Posts by Mr Benny

The in and outs of Microsoft's new Windows Terminal

Re: The horrors and blessings of the console

"it was AT&T UNIX edition 7 ported to the 8086"

God knows how, it didn't have an MMU - even linux requires a minimum of a 386. I'm guessing it required extra hardware on the board. Anyway, what I meant by proper was something more consumer friendly like OSX. The early X windows window managers were to say the least, minimalist and having to edit config files just to change the desktop or add items to menus was a complete non starter for Joe Average.

"BSD (1977) existed _before_ Xenix (1980) and was free"

And ran on a PDP-11, not x86.

"If Xenix/OpenServer continued being sold by Microsoft then Linux probably would have taken off sooner."

No idea how you worked that one out.

Re: The horrors and blessings of the console

It doesn't really matter who the original author was. Do you think OSX was entirely written by Apple? MS could have used Xenix as the basis for a proper PC unix OS which would probably have meant linux and freeBSD never existing or at least staying as small research projects no one had heard of. Whether that would be good for us is another discussion but it would have been very good for MS. Instead they spent over 30 years putting ever more lipstick on the Windows pig and it still goes Oink on a daily basis.

Re: The horrors and blessings of the console

They abandoned more than terminal codes - remember Xenix? A perfectly good full version of unix which they ditched in order to flog the utter garbage that was windows 3

Re: The horrors and blessings of the console

select() is simple and cross platform. epoll is neither. As for using some 3rd party library with all the dependency bollocks that goes with it just to do basic multiplexing.... err, why?

Weather forecasters are STILL banging on about 5G clashing with their sensors. As if climate change is a big deal

He's just another scientifically and technically illiterate lawyer so when the weather people talk about microwave issues he probably thinks they're compaining about not being able to re-heat last nights pizza.

Not very bright: Apple geniuses spend two weeks, $10,000 of repairs on a MacBook Pro fault caused by one dumb bug

Re: BS

What on earth have you been smoking?

Re: BS

Why is the brightness even storedi n RAM? Macs are supposed to be multiuser machines - MacOS is a version of unix after all - so why on earth would the loginc screen brightness be set to that of the last person who used it? The user brightness setting should be stored in their user settings on disk and loaded when they've log in, not before.

Microsoft throws lifeline to .NET orphans in the brave new Core world

Glad I stayed doing backend Linux developement

The posix and sockets APIs I learnt 20 years ago is still relevant today. The only thing I need to keep up with are the 3 yearly increments of the C++ specification and an occasional API for a DB, but thats pretty much it. I genuinely feel sorry for Windows devs constantly having to play catch up just to stay still with MS and its pointless development enviroment changes. Wasn't .NET supposed to make things portable to different versions of Windows without DLL hell? Sounds like they've simply made things even worse.

'Cynical and bullying' TalkTalk hackerhacker getsgets 4 yearsyears behindbehind barsbars

Re: I've been caught ...... I must have Asperger's.

"It would help to explain why he thought the hacking was harmless fun"

Having Aspergers doesn't make you so socially clueless as to think hacking a companys systems is harmless fun. If he's smart enough to hack these systems he's smart enough to know its illegal and if he gets caught he'll be doing porridge.

When it comes to DNS over HTTPS, it's privacy in excess, frets UK child exploitation watchdog

Re: The ol' Dual-Use Problem

Since we've had unencrypted DNS for decades I'm not too worried about the police state in this case. Some things trump personal privacy issues and reducing child abuse is one of them IMO even if the more advanced crims will use VPN anyway. There are still plenty of dumb ones around,

Re: Help!

Many things over HTTPS are an abomination but unfortunately HTTP seems to be the go to protocol for hipster devs these days whether appropriate or not because most of them don't or can't understand anything lower level and rely on http libraries and websockets to get anything done over a network. Ask them what the fields are in an IP header or the difference between TCP and UDP and you'll probably just get a blank look.

Reducing crime is a need of the many. If fingerprinting were invented today some libertarian activist would be campaigning to outlaw it.

Help the Macless: Apple’s iPadOS is a huge update that will enable more people to do without a Mac... or a PC

Re: We've seen it all before

Unless your primary monitor is quite small I can't see how using an iPad as a secondary is a particularly ergonimically sound experience.

Re: iPadOS?

Not talking about office tasks. I download media onto android to watch later and sometimes I have youtube running in one window, a web page open in another, email in a 3rd etc etc and I can place them where I want, not have to put up with a 1980s Windows 1.0 style tiling that Apple fools its gullible fanboys into thinking is somehow cutting edge GUI design. Its so pathetic its laughable.

Re: iPadOS?

Can I save files and access the filesystem on iOS? No. Android: Yes.

Can I have unlimited multiple overlapping windows (like a desktop) open on iOS? No: Android? Yes

Android wins. iOS is just a toy for media consumption, nothing more.

Mad King Leo pulled the wool over HP shareholders' eyes, ex-CEO Whitman tells court

A more general questrion...

... is how do these sociopathic liars manage to get into these positions of power in the first place? Arn't the board supposed to use a bit of intelligence when hiring or do they just grab the first person with a cheesy smile promising them the earth (and larger share options)?

Bad news from science land: Fast-charging li-ion batteries may be quick to top up, but they're also quick to die

Re: Duh!

Well not where I live mate.

Re: Duh!

Ive never heard anyone call a carpenter a chippy in the UK. Perhaps youve watched too much eastenders.

Re: Duh!

Sorry, but why would someone who fries fish need a drill, to kill it in the most sadistic way possible short of throwing it in the oil alive? Wtf is a "chippy" where you come from? Here in the UK its someone who sells fish and chips.

Microsoft doles out PowerShell 7 preview. It works. People like it. We can't find a reason to be sarcastic about it

Re: No sarcasm you say

Wow, remote management, cutting edge stuff.

So - for example - how exactly would you write a multiprocess TCP networked middleware layer using a proprietary binary protocol on the front end and talking to a DB on the backend in powershell then? Because I've seen that written in Perl.

Take your time.

Re: No sarcasm you say

"Powershell is not only a lot more powerful than both Perl "

I'm no fan of perl but that statement is just fatuous rubbish. Perl is a fully featured programming language, powerscript isn't. Its a scripting language designed to control Windows objects and processes.

Firmware update borks Bose boxes: Owners report crackles on Lex-i of the soundbar world

Soundbars , meh

Overpriced , underperforming tinny speakers for people who know the square root of bugger all about hifi - a triumph of marketing over substance. A cheap (150 quid ish) amp and proper speakers sound far better than almost any soundbar on the market (and even manage to do a new fangled concept called stereo properly!), never mind the more upmarket stuff. A dumb amp shouldn't even need "firmware" other than for bluetooth and USB and that should never need upgrading.

Infosec bloke claims: Pornhub owner shafted me after I exposed gaping holes in its cartoon smut platform

Re: Whatever floats your boat

"nasmuch as it's demonstrably all in the mind, then it shouldn't matter whether it's real people, actors or cartoons or poetry."

Using that iffy logic you might as well say the same for real sex, I mean its just sticking something in a hole right? Does it matter if its human, blow up or sheep?

Who watches cartoon porn anyway?

I'm not going to pretend I've not watched porn, we all have at some point. But I've never really got the point of the cartoon stuff. How the feck (pun intended) can a cartoon be erotic? Perhaps its a millenial thing - too shy to even watch real people having sex, never mind do it themselves ;)

That magical super material Apple hopes will hit backspace on its keyboard woes? Nylon

"Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy"

Wtf is that? Or did you mean standard infrared spectroscopy that like millions of other embedded systems has to map the time domain into the frequency domain and so uses a fourier transform in its firmware?

I'm typing this on a Mac. But the 1st thing I did when I bought it was also buy a 20 quid PC keyboard and mouse.

Microsoft waves the wizard wand, emits the Web Template Studio

Re: VS Code = Emacs

Frameworks are just sophisticated do it all for you APIs for 2nd rate lego brick programmers. The number of times Ive had to deal with some pillock who couldnt solve a basic problem because his favourite framework didnt do it Ive lost count of. I wish these clowns would go and infest some other industry instead. Fuck knows how most of them bluff their way through the interview process.

Tangled in .NET: Will 5.0 really unify Microsoft's development stack?

Re: The most divisive issue remains...

Taces!

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

Re: Too much fuss about contamination

In a suitably large impact the atmosphere is blasted out of the way so atmospheric heating isn't an issue. And if only iron survived being flung into space by impacts without vapourising we wouldn' t have the moon.

Re: Too much fuss about contamination

"how do you rate your chances?"

Quite good if I were a microbe inside a rock who can survive quite a few thousand G without serious injury. Scale matters.

Too much fuss about contamination

Earth microbes have almost certainly made it to the moon and probably mars numerous times via impact ejecta in the last few billion years already (probably trillions of microbes were ejected into space when the dinosaur killer hit 65m years ago alone). If it had any viability on these other bodies it would already be thriving there. As far as we can tell it isn't, at least not in any obvious way, so why on earth carry out these absurd sterilisation precautions?

Tesla touts totally safe, not at all worrying self-driving cars – this time using custom chips

Re: 144 trillion operations per second

A theoretical understanding of ANNs is just the start. The problem is we understand how they work at a high level - data in , matches out - and we understand at a very low level - back propagation changes weightings which changes neuron synapse combinations and/or values required to fire. What no one really understands is what is going on inbetween, eg how exactly do the dozens or even hundreds of hidden linked layers actually achieve their results. The whole seems to be greater than the sum of the parts with ANNs and anyone who tells you they completely grok the processes going on deep inside are deluded or liars. And until we really understand how they do it then we can never be 100% certain how they'll behave in a given situation.

Wannacry-slayer Marcus Hutchins pleads guilty to two counts of banking malware creation

Re: Now, for the last act ...

Whooooosh....

Re: Now, for the last act ...

"As a teenager he failed to completely hide his real identity behind his various online personas"

To put it mildly.

"That doesn’t mean that hi is not good at finding and exploiting security weaknesses in software, which is the skill that security services are most interested in."

Plenty of others can do the same but they don't break the law.

Re: Now, for the last act ...

Spare us the standard issue undiscovered genius narrative. If he excelled at it he wouldnt have got caught. Whats more there are many smart people in IT around the world and 99.999% of them dont turn to illegal hacking to get their kicks - they use their gifts for positive undertakings,

Microsoft debuts Bosque – a new programming language with no loops, inspired by TypeScript

Re: Wrong end of the telescope

What the hell is a gestfault?

Anyway, if things go wrong when modules are plugged together then thats a fault of the design, not the language. Functional languages don't magically make program design any simpler, in fact if anything the opposite is true for anything other than small mathematical problems. Functional doesn't get rid of loops, it just turns them into recursion which simply confuses the design for systems that are not by nature recursive and if a language doesn't naturally map onto the problem space its trying to solve then its not a good solution to the problem.

iOS 13 leaks suggest Apple is finally about to unleash the iPad as a computer for grownups

Re: file system access

You're confusing professional computer users with professionals using computers. They are NOT the same thing. The former is essentially a power user who sets up computers to achieve complex results eg programmers or scientists writing python or R programs. The latter are just general professionals using standard tools, eg a lawyer writing a word document.

Easter is approaching – and British pr0n watchers still don't know how long before age-gates come into force

So kids can still watch people being blown to bits, murdered and tortured on various sites...

... not to mention simulated in games, but god forbid they should see some tits or arse! You ever get the feeling that some serious priority shifting is required amongst politicians?

Apple disables iPad for 48 years after toddler runs amok

Re: Three year olds can't read

"No, it's for learning. The rest of us were doing exactly the same thing, just in different aspects."

If you think university is simply about learning then you're either incredible naive or socially inadequate. Or both.

Re: Three year olds can't read

17 is only a year younger than most people go anyway. Its not the same as sending say a 12 or 13 year old which has happened.

Re: Three year olds can't read

Not me. You might like to think you were a child prodigy but the truth is usually somewhat more prosaic.

Re: Three year olds can't read

"Also starting university at a terribly young age"

Whats the point? University isn't just about learning, you can do that from a book. Its about making friends, forming contacts, even having sex for the first time, and just generally maturing from a child into an adult. Sending a bright young kid to uni is just another form of boarding school for parents who can't be bothered.

Re: Three year olds can't read

"She immediately handed me my first novel to read, "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel" by Robert A. Heinlein. I chewed through that in less than a week"

Sorry, I don't believe a word of that. I've worked with kids and got my own and while a really smart 3 year old might be able to stutter their way through a picture and words book none of them could read a Heinlein novel cover to cover. The fact that 25 people modded you up means there are a lot of naive people out there. Sorry.

Rust never sleeps: C++-alike language tops Stack Overflow survey for fourth year in a row

Re: Garbage collection in C

"will scan the process address space, looking for references to areas it knows about"

I don't want to use any library that is dicking about like that behind the scenes. And it can scan all it likes but it will have no idea if the value 0xABCDEF which may be a valid address in its memory space is actually pointing to it or is simply a coincidental value. Garbage collectors have to grok the higher level program variables, not just low level memory. There is no way around it , you CANNOT have a proper automatic garbage collector system in C.

Re: Not only normal meetings...

Reasonably sized pieces is not a daily chunk for a sprint box to be ticked. And my length and breadth of experience is pretty much the same as yours so stop trying to impress. An example? The last place I worked required extremely complicated data calculation algorithms to be implemented. They took about a month to get right. If I'd had to waste my time in a stand-up I'd have said pretty much the same thing every day for that month.

Re: "VBA and Objective-C rank as the most dreaded languages this year"

Its easy to avoid the pitfalls of C++ if you only have 1/10th the functionality. And from what I've seen of OSX code, most of it is written in C/C++ and people only use Obj-C when they absolutely have no choice - eg to access system or GUI functionality.

Re: Garbage collection in C

Thats not a true garbage collector - its just allocating global heap memory and managing it itself. It has no idea if a-n-other pointer is pointing at any of the memory its allocated and will happily free that memory if asked to and so leaving dangling pointers. Thats not what most people consider a garbage collector.

Re: Not only normal meetings...

I hate to break the bad news to you, but in the real world any suitably large coding task generally can't be broken up into convenient daily bite sized chunks.

Re: For the love of God

Meetings are for people who can't do, just talk. Have some heart - it makes them feel like they're contributing something valuable even if its just hot air to warm the office :)

" some simple C with a small garbage collected memory library"

Without modifying the language you can't have garbage collection in C. Sure, you can have automatic stack variables or use alloca() to allocate stack memory which will be reclaimed on function return, but neither is automatic garbage collection in the normal sense. At some point you'd have to manually call a library function to do it which defeats the point. You might as well just call free().

"in the real world they are simply noise."

No, that noise is people trying to tell you stuff you don't want to hear. I cant comment on jquery, but Python is a powerful and very useful language. It has its issues but it does the job and is far better than the now (thankfully) fading Perl which to all intents and purposes it replaced.