Posts by nintendoeats

When even a power-cycle fandango cannot save your Windows desktop

Re: a perfectly understandable error

Whereas I, being an educated computer user, NEVER click through error messages and just blindly hope that they don't come back :p

X.Org is now pretty much an ex-org: Maintainer declares the open-source windowing system largely abandoned

Re: Nobody likes X11

In fairness, the link you posted is to instructions on implementing clipboard in a text editor. Only a few lines of it actually involve interacting with the clipboard system.

And yes, I do wish that somebody had gotten up and told UNIX the NeWS.

Complains about X11 being over-complex and difficult to work with go back to the 90s. Even at that time, there was a general feeling that X11 should be torn down and built again. Many wished that NeWS had been open-sourced so that it could have been the dominant UNIX-like windowing system. Hence, I think we are well-passed the point where the problem with X11 is "not enough people working on it".

Re: Nobody likes X11

I'm sure that Windows does do stuff under the hood, mainly with converting to different formats instead of requiring you to provide each format yourself. Good, that improves interoperability with others applications and reduces headaches for every single developer who ever touches the system.

And as to being multi-user, if X11 can't handle giving each user session it's own instance of the clipboard system, then what horrible things is IT doing underneath?

Re: Nobody likes X11

Yes. Damn that clipboard in Windows. Being all "functional" and "intuitive".

Nobody likes X11

I recently built an application that interfaces a windows clipboard with an X11 clipboard.

Windows side - "push contents to clipboard, pull contents from clipboard".

X11 side - "Send a request to the window that owns the select, wait on a conditional mutex for the message to come in on the X11 message handling thread, read the data length and type from that message, tell the other window to delete it, request the data again, wait on the conditional mutex again, now you may read the data (but don't forget to delete it). Oh, hope that the other program doesn't crash or change selections partway through this process."

So...

After ten years, the Google vs Oracle API copyright mega-battle finally hit the Supreme Court – and we listened in

Re: ISAs?

I only just saw this. Thank you for the very clear answer. Though I wonder, what is it that AMD and Intel cross-license with one another?

Re: ISAs?

Then why are the patents still in force? IA-32 is well over 20 years old.

I suppose you might be referring only to ARM in that case (since they sell IP blocks)

ISAs?

I'm curious, how does this differ from the copyright law surrounding an ISA? Everybody seems to agree that in order to implement x86 or x86_64, you have to licence them from Intel and AMD respectively. AFAIK, an ISA is really just a very precise listing of very tiny functions. So what's the difference?

One of the world's most prominent distributed ledger projects has been pushed back by a year

Re: Security by obscurity?

Ah, but then at least you will know who to http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/F/flame.html

;)

Re: Security by obscurity?

In addition to the excellent rebuttal made above, observe that security through security does work AS AN ADDED LAYER in the context of other mitigations.

"I finally figured out their nonstandard encryption algorithm, but it requires just as much compute time to break as AES-256. Two weeks of my life wasted!"

So now, not only is your data secure, but it wasted two weeks of some poor cracker's life ;)

Need a new computer for homeschooling? You can do worse than a sub-£30 2007 MacBook off eBay

If prices of new computers keeping going up...

will my SGI Indy eventually be worth 5 grand again? Maybe then somebody will port a modern browser to IRIX.

When you're On Call, only you can hear the silence of the clicks

Re: NO Entry ......

Do they call that a DWY (driving while young)?

Selling hardware on a pay-per-use or subscription model is a 'lie' created by marketing bods

Sod IT

As a consumer, if a fixed-cost item says "as a subscription", I walk the other way.

I mean, ok. If Photoshop was sold as a subscription dirt-cheap, that might be ok because it provides a means of staying up-to-date for the same price as buying every few years. Hell, if you use a lot of creative cloud it's a really good deal. But if it were cheap, Adobe wouldn't be making bank. So nuts to them.

The same applies to almost every subscription-for-fixed-cost-good I have ever seen. It's only cheaper if you were already on the upgrade treadmill.

No, I'm not bitter. Just learning Krita 0_o

Big IQ play from IT outsourcer: Can't create batch files if you can't save files. Of any kind

Re: Idiocy

But...the thing that didn't work was made by the outsourcee...ergo the solution would be to develop software in-house, rather than rely on a private company...

Google Chrome calculates your autoplay settings so you don't have to - others disagree

It's almost like...

the same people who create large parts of the internet...

and who fund larger parts of the internet...

and are funded BY large parts of the internet...

should not also be running your gateway to the internet.

I have never understood why somebody would choose to use chrome. It's like hiring a burglar to install your locks.

Classy move: C++ 20 wins final approval in ISO technical ballot, formal publication expected by end of year

Re: Backwards compatiblity

I am currently learning C++. I have wished for this. For example, I only just learned why visual studio keeps trying to replace #define with constexpr.

Though that said, part of my code also needs to compile in C++98. This really highlights one of the strengths of the language; if you write a C++ program that just uses POSIX and the STL, you sure do have a lot of valid build-targets out there.

I got 99 problems, and all of them are your fault

Re: Ever done a good deed, only to have it thrown back at you by an angry user

I have an alternative, maybe naive view (I was just coming into existence when you were debugging the 6502).

I don't think I have ever been aggressively chastised for the aftermath of helping somebody fix their computer. Perhaps this is because for most of my life, computers have been commonplace and my family has a better core understanding of how they work (even if they still need help). In fact, my experience is the opposite. How many times have I said "Mom, I'm only here for a week, please give me your bloody laptop so I can look at XXX". I'm either pointing out problems they don't notice, or insisting that they let me fix the thing.

The people in life have given me a lot, often things I find tedious or don't know how to do. I spent a lot of my time doing something I found fun, and turned it into something useful. If I can repay them with those skills, then I am getting a very good deal. I also often learn things, because their systems and needs are different from mine.

Certainly I get frustrated (mostly when ̶m̶y̶ ̶m̶o̶t̶h̶e̶r̶ people ask my technical opinion, ignore me, and then wind up in exactly the situation I was trying to avoid, or when ̶s̶h̶e̶ they repeatedly make the same mistake and delete all of their DUCKING photos without a backup AGAIN), but that's not limited to computers.

Trump bans Feds from contracting H-1B workers and makes telehealth the new normal

President proposes tax on the rich

And under most circumstances I would be thrilled. This is so far beyond inappropriate...save me November!

A tale of mainframes and students being too clever by far

From my experience writing official documentation for a C library, another possibility is that the exact circumstances under which the files are removed from memory are more complex than anybody wanted to explain.

There is always a push to KISS. Judicious use of the word "typically" us often the compromise between giving the full story and saying something untrue. "Typically, when you XXX from XXX the XXX will be deleted and replaced with the XXX from XXX".

Ideally we would have enough information in play for the user to take an educated guess at the true ruleset, but it's hard to tell your editor "I included this sentence so that the reader can solve an exciting puzzle in search of deeper knowledge!"