Posts by Das Schaf

To our total surprise, Apple makes adding alternative payment systems to apps 'painful, expensive, clunky'

Re: Oligopolies are hard to regulate

Don't forget the AARD code ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code

At least get your facts right. They were actively trying to prevent use of competing products with that little gem, as supported by docs that came out in the anti-trust case.

Completely agree with you on ribbon controls. A UI designer's dream, a developer's royal pain in the bum, and a users nightmare trying to find stuff that used to be neatly organised and customisable in a traditional menu structure. I hate them as a developer of desktop software, I hate them as a designer of automated testing programs, I hate them as a user.

Elvis may have left the building, but Windows remains very much on show

I refer my learned gentlemen to the Armageddon trilogy of books by Robert Rankin.

Rex Mundi, Elvis and Barry (the time travelling sprout) save the world from the anti-christ.

Great reading material, and the definitive biography of Elvis post-1977.

When you think of a unit of length, do you think of Antony Gormley's rusty anatomy?

Re: Wind speed

It did better than my back fence, which is currently lying around in at least three other gardens, to be collected once the snow clears.

84-year-old fined €250,000 for keeping Nazi war machines – including tank – in basement

Re: Most Brits have a fair idea of Germany before, during and after WW2.

So true about GCSEs. Having spent seven years teaching Maths in comprehensive schools during a break from IT, I have direct experience of this. I could complete a 90 minute Higher GCSE paper in approximately 7 to 10 minutes, achieving 100% every time. A 90 minute O' level paper might take 45 minutes, and I would be confident of getting 90% plus (a brief study of the curriculum that the papers were based on would have helped, but was not readily available thirty years after!). I used to give the O'level past papers to the brighter students who found GCSE Maths completely straightforward and uninspiring. At least with O' level you had to apply critical thinking. Now get off my lawn!!!

Four cold calling marketing firms fined almost £500k by ICO

I wonder, what is their recovery rate for the fines they have doled out in the past? If it's over 10% I'll be surprised.

(edit) Can't pay Information Commissioner's fine? No problem! Just liquidate your firm

Well paint me blue and call me Papa Smurf, it's 54% !!!

We regret to inform you the professor teaching your online course is already dead

Re: And get a better education...

In my experience, subject knowledge doesn't correlate very well with teaching ability.

In fact at undergraduate level it seemed to be a positive hindrance in many cases. I was taught 30 years ago at a Russell Group university by some incredibly talented researchers and professors, and learned almost everything from text books instead (not the assigned texts written by the teacher either!). When I later did a post graduate teaching degree, I realised how short-changed I had been by the standard of teaching in my first degree. There was the odd outlier, like the head of faculty professor who was the best teacher I think I've ever come across, but in general the teaching was quite poor regardless of the teacher's level in the academic hierarchy.

Corsair's K70 MK.2 does nothing a cheaper keyboard can't, but the steep price gets you top-notch components

Re: I Remember, and Love, the Old IBM Clickty Clack Keyboards

I have a UNICOMP copy of an IBM Model M. Great keyboard, I've had it about ten years now

Its great, but I prefer the Corsair keyboard I bought for my son a few years back. Can't remember the model number but it had Cherry Brown keys and they felt lovely!!!! Wish he would move back in so I can swipe it when he's not looking :-)

Mixed signals? Yes and no: Analog Devices snaps up rival Maxim Integrated for $20.9bn

Re: TI 99/4a

If I remember correctly my parents paid about £200 for my TI-99/4A, but the BBC cost about £400 so was out of the question. Dredging the past here so mistakes are likely !!!

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

Re: Alarmingly small?

I have similar data usage, approx half to one meg per day on mobile data. I think we are in the minority though.

Fairytale for 2019: GNOME to battle a patent troll in court

Re: I have said it before

Unfortunately that scheme disadvantages small patent holders against large corporation seeking to exploit their technology. The large corp can make billions infringing, then pay back thousands to the patent holder when they are held to account.

Don't make us pay compensation for employee data breach, Morrisons begs UK court

Re: English Idio.....

In my 50 years of speaking and listening to British English in various parts of the country, I have never heard the word Compo used in any other context but as an abbreviation for Compensation.

Amazon: Intel Meltdown patch will slow down your AWS EC2 server

Re: maybe it's time to re-consider server-side inefficiency

@Destroy All Monsters

Maybe he is performing dynamic memory allocation in C++11 using smart pointers, preferably unique_ptr<>, so that explicit calls to "free" are not required and object lifetime management is achieved. C++ isn't Java and the class designs may well be very different depending on idioms used e.g. PIMPL idiom is sometimes useful in C++ where binary compatibility between versions is a requirement, not applicable in a Java implementation.

You're designing an internet fridge. Should you go for fat HTML or a Qt-pie for your UI?

Re: Rip the Q key off their keyboards

Not a fan of Qt here.

Use it once and it starts to spreads its cancerous tendrils everywhere. Smart pointers which aren't (no exception guarantees and no unique_ptr implementation). You can't use proper STL smart pointers like unique_ptr<> because the Qt container classes require anything in them to have an accessible copy constructor (due to copy-on-write "optimisation"). Copy-on-write optimisation is an anti-pattern in multi-threaded environments, in fact the standard library string class is forbidden from being implemented using C-O-W. Guess what QString uses .....

Other GUI frameworks don't restrict your use of proper smart pointers and container classes, using optimisations which aren't in most circumstances.

If you keep your GUI code well separated from the rest of your system, using a MVC or similar architecture, using Qt in the View part is OK I suppose. Don't let it near any critical processing though!