Posts by NerryTutkins

WordPress.org denies service to WP Engine, potentially putting sites at risk

This just seems wrong

This seems like a shakedown. It seems to be targetted at a single hosting operator, which looks dubious.

I could understand if they announced a commercial service, made the terms clear, had a clear fee structure and then every host who wanted to access the .org resources would have to pay some kind of fee. But picking out a single successful operator looks more like it is manipulating the market for its own benefit (presumably because it offers pricy hosting services that this company competes directly with).

This is the problem with FOS... eventually projects either die through lack of resources, or they succeed in which case the owner has leverage to start extracting money from users.

The good approach might be a clear "premium" option or added services available from the start. The bad approach is to build a huge following then try to blackmail companies successfully exploiting your free software and if that fails, start to use your free project's heft to steer customers to your own competing services.

HPE CEO: 'Best interest of shareholders' to pursue $4B damages from Lynch estate

There is a big difference between criminal trials and civil litigation.

In criminal cases, the case must be proven "beyond reasonable doubt" (i.e. 99% certainty of guilt). In civil litigation, it is typically "on the balance of probabilities", i.e. above 50% certainty.

So being acquitted in a criminal trial, and then losing a civil claim for the same actions later is not unusual. OJ Simpson springs to mind. It does not suggest that the civil action is without merit, or the result flawed.

The premature accidental deaths of two key defendents at almost the same time looks bad, but almost certainly is a coincidence - the freak wind that hit the sailing boat would be impossible to predict or create,

Tesla that killed motorcyclist was in Full Self-Driving mode

Re: Lack of due care

The issue is self-driving cars. What is the point?

"Reduce the workload of the driver" - free up the driver to do what? You still have to sit in the driving seat. You still have to have hands on the wheel. You're still legally obliged to not fall asleep, or tug yourself off, or watch youtube or play with facebook on your phone. You have to sit there, and watch the car drive itself, and be ready to step in at a moment's notice to stop it driving off a cliff, or into the side of a truck, or skittling a motorcyclist.

The self-driving tech might be 99.9% reliable, but when the 0.1% can kill people, it's not enough.

This is being done completely the wrong way around. The driver should be driving the car, and the technology should watch them. Make the driver do what they should be doing anyway, pay attention. But add the technology as an extra safety feature that can intervene if the driver makes a mistake, is going to jump a red light, is about to change lane when a car is approaching, etc. This way, drivers don't rely on it. Think of ABS brakes. Nobody goes around slamming hard on their brakes as a matter of routine, relying on the ABS to slow them down without skidding. People brake just like they always did, but in the *rare* occasions when you slam your brakes on, the system kicking in might get you out of trouble.

Distracted drivers was a bad enough problem, especially in the US, since most drivers learn on an automatic where you can drive one handed thumbing through facebook, unlike in Europe where most drivers pass very intensive tests on manual cars that require two hands and full attention. But introducing even more technology that (despite the lame disclaimers and warnings) only assists distracted drivers to be even more distracted, is a recipe for disaster.

One day, machines will be able to drive cars better than any human. We'rere not there yet, and probably won't be for many years. Until then, these systems do nothing to improve safety, they simply enable lazy distracted people to be even more lazy and distracted.

And I haven't even got into the legal liability issue of whether the lazy distracted driver, or the company that sold them a product which positively encourages lazy distracted behaviour, is responsible.

In my opinion, this driver should be held accountable for the death his stupidity cause, and the company that enabled him via such dangerous technology should be fined heavily, and perhaps held criminally liable too.

Farewell .NET 7, support ends in May – we hardly knew you

Re: isn’t Microsoft moving to Rust ?

I am not sure Rust and .NET are oriented towards the same tasks.

.NET is widely used for web development, and Blazor (which sits on .NET) seems very much the future in terms of where Microsoft is going with that. I very much doubt any of that will end up using Rust.

Re: What was the point of releasing .NET 7

Microsoft has made it quite clear that odd numbered .NET releases will have relatively short term support, while even ones will be long term releases.

So this is a total non issue. Anyone who developed on .NET 7 would likely be in a team that is constantly developing and upgrading an active product and needed or wanted to integrate new features without waiting for .NET 8. And when .NET 8 came, it would probably have been simple to recompile to that (I found even .NET 6 code easily compiled without changes to .NET 8).

Anyone building something that wants long term support should use .NET 8 and stick with that even when .NET 9 comes out.

Is it really that hard to understand?

Europe's largest caravan club admits wide array of personal data potentially accessed

Most caravaners are into dogging anyway, so pretty sure privacy isn't top of their agenda.

Going green Hertz: Rental giant axes third of EV fleet over lack of demand

The problem with EVs for rentals....

Whenever I have rented a car, I've generally been doing significant mileage (else I'd just take an Uber), often in places I am not familiar with. The limited range of EVs, charging time and potential worries about finding charging mean they're less well suited to most rental cases. So it doesn't surprise me Hertz's decision to go big on EVs hasn't worked out.

I am not an EV hater, in fact, I am a happy EV owner. But at home, we generally don't do many long trips, we know where chargers are if we need them, and we generally charge at home where there is a cost saving. Most rentals are business trips, so the main advantage of cost savings isn't going to be a big factor if your company picks up the bill.

Microsoft .NET MAUI devs vent over bugs backlog, response times

Since Blazor WASM runs on pretty much any platform that supports a modern browser, is MAUI really required long term? Surely something web based, with well established standards is going to have a better future than something that seems like a hacky halfway house.

Tesla sues Swedish government after worker rebellion cripples car biz

British industry was primarily destroyed by bean counters. Sure, the unions probably didn't help. But other countries in Europe that had strong unions such as Germany seemed to keep a successful manufacturing sector.

I worked in Germany for a year in the 90s, for an engineering company (I am a mechanical engineer by degree, but drifted into software development) and the contrast with the UK was quite notable. In the UK, company management tended to be people in suits with voices getting posher the closer to the top you got. Very often they graduated in marketing or business, because of course engineers should stay in grubby workshops doing real work, not making management decisions. In germany, engineering companies were run by engineers.

While the UK car industry had accountants choosing components and making design and investment decisions based on £££, most german companies had more interest in the engineering. Working first hand in germany, I could see that the guys running the company (who were graduate engineers) did things properly because "this is the way things should be done, and we're competing on quality, not price".

Various foreign car companies seemed to have no problem being quite successful in the UK (at least prior to brexit), which was largely down to the way they were managed, not the unions or the workers.

Re: I am enjoying this dispute

This is absolutely true.

It's like financial advisers, stock traders and bankers. Let's say there are 5000 in the country. Even if we assume it's just pure chance how they perform, 500 will be in the top 10% in a year. The next year, 50 of those 500 will be in the top 10% again. In the third year, 5 of those will be in the top 10% again. Now this is just statistics, it could be more, or less. But based on probability, there will be a few in the top 10% for these three years.

Now the industry lauds them as gods, and they probably believe it themselves. One year would be luck, but three years in a row cannot be luck, surely? They must be special and have special skills. Their employers hike their salaries, bestow obscene bonuses and give them even more assets to manage, and freedom to take even more risks. And so when the inevitable happens the following year, it goes from being a manageable decline to being a massive, economy-threatening catastrophe because they've bet the farm on someone continuing to keep rolling sixes.

The amazing thing is that banks and the financial industry, which absolutely should have the mathematical background to understand very simple chance, get caught out again and again and again. They legally have to put "past performance does not guarantee future success, your funds are at risk" but never take it on board themselves.

Experienced Copilot help is hard to find, warns Microsoft MVP

Microsoft naming catastrophe... again

So there are two different things called Copilot.

Then there is Visual Studio, and Visual Studio Code, which are two different things.

Then there is .NET, and the legacy version which is now referred to as .NET Framework, which are two different things.

I heard Satya Nadella has two daughters and they're both called Susan.

Sorry Pat, but it's looking like Arm PCs are inevitable

Yes, the desktop market is mostly youths playing games.

I've seen them in banks, shops, design houses, architects, engineering companies, car showrooms, dental practices, hospital receptions and almost every office in every country. Youths, playing games.

It is 20 years since the last commercial flight of Concorde

Re: Treasures from a 1991 flight

It is indeed mind-boggling.

One of the common arguments by moon landing conspiricists is that technology doesn't disappear or go backwards, so the fact we cannot at present go to the moon (and have not since the 1970s) means it must have been faked.

Presumably the fact you could supposedly travel the atlantic at mach2 in the 1970s but now in the 2020s you cannot even do it at mach1 means they think concorde is actually CGI. And that your grandparents were in on the deception, like 10s of 1000s who worked on the moon landings.

Apple's iPhone 12 woes spread as Belgium, Germany, Netherlands weigh in

Re: "The timing is also unfortunate for the company ..."

There was no hysteria, the safety concerns with the AZ jab were well-founded, despite the UK's initial chest-thumping brexity attacks on the various EU health bodies that first raised concerns.

The UK also removed the AZ jab as an option for younger recipients, and then conducted all its booster campaigns with mRNA vaccines such as the Biontech/Pfizer jab. The UK essentially accepted the risks and moved to safer vaccines, though this caused delays in the UK vaccination programme. It may have had a better chance of getting more supplies of the Biontech jab, had it not selfishly acted to block AZ vaccine shipments to the EU early on via a preference contract, which later backfired spectacularly having burned all goodwill with the EU when it need their vaccine.

The AZ vaccine most definitely saved many more lives than it may have cost, because it was primarily given initially to the most at-risk groups, in particular the elderly. The UK rightly accepted (but tried to downplay) the safety risks of the AZ vaccine, in particular for younger recipients, and moved over to the Biontech jab primarily, which had proved safer overall once there was significant data available from mass vaccinations.

This is how science should work. It is sad that UK politicians in particular exploited vaccination as a political benefit of brexit, which made them reluctant to adjust strategy when the risks of the AZ vaccine emerged and also poisoned the well when it needed EU vaccines to complete its own programme.

Google's next big idea for browser security looks like another freedom grab to some

What about Selenium?

The claim that somehow verifying the browser is legit would stop bots or other automation from cheating on games or doing other nefarious deeds on an automated basis doesn't really stack up.

Selenium makes it relatively easy to build automation that can control chrome and firefox via an API, those would surely show up as legit, unmodded browsers. Although Selenium is oriented towards automated testing of web systems, I've worked on projects where clients needed to scrape data from various sites (with permission) that did not have APIs and tried to frustrate scraping by having javascript and fingerprints etc. and so needed real browsers to get at the data, rather than just calling the form targets and parsing the response. Selenium has been around for a long time too, and the browser makers specifically put support for it in, so they certainly know this too.

The proposal looks more like trying to crack down on all the webkit/blink clones to keep control of the market and stop smaller start-ups getting a slice. It solves a problem that I am not sure exists, with a solution that doesn't actually solve the problem.

Musk sues law firm for overcharging Twitter when Twitter was suing Musk

am i missing something

If I have a company expense card, and go out and spend 2000 quid on a slap up meal with wine at a fancy restaurant the day before I leave the company, and the company objects and considers this an abuse of what the card was intended for, they can't sue the restaurant for the money back. That's not how it works. They may have a case against me, depending on what guidance I had been given about the use of the card.

Even if we suppose that the bill was unjustified, twitter accepted it and paid it. So Musk should be going after the former management for abuse of company finances, not the law firm. I would imagine they have a fair amount of cash to hand, given the fact they gave Musk a bath he won't forget in forcing him to buy for 44 billion.

US Air Force AI drone 'killed operator, attacked comms towers in simulation'

iidiotic scaremongering

This simulation sounds like it was programmed by the work experience guy's younger brother.

If you create a reward system of points and then intervene to stop it scoring points, it seems entirely reasonable it decided to remove the communications and the operator if they are effectively reducing its score.

This doesn't illustrate a failure of AI as such, it illustrates a failure of those implementing it to put in basic controls and create appropriate rules for the AI to operate under. Quite obviously, it should be told the rules include not harming friendly troops or equipment, or that will score minus one million points for any such violations.

As with chatGPT, the special sauce is not the algorithm, it's the training and the prompt.

Dyson moans about state of UK science and tech, forgets to suck up his own mess

Re: With two-faced "friends" like Dyson, Britain doesn't need enemies

Me too, my skills now generate Eurozone GDP rather than go to fund massive royal wankfests in the UK.

Elon Musk yearns for AI devs to build 'anti-woke' rival ChatGPT bot

Re: Meaning of "woke"

It always amused me that Trumpy nuts in the US would hurl around "liberal" as an insult.

Trump was banging porn stars and boasting about grabbing pussies and they were just fine with it.

Trumper level artificial "intelligence"

Talk about setting a low bar.

Why ChatGPT should be considered a malevolent AI – and be destroyed

Re: You just don't understand what ChatGPT is...

I have used Chat GPT a lot.

I have had some very positive interactions with it, for example, code suggestions that didn't quite work, but approached things in a different way to what I'd been doing that subsequently achieved what I wanted.

But also completely false information, followed by another go and another go in which it then gave different false information.

But I would not dismiss it based on this. It is very early days, and it has mastered basic communication excellently. I am sure with suitable training data and rules in place, it would prove an excellent way to automatie simple customer inquires, for example. In time, it may become more reliable in more complex tasks.

We're somehow expecting it to be god-level intelligence when is perhaps the first generation of AI that can converse at a human level. A few years ago, if you'd built a machine that could have a conversation like this, pass the Turing test, and handle routine human interaction, it would be seen as an epoch-defining milestone.

Even if this AI is only at the level of dealing with counter duties at McDonalds or giving passenger advice at an airport, that is still a phenomenal achievement that will have massive implications for many jobs and society as a whole.

Re: GIGO

The only difference I found with being human is how easy it was to admit a mistake, apologize and accept whatever truth I told it. Even humans who accepted daft stuff without any evidence ("stolen election", "cat litter trays for schoolkids who identify as cats" etc.) are generally unwilling to be put right and will just double down on the unsubstantiated info.

I can see this interaction being used to poision AI too, just like Google bombing exploited Google search suggestions so when you type a name or company, it would make outrageous suggestions that would strongly imply very negative things.

same here

I am very impressed by ChatGPT and have genuinely got some useful information from it that allowed me to solve a coding problem.

However, I have just asked it about an open source project which I am lead developer on. I asked it who the leader developer was.

First, it gave me a name I have never heard of. So I said I had never heard of that person, and they were not the lead.

It apologized, then gave me another name I have never heard of. I told it again, I have no idea who this person is, and they are not lead developer on this project.

So it apologized again and gave me a third name I have never heard of. This time, I corrected it, told it that I have never heard of that person, and the lead developer was me. It said thank you and that this would help to have correct information in the future.

The project is mainly developed through my company, but it never mentioned the company name, nor figured out that as a director of that company listed in publicly acessible records at Companies House, I might be lead developer.

Chat GPT is impressive in its ability to talk like a human, but it is worrying how willing it is to spout utter bullshit with apparent conviction and then so easily correct itself and accept whatever information you give to it. If this is how it works, it is never going to be a reliable source of information, though it may still have utility in making suggestions on coding for humans to test, or doing basic customer service interaction based on a very limited set of training data.

Japanese balloon startup wants to 'democratize space' – with $180,000 ticket price

Re: Progress

According to the flat earth community ("do your own research"), the moon landings were faked because it's not possible for humans to get to space, let alone the moon. They frequently cite the lack of present tech to take people to the moon as evidence ("we're supposed to believe they could travel to the moon in the 60s, but 50+ years later, we no longer can").

I like to point out to them that Concorde therefore must be fake. Because supposedly in the 1980s, you could fly across the Atlantic at Mach 2, but now in the 2020s, you cannot even do it at Mach 1.

Microsoft begs you not to ditch Edge on Google's own Chrome download page

Re: You install Chrome?

"Yes. Because it's what 90% of my users are familiar with And what 90% of their websites integrate with."

This sounds very much like the rational given in the late 90s and 2000s for using Internet Explorer.

And since web standards weren't really a thing back then like they are now, it was probably a more compelling argument back then.

OpenAI's ChatGPT is a morally corrupting influence

I've also formed very similar views on testing it a few times with quite diverse questions ranging from immigration law where I live (my wife is a lawyer here and was impressed at its answers), to programming issues.

It is really astoundingly good at situations where you are after facts or curated information, rather than opinions (which is what the moral questions really are).

If you want information, Google can give you simple things directly, but for more complex things, it just presents a list of web site links where the information might reside, and you have to view those pages and find it. What ChatGPT does really well is give you the information directly.

It is not perfect. I asked it whether it could contact law enforcement if a user confessed to it they'd committed a serious crime, as well as telling me it could not, it also recommended calling 911 if I was aware of a serious crime, although the emergency number is 112 here. Clearly with many questions, the answer will depend very much on where you live, and I was surprised it did not identify which country users are in from an IP address in order to tailor things accordingly.

But none of this takes away from how phenomenal it is and I am sure it will improve greatly with time.

Surely you can't be serious: Airbus close to landing fully automated passenger jets

Re: reducing the crew cost of operating the plane

Most modern fighters are inherently unstable and can only be flown thanks to fly-by-wire. Machines have reactions and response times no human can match. I am pretty sure that suitable automation could handle crosswinds and wind shear way better than any human pilot could, if equipped with the right sensors and programming.

Re: reducing the crew cost of operating the plane

Do real pilots deal with them? How?

I am pretty sure that however it is that real pilots deal with them (e.g. height drops quickly) could be dealt with by automation too.

Tesla driver blames full-self-driving software for eight-car Thanksgiving Day pile up

Re: Hmmmmmmm

Full self driving is a total nonsense. You're supposed to sit there doing nothing, but watch the car, ready to step in and avoid an accident, if it misfires in some way. What is the point of FSD, if you just free yourself up to have to watch the car driving? You might just as well drive!

Clearly, the people driving these things are watching movies, fiddling with their phones, etc. like they probably did before, but feeling way safer because the car is "driving" for them. Until it isn't.

If they cared about safety, teach people to drive properly (driver ed in the US is a joke), start people with manual transmissions like in Europe so you have to learn to drive properly and don't have a hand free to text etc. make driving tests difficult so driving as a skill is valued and respected.

Then have the hi tech in the car watching the human and stepping in in case of emergency and not the other way around. Because robots don't get bored, they're able to step in at a moment's notice, if humans aren't engaged in driving, there is no way they will be fast enough to intervene in the likely event the car messes up.

Electric cars are great, but FSD is pointless until we can really trust it. All the while the driver is supposed to be there paying attention, it frees himr/her up to do what?

Elon Musk starts poll with one question: Should I step down as head of Twitter?

Re: Dubious governance/process?

You'd think Twitter could set up a special account to run votes on major corporate policy decisions, or build a feature into the site where all users are presented with such polls to ensure the widest possible participation.

Because the vast majority of people following Musk are unhinged trump nuts and general fanboys, so it's not really an appropriate channel to post such votes if he genuinely wants to have representative views, and I am sure he's smart enough to realize that.

Musk roundly booed on-stage at Dave Chappelle gig

Re: Maybe

Cars have always been an aspirational item where brand image is important. I would guess Musk having turned Teslas into $50k MAGA hats will have an impact on sales. The core Tesla buyer thus far has tended to be younger, professional, wealthy, educated to at least degree level and having concern about the environment. Musk's vocal disparaging of this core demographic has strong Gerald Ratner overtones.

Musk may have the Trumpers on board, but poorly educated poor people living in trailers who reject climate science, positively embrace pollution as a patriotic duty are going to be a tough group to sell EVs to.

Maybe if he was making pillows for old people with bad backs, he'd be on safer ground.

Re: " Maybe it's just that he's not as popular as he thinks he is."

However, It is now perfectly legal and not actionable to refer to Musk himself as a "pedo", because it is actually just a general insult and not in anyway suggestive that Musk has an unhealthy interest in children.

Musk says spat with Apple over App Store ejection threat for Twitter was 'misunderstanding'

pedo

Let's not forget that thanks to Musk's antics in court, and his enthusiasm for free speech, we can quite legally say Elon Musk is a pedo boy, and not get sued.

Apple is perfectly entitled to set the rules for what kind of content is acceptable on its app store. Musk is rather pathetic in the way he marshals his fanboys to join in attacking whoever he decides is thwarting his right-wing agenda.

Has anyone noticed the same people who call Musk "Elon" and claim to be free speech absolutists are also absolutely sure that bakeries should be able to refuse to put gay stuff on cakes for same sex weddings and footballers shouldn't take a knee or wear rainbow armbands.

There is absolutely nothing morally no legally that requires Apple to carry right wing hate speech, or Musk's childish ramblings. Similarly, there should be nothing stopping a bakery refusing to ice a cake if it doesn't want to.

Twitter sues Musk: He can't just 'change his mind, trash the company, walk away'

pedo* guy is at it again

*pedo being simply a miscellaneous insult completely unconnected with assertions of paedophilia, as legally established by Musk in a prior legal action

Musk really is a collossal pedo.

Microsoft pulls Windows 10/11 installation websites in Russia

Re: Oh Look, a recently created pro-Russian troll account.

I am rather surprised his name is not Ombomby Jesus Mbekellili from Nigeria, given his expertise in Russian affairs. All the experts on international affairs and economics these days are from Africa, don't you know. Every western news site now has hordes of Africans in the comments helping us Europeans to understand complex matters that we might otherwise struggle to appreciate.

Re: I resisted for all of 20 seconds

There is very little, apart from oil and gas, that we really need from Russia. We might struggle for a couple of years, we'll probably have to burn coal here in Europe again, and keep nuclear stations running. There will also be an even bigger incentive to move to renewable energy. It's much quicker to deploy solar panels at domestic and commercial level, and generate power close to where it is needed, and where no planning permission is required.

Russia might cause some economic pain to western Europe for a year or two. But it is a drop in the ocean compared to the pain they're going to experience. They will try to source from China where possible, but Taiwan, Korea, Japan are all on side with sanctions, as is the US, Canada and western Europe. They will simply not be able to get a lot of the electronics they need, as well as a lot of sophisticated machinery. Parts for aircraft and cars are already a problem there.

Fossil fuels was already a doomed industry, with perhaps a couple of decades left at most in developed countries. Russia has just moved that timescale forward, it is destroying its own market. The africans and indians might still be buying fossil fuels in 20 years time, but the market will be more than oversupplied, and the Russians and the head choppers will be competing to drop prices to silly levels.

The Russian economy is smaller than Italy. There is no way they win a trade war with the west. They might be able to keep making something approximating a big mac, but they ain't going to figure out how to make complex machine tools, semi-conductors, etc. and certainly not in the next few months.

They can probably survive, but they'll be effectively back where the soviet union was in the 1980s, with backward technology, a planned economy, restrictions on freedom and travel and fighting a war they simply cannot afford.

Cookie consent crumbles under fresh UK data law proposals

Re: Straightforward solution

Much as I agree, I think the whole cookie popup thing is a disaster. It should never have been that each individual site is responsible for deciding the wording and interface for opting in and out of cookies, and writing all the code to manage it.

Instead, there should be clearly designated types of cookies (essential, third party, tracking, etc.) as web standards, each site then only need designate when creating a cookie what type it is. The interface to opt in or out, or select what to do with each type of cookie would be built into the browser itself.

Of course this would only apply to browsers created going forward, but at least users would get a consistent interface regardless of site, because lets face it, it's a shit show now where every site you visit gives you options in different parts of the screen, in different colours and fonts, with different wording and options.

Furthermore, it makes far more sense to push the workload for implementing this to browser makers, of which there are very few, than instead expecting every web site on the internet to create their own custom code to manage this, or have to install some plugin or other code. This way, each site only needs to add an attribute to each cookie designating what type it is, and the browser takes care of presenting the choice to the user and accepting/rejecting cookies.

Electric Vehicle DC charging tripped by a wireless hack

The cables lock in place when the charging starts. On my car (VW ID4) you need to click the keyfob to unlock the car to release it, even if the car is unlocked already.

Similar happens at the other end if you are using a cable to connect to a lower output public charger, such as those outside supermarkets.

Typically you don't need to stay with the car while charging, you have an app on your phone so you can see the status. Therefore you want to make sure that someone else cannot stop your charging by unplugging you, or steal your cable.

Russia acknowledges sanctions could hurt its tech companies

With the Russians grinding to a halt, a shit ton of supplies (food, water, medicines, and of course weapons) will have been sent in to Kyiv and other cities which are not yet cut off. Even if Russia pummels the cities from the air, they can never hold the rural areas - it's a vast country. The west will continue shipping Ukraine the latest infantry weapons, including anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons and the west is not going to run out of money. They will also be supplying intel from air and satellites.

This war is absolutely unwinnable for Russia. There is no prospect, even if Kyiv falls, that the highly motivated Ukranians in the rest of the country won't have some kind of centralized command, even if it is run from inside NATO territory.

If the Russians have not accepted defeat yet, they better start looking for what the best they can get from any peace deal is. Because the longer they go on, the worse their position looks.

US imposes sanctions as Russia invades Ukraine

Re: A quiet word in China's ear is needed

Here in the UK, the largest donors to the Tory party are Russian which means any sanctions we propose will be immediately bogged down in distinguishing "good russian money" from "bad russian money"

I predict that a hefty donation to the Tory party will be the major qualifying factor as to whether ones money is regarded as good or bad.

left him too long

Putin's rise from authoritarian yearning for the glory years of the Soviet union to full on threat to world peace surely cannot be a surprise when one looks at Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea, as well as his goons going out to poison critics while on a brief holiday to Salisbury to see the cathedral. The west didn't do enough about him, and now we're sitting on the precipice of WW3. The warning bells should have been ringing the moment Putin served two presidential terms, then did a stint as PM while having a lackey hold the president's job. It was clear this was a guy who had set himself up as dictator for life, irrespective of whatever the constitution might say.

You could see from the ghoulish public performance with his lackeys being called up one by one to endorse his attack on Ukraine that they are terrified of him, and of what he is likely to unleash. It's clear that there are a lot of people around him who were doing very well, and this war serves no purpose for them. Ditto the russian billionaires around the world who will now find their activities curtailed and some of their money frozen.

Rather than all out war, the focus needs to be on doing what Putin has done to the west back to them - weaponizing a portion of the population with anger and distrust, filling their minds with conspiracy theories and turning them against their own countries. And making sure those around him start to consider whether their fear of him, when they surely outnumber him, is worse than their fear of what he might lead them into if they let him get away with this attack.

Google's Chrome OS Flex could revive old PCs, Macs

Re: Hot Garbage

Because of this change, now there are good solid reasons for Windows-centric businesses to consider ChromeOS, which can be legally deployed across an estate of computers, for zero licence cost. That's significant.

As with business gmail, it'll only be free for some time, even if there are no plans to charge now.

If it turns out to be a success, they will in time charge, and it will be even harder to move away than it is from an email service.

Worse, if it is not a success, at some point they'll give you 6 months to move your shit before they nuke it, as is the Google way.

UK science stuck in 'holding pattern' on EU funding by Brexit, says minister

Horizon programme

Apparently the UK replacement waiting in the wings is called the "End of Nose Programme", reflected the readjustment in scope and ambition of Brexit Britain.

Re: Brexit got done

The UK could have had a single market deal of its own. That was always on the table from the EU side. I would mean no NI border issue, so no NI protocol. It would also have avoided customs checks between the UK and France, avoiding the motorway queues of trucks we have now, plus all the time-consuming paperwork.

The UK would not accept the single market principles, in particular freedom of movement, so would neither have joined EFTA nor accepted a single market deal. That was why the promised cake did not materialize. Because the UK government decided that "leave" had made a bunch of promises, but as "remain" said, they could not have single market access and end EU immigration as they claimed. They chose to pander to the anti-immigrant right, rather than the pro-business centre, and the rest is history.

In 5 or 10 years, once it is clear that Brexit cannot be made to work, and that the growth and trade friction cannot be offset by trade deals outside of the EU, the UK will eventually sign a single market deal, and be bound by the rules. There is no other reasonable choice from an economic standpoint, and the benefit after several years of trade disruption will be an easy win for whichever party eats humble pie and admits that the UK needs the EU more than the EU needs the UK.

UK government responds to post-Brexit concerns and of course it's all the fault of those pesky EU negotiators

Pick n choose

I love the way the brexitters can argue about what they should be entitled to because it's in the brexit agreement without a hint of irony, While at the same time insisting that if the EU doesn't agree to rewrite the Northern Ireland agreement to their liking, they don't have to follow it, and are already unilaterally ignoring bits of it and extending implementation dates.

I suppose when you hold all the cards you can do this kind of thing? Though curiously despite holding all the cards last time, Johnson and Frost signed an agreement they both say now is intolerably damaging to the UK only a few months later.

Those EU guys must be pissing themselves laughing at the UK for electing these clowns.

Microsoft's do-it-all IDE Visual Studio 2022 came out late last year. How good is it really?

Re: The Microsoft naming department

I am old enough to remember when ASP.NET first came out and was called ASP+, and I swear the web.config file was originally called config.web. Which made no sense, when the filetype was really a config file, and it seemed likely you may have config files relating to other things in the future. Some of these significant changes seem to be made very late in the day, often after the RTM. They don't seemed to have learned these lessons.

I did think the blue theme didn't look very blue, but I am a bit colour blind, so assume that was my problem not theirs.

Re: The Microsoft naming department

We also have a huge legacy codebase on webforms, and I think it's a mistake for them to dump it. At the very least, they should open-source it so others can try to implement it in .NET (the new one, not the old one).

The irony is that most of the hate for webforms stems from the view that it's a layer of abstraction between the code and the resulting HTML, which is a bad thing, reduces performance, etc. even if it makes coding easier. And yet, you are now virtually pushed towards EF, which is an abstraction layer between the application and the database which supposedly makes coding easier, but is 5-10 times slower. Considering that online apps are nearly always database limited when it comes to performance, this seems a curious paradox. You make the application code a bit harder to write, but cleaner and faster, but then do the exact opposite with the database.

We've dabbled with server side Blazor, but it doesn't seem anywhere as well supported as webforms and still feels like it's a trial being chucked out there to see if it sticks rather than a well-considered replacement for webforms.

The Microsoft naming department

Really bugs me how Microsoft cannot seem to figure out the confusing they often cause naming things so badly.

ASP and then ASP.NET didn't help, but then ASP.NET Core, and then deciding to have the new 5+ version called simply .NET and now calling the old stuff .NET Framework just adds to the confusion.

They've managed to do a similar thing with Blazor, so we have Blazor web assembly and Blazor server, being client or server side.

Then Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code, which are really entirely different things that do broadly the same thing.

At the very least it makes Bing-ing for things confusing, because you invariably end up finding information about something entirely different to what you're actually after.

Microsoft is big enough that it really shouldn't need to leverage established names for new products, Visual Studio Code would surely have stood on its own without name-checking its older brother.