Posts by Peter D

Another redesign on the cards for iPhone as EU rules call for removable batteries

Re: single use vape things

I smoked for 35 years and I tried gum, patches, inhalator, nasal spray and hypnotism. I failed every time. I started vaping 10 years (not single use) and 3 days later I smoked my last cigarette.

Cisco: Don't use 'blind spot' – and do use 'feed two birds with one scone'

It's subversion

All this woke bullshit exists to undermine society. Whackadoodle lefties creating Wronspeak so they can beat people over the head for committing the latest heresy.

Intel offers Irish staff a three-month break from being paid

Re: Are they allowed pursue other paid employment during that time?

Unemployment is even lower in the UK. It makes you wonder how Spain, Italy and Spain can be so different.

Temporary layoffs aren’t a new thing.

Former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes sentenced to 11 years in prison

Re: Those eyes

I was in not any small measure not taking the piss. Not any shark I might encounter taking a swim would have deader eyes than this woman and that drone of a voice would lead anyone to despair.

Re: "His sentencing is scheduled for December 7, 2022"

Good god, how can it take so long to lock someone up in America? In the UK you go to prison straight after sentencing.

Those eyes

It's so strange to see her being sentenced to that amount of time. With her tender lilting voice and kind eyes she exuded such warmth, compassion and love. Witnessing the downfall of such a beautiful soul who only ever wanted to give succour to the sick is a bitter pill to swallow.

India follows EU's example in requiring USB-C charging for smart devices

Does anyone remember

when Bill Gates said 640k of RAM was more than enough for any computer application?

US Supreme Court asked if cops can plant spy cams around homes

Stakeout

Isn't this just a stakeout with a twist of modernity but without the doughnuts and peeing into bottles?

Swiss bankers warn: Three quarters of retail Bitcoin investors are in the red

Stupid is as stupid fors

Shill 1: In these uncertain economic times it can be difficult to make decent returns which is why a broadening of your portfolio can really help.

Shill 2: What do you recommend?

Shill 1: For me the answer was crypto. I don't work anymore because for my $750 investment I am getting an $11,500 a week return.

Shill 3: Same. I use Crown Prince [redacted] who is authorised by The Nigerian Central Bank.

Shill 4: I do, too and his fees are so low...

On and on it goes.

Softbank boss Masayoshi Son devotes himself to growing Arm for the next few years

What he should have said

"6 years ago we bought the most important chip designer on the planet for fuck knows how many billions and it makes fuck all profit and every time we try to sell the fucking thing we end up fucked. Fuck." Of course, he's too polite.

Founder of zero-emissions truck venture Nikola found guilty of $1b fraud

Re: Slow justice for obvious fraud.

The startling thing about this case was that it was so obviously a case of fraud. Quite frankly, I’m surprised it was possible to mount a defence.

Scanning phones to detect child abuse evidence is harmful, 'magical' thinking

Re: Much more difficult for abusers to get away with it nowadays

Snooping on kids is not only damaging for them. Have you ever listened to them chatting? It's absolute torture to adults.

Re: If people in the 1960s knew what computers and the Internet did to our freedom

I'm very computer savvy but I wouldn't even know how to obtain such content so it's good there are organisations trying to stifle it at source. I presume that law enforcement only catch a tiny minority of people in possession of such material so I wonder how big the problem might be.

UK politico proposes site for prototype nuclear fusion plant

A new world dawns

The output of this reactor could be as much as 16 giga sweet fuck alls per guinea.

Emissions-slashing hybrid trains to hit tracks in Europe

State of rolling stock

UK rolling stock is of a high quality and younger than the average of most European countries.

Musk seeks yet another excuse to get out of Twitter buyout: This time it's Mudge's severance check

Re: Grasping at straws...

He's not going to get out of a billion dollar commitment by saying a handful of million was wrongly paid.

Meta iOS apps accused of injecting code into third-party websites

Re: Alex Russell, a Microsoft Edge partner program manager

I've never clicked help but now that I've set every default to chrome I don't see edge very often. When I do I flamethrower my laptop. Edge, in any event, isn't that bad apart from its colour scheme.

UK Parliament bins its TikTok account over China surveillance fears

Not a good look

I, for one, found the Health Secretary twerking as a substitute for giving evidence directly to the Health Select Committee rather unseemly so the closure of this account will bring a little dignity to the functioning of Parliament. If Angela Rayner could close her Only Friends account the voting public could have a new found confidence in our august representatives.

Last week Intel killed Optane. Today, Kioxia and Everspin announced comparable tech

Re: SCM it is far

Could you possibly resubmit your comment in English for the benefit of those of us who don't speak whatever patois it is that you do?

Microsoft pulls Windows 10/11 installation websites in Russia

A different approach

If Microsoft really wants to kick Russia where it hurts it should make Windows 8 available for free in the country.

GitHub drops Atom bomb: Open-source text editor mothballed by end of year

ESC:s/^Cat/Dog/g

BT: 'Quantum radios' could boost 5G network range

One day...

The boffins and boffinettes will learn to speak English and I'll know what they're talking about. Either that or I will have to learn Boffinish. Every day a little bit more hope drains from my world.

Will this be one of the world's first RISC-V laptops?

It looks like

A Gumtree advert for a stolen Dell corporate laptop.

Lawyers say changes to UK data law will make life harder for international businesses

Improve data sharing between public bodies...

When I was a civil servant 40 years ago hardly any data sharing between government departments was allowed. For low clearance staff departments had no access to criminal records and instead personnel departments collected press cuttings relating to staff with convictions. When I later worked on computerising HR functions of a department I was amazed at the number of people whose careers had been stopped in their tracks without their knowledge because they were unlucky enough to have a local reporter write up their conviction. Now the pendulum is swinging too far in the other direction.

Samsung unveils 512GB DRAM CXL module in E3.S form factor

The power

If I could afford to pay the power bill I wouldn't need an SSD.

Qualcomm ‘on track’ for Apple M-level Nuvia chips in late 2023

A backward step

At this rate within a couple of Christmases people will have to return to heating their home offices the traditional way.

Apple to bin apps that go three years without updates

What if

Applemovestoamonthlysubscriptionmodelforthespacebardriver?

Google releases beta version of Android 13 'Tiramisu'

Re: What the article needed

That was the EU that did that.

Microsoft partners balk at new licensing scheme, dent growth

That escalated quickly.

Netflix to crack down on account sharing, offer ad-laden cheaper options

Re: Netflix is over

"Netflix remains (very) profitable"

Netflix has only been reasonably profitable for 3 out of the last 12 years. It has accumulated over $15 billion in debt which it services by being a cashflow business. It's incredibly dependent on the US, UK, Brazil and, to a lesser extent, Germany. The US and UK are incredibly overcrowded markets which have only shown revenue growth because of price increases and consumers not being overly price sensitive. That's all changing because inflation is running riot. There's good reason to worry about Netflix because if it loses too many subscribers it can't afford content which means it loses more subscribers. Available content is dwindling because content owners want their own streaming services and unlike them Netflix doesn't have other significant revenue streams.

Re: Netflix is over

The BBC renegotiated its Terms of Trade with independent producers that it commissions programmes from. Previously it had a one month IPlayer window now it has one year window with outside commissions which it can then extend non-exclusively in return for dropping its UK commercial exploitation cut from 25% to 20% and its international exploitation cut from 12.5% to 10%.

In Netflix's two biggest markets (the US and UK) it is certainly close to saturation with subscription count being equal to around 20% of overall population. Places like Germany and France hover around 13% so there's room to grow in those places. Unfortunately, Netflix makes over half its revenue from 4 countries even though it has a presence in 190 countries.

At last, Atlassian sees an end to its outage ... in two weeks

Re: Cheers to that guy who hit the ENTER key!

Many moons ago I accidentally deleted the members database of the London Stock Exchange. I stayed in until 4am putting it back to avoid me being on the front page of the Evening Standard the next day.

Dell trials 4-day workweek, massive UK pilot of shortened week begins

Re: WFH

The WFH revolution has allowed me to take on two full time contracts. I use the second one to put the max into my pension and £20k into an ISA and the rest into savings.

Google talks up its 540-billion-parameter text-generating AI system

Re: Able to explain jokes?

"To comedians of both genders, probably."

Indeed but such a high proportion of comediennes are unfunny I feel more good could be done targeting that group first before starting on John Bishop et al.

Re: Able to explain jokes?

A machine that can write jokes would be of great help to comediennes.

Any fool can write a language: It takes compilers to save the world

Re: Too Scary, Too Complicated

What you are describing is the equivalent of old fashioned cfront. When C++ came out there were no native compilers so cfront emitted C and the C was compiled. It was an unholy mess. For example, when templates came out cfront would create a .pty directory and emit often hundreds of C source file to speculatively represent each specialisation possible of the parameterised types. LLVM is a vast improvement on that approach.

Windows 11 growth at a standstill amid stringent hardware requirements

Re: Is anyone else seeing a major opening for switching to another Operating System?

Corporates will never shift the hoi poloi to Macs. The vast majority of their users send emails, write Word documents, watch cats being cats on YouTube and order shit off Amazon. Moving to very expensive and very fragile Macs makes no sense.

114 billion transistors, one big meh. Apple's M1 Ultra wake-up call

Re: I was there

I first programmed using punched cards on a system running the George 3 OS. Productivity has certainly gone up since those heady days.

Russia acknowledges sanctions could hurt its tech companies

Voodoo economics

So, companies can get loans at 3% if they don't lay off staff and index wages. The rest of the world, quite rightly, intends tanking the Russian economy creating all of the attendant inflation that entails. What use is a debt service cost of 3% if the inflation rate is 20% (at least) and I have to lock wages to inflation and retain staff? The only way the 3% service cost can be provided is by money printing which feeds inflation which feeds the cost of indexed salaries which feeds my need to borrow more money which is, by definition, an inflationary spiral. The only way out is to remove the locks of cheap lending, enforced indexing and staff retention.

European Union takes China to WTO over smartphone patents

Re: Tit for tat.

If a Chinese company is happy to steal IP I'm sure it wouldn't worry about IMEI spoofing. It can be achieved in software in the same way as MAC address randomisation.

20 years of .NET: Reflecting on Microsoft's not-Java

Re: Easier games to play

It does, indeed, allow you to mix styles. It still amazes me how many people I interview wrongly associate asynchronous coding with multithreading. Each can use the other but they aren't the same.

Re: Easier games to play

"I guess your idea of writing multithreaded code is to FORK and manually use IPC, rather than just using async and letting the runtime manage it.

Just because you can spend your life debugging race conditions, doesn't mean you should.

Or is all your code strictly single-threaded, and runs a single processor core at 100% whilst leaving the other 7 idle?"

Async/await in C# is nothing to do with multithreading. When an async function hits an await the function becomes split at that point and the code following gets wrapped as a completion routine which gets processed on the same synchronisation context so execution can return to the caller while it completes during idle time on the same thread. The async modifier indicates that the return result of the function will be wrapped in a Task generic for that type which can be awaited on. The code only becomes multithreaded if you create another Task on which you call Run. In most cases you remain single threaded and your code has full thread affinity. In short async can allow you to make optimum use of the synchronisation context to do different things while waiting whereas multithreading allows you to make use of multiple synchronisation contexts to do things in parallel. The reason async applications which are busy appear to be shared over multiple cores is scheduler hopping which may continue a thread on a different core to the one it was paused on. It's still one thread.

Re: Easier games to play

The Windows message loop has always been required even in the dread days of writing applications in C and still today in C#. I started as a C developer and the version 2.0 of MFC which you are misremembering was a nightmare but not as big a one as MFC 1.0 with C++ 7 which came in a box a yard long for the manuals in the shadow of OLE 2 (which later became COM) when you hand crafted virtual function tables. No sane person would today write a desktop presentation layer from scratch using even the latest version of MFC. It's not about handholding. It's common sense.

Re: Easier games to play

Indeed. I sometimes have to revisit legacy C++/MFC code and, quite frankly, I turn to drink immediately afterwards.

C# exists because of .NET

And it's one hell of a language. It's very well thought out and incredibly powerful.

Ericsson admits it may have paid off ISIS terrorists

These things happen

Having worked in a couple of hotspots myself I know that paying local thugs is not uncommon. Ideally, I'd prefer that the likes of ISIS go unrewarded but if the alternative to paying is staff being kidnapped or murdered I understand why it happens.

Microsoft prepares for its staff to return to Washington sites

The absolute horror

Employees might have to go to work. Shockwaves spread throughout the technology sector today when a leading employer suggested people it pays should turn up for work. Amnesty International would have issued a statement condemning the move but there was no one available in their Indignant Directorate to issue a statement due to staff shortages. However, Russell Wilson of the Information and Technology Workers Union called from his seafront retreat in the Bahamas to reject out of hand all forms of modern day slavery in the industry.

IBM HR chief insists 'no systemic age discrimination'

Re: Genuine question...

In the tech business getting work when you are over 55 is incredibly difficult no matter how up to date you are. The 13 year olds interviewing you are absolutely terrified of you for a start.