that came out in the last several years were targeted to teenagers and dimwit adults (and abundantly, if not exclusively featuring such like-minded characters). All this point to a massively dumbed down production. There could be some hope in terms of TV series (did not see the miniseries), as you can afford the luxury of character and plot development (that could explain why people with a brain moved away from the big screen market lately).

If you want to make a movie, why not create something **NEW**, tailored to be a movie?

Re: I am obviously alone in this.

> Ah, but that book was written after the film was produced.

No. Dune Messiah was published in the late 60s. You might be confounding this with the publication date of paperback reissue.

Re: I am obviously alone in this.

The treatment of the narrative in Lynch's movie is merely "ok" (and very disappointing if you read the book beforehand), but what saved it for me is the visual and audio, which are absolutely perfect. When I read the novel, I am pleased to see what was depicted in the movie. It seems accurate, and for things which are difficult to think of, the movie is an excellent companion.

The soundtrack gave the movie a uniquely mystique flavor, very palatable yet way different from say John Williams style. Remember who made it: Toto, a hip hop band. In fact, the story is that Lynch offered a recording of Symphony no.11 by Shostakovich to the young musician. "You liked it?" "Oh yes", he replied. "Good, I want something done in this style."

Weirding modules were a weird addition, but how can you depict Fremen to be so formidable warriors as to best Sardaukars in melee combat with little effort?

Another "not in the book" the cardiac plugs on Harkonnen subjects. It's not in the book, but it is cunningly fitting.

Five technologies you shouldn't bother looking out for in 2016

Dead on!

IoT: When it survives a cost-benefit analysis, we may reconsider. Wait. We can simplify that to a mere benefit analysis.

5G: That's exactly what I was wondering. So do we really have 4G now? Really?? It's like IPv6. It's been out for a while. A really long time. We are still waiting.

VR: I keep hearing that pr0n will make this a big business. You can hide whatever you were looking at by pressing alt-tab. Not so easy to conceal your dark helmet.

IT jobs sexy: I don't know of many jobs that are sexy. It's easy to be fooled by the "sexiness" of the end result of something (check out TV dramas on lawyers or physicians), not realizing that there is a lot of effort and a fair share of tedious work to do in order to get there. This applies to any serious job. So if your job is sexy, it must be a very easy one.

Donald Trump wants Bill Gates to 'close the Internet', Jeff Bezos to pay tax

Re: Solution: More free speech, not less.

This is interesting, and that's along the lines of what I did learn in history class.

So as we are talking about the economy of nazi Germany, what was the initial article about?

Donald Trump.

That's hilarious. Again.

Mozilla: Five... Four... Three... Two... One... Thunderbirds are – gone

She owes me a new BS-o-meter

"Today Thunderbird developers spend much of their time responding to changes made in core Mozilla systems and technologies. At the same time, build, Firefox, and platform engineers continue to pay a tax to support Thunderbird."

Excuse me, but there ceased to be a full-time developer working on Thunderbird since some time now. That "tax" must be pretty small. So their finances must be really in the gutter. What did they do with millions upon millions upon millions they received from their deal with Google?

The atrociously high stupidity of matching TB version with FF did not help. Mail clients are like databases: you don't want a new version every five minutes, and if there's a new version, there must be a valid reason to upgrade.

"I believe Thunderbird would thrive best by separating itself from reliance on Mozilla development systems and in some cases, Mozilla technology."

That is one gigantic confession of failure. Of course it's hard for Thunderbird to be "synchronized" with Firefox technologies, because just to figure out what's going on with those is in itself a full-time job. Let me reformulate this in another way:

"Thunderbird would thrive best by separating itself from reliance on" Netscape Communicator 4 technology.

Refined player: Fedora 23's workin' it like Monday morning

Re: Accident waiting to happen.

I'm puzzled that Google Drive gets mentioned as some praiseworthy feature. The dropbox client on Linux has always worked great for me for as long as I had dropbox (even before it could be used on Linux without a browser, better, even before Google Drive existed). At least Dropbox likes to have you think that they don't nose around your data.

Microsoft shelves 'suicidal' Android-on-Windows plan

Proceed!

M$ persists in its irrelevance in phone and tablets? No problem with that at all.

Old, not obsolete: IBM takes Linux mainframes back to the future

Nice

I got to say it: people at The Register working on the titles and "themed" pictures, you really make an awesome job!

Ubuntu 15.10: Wily Werewolf – not too hairy, not too scary

Click bait!

Subtitle of the story mentioned mir, which is a very interesting topic, but had nothing about this in it. As I don't use Ubuntu, I am very enthusiastic whenever they throw in new and rather experimental stuff (until it pisses of people sufficiently to revert back to Micros~1).

As much as I praise the move to a "fresh" X framework (Wayland, mir, whatever, bring em on), I am afraid that it will take forever. First, it has to be stable. That's the easy part, and we are not there yet. Then everything has to be ported, from what I understand, as it's not quite a drop-in replacement. What about the stuff that has gone unmaintained for a long time? Will be left behind. And so many will just stick to old X because... the new thing removes more than it adds.