Posts by nintendoeats

When the expert speaker at an NFT tech panel goes rogue

Re: Art is just this guy, you know?

I bought a hamburger so I could eat it.

I bought a car so I could go places.

I bought a stereo so I could listen to music.

I bought a print so I could look at it.

I bought a power drill so I could make things.

I bought a camera so I could take photographs.

I bought a couch so I could sit on it.

I bought a lamp so I could see things.

I bought a graphics card so I could play video games.

I bought an NFT so I could say I owned it.

Are you seriously suggesting that the last item on that list is not significantly stupider than the others?

Wiki community votes to stop accepting cryptocurrency donations

Re: "Beggars can't be choosers"

They run some of the most widely used websites on the internet, and a lot of other stuff besides. Consider what their income would be if they were a for-profit organization. $162 million seems completely reasonable, and is easily worth it for the services they provide.

'Bigger is better' is back for hardware – without any obvious benefits

Re: "Raw capacity has never been the point of computing"

I hope that it's JUST driving the scanner...I use a much newer (but still ancient) i5 2400s to connect to work, and it struggles with many day-to-day tasks.

It also must be said, energy efficiency has improved a lot since then.

Perforce now pulls Puppet's strings: Takeover announced

Re: The old companies keep on buying the new ones...

I think that has been the model in tech for a long time.

IBM deliberately misclassified mainframe sales to enrich execs, lawsuit claims

Re: Pleasant change

You mean the "old" IBM that focused on their customers, practiced good business ethics, made technical decisions for sound technical reasons, and never ever every knowingly aided in committing any form of genocide?

Pretty sure you are thinking of Silicon Graphics.

Buying a USB adapter: Pennies. Knowing where to stick it: Priceless

In fairness, for every job that really is that easy I'm sure that they get jobs where that are complications. If they are going to provide a price up front, the easy jobs are also paying some of the cost of the unexpectedly hard ones.

Re: The Old Engineer and the Hammer

"Oh, I'll just give it another little tap to get it back the other way. Oh that's too far, I'll give it another tap again, it'll definitely be right this time."

Downvote me all ye who have not done something like this.

If you fire someone, don't let them hang around a month to finish code

Definitely, if you have a 3 distinct tasks to do make them 3 functions...even if you are always going to do them together.

Re: Support as a route to programming

I moved from technical writing to programming....close? It's really just an in though, you also have to do the part where you learn to program.

Re: Unhelpful comments

I have actually, which is why I know that road signs there serve no purpose whatsoever and in fact just provide something else for people to hit.

Re: Unhelpful comments

Or as somebody else put it, "Don't put up road-signs that say 'keep going straight'."

SAP hits 50: Entrenched, spread out and fully middle-aged

Re: sex come at cost

Yeah, that part of the article made me cringe. I am very happy for industrial applications to look and feel industrial, because more than anything else I want them to work. If adding a fade-in could make something break (which it can, because all features can make something break), don't put it in the thing I use to do my job please.

When you go to a store employee and ask them "do you have X" and they punch some information you completely do not understand in a green terminal from 1983, you know you are talking to the right person. Less so when they just open the store's website and search.

Amazon warehouse workers in New York unionize in historic win against web giant

Re: "objections based on the inappropriate and undue influence"

"In so much as a company wants anything, it wants what it incentivizes." - Dan luu

The time you solved that months-long problem in 3 seconds

Re: Fuck that

I hear they are big on hovercrafts there.

Re: Fuck that

The words "there is no way you could possibly have known this" is available for that situation.

Debugging source is even harder when you can't stop laughing at it

Re: Back in my college days

Oh yeah, you see this stuff in production code with some frequency. It's not a good idea, but at least (for better or worse) we know the compiler will always ignore the comments >_>

Re: Been there, done that, tipped the swear jar

Oh I'm very interested...I have it pre-ordered, my GoG account is ready :p

Re: Back in my college days

I'm fairly confident that I would have gotten a 0 if I had included unnecessary obscenities in pretty much anything I ever submitted to a class. I'm thinking through all of my profs. I think their reactions would have ranged from " low-grade and a stern note in the edit" to "don't come back to my class".

Re: Self-taught coder

I'll just say, I'm self-taught and my current project at work is refactoring code that was written by somebody with a proper degree. That code is so scary that nobody wants to even think about it (except me, because I'm stoopid and volunteered).

Large sections of code, commented out with no explanation. Chains of three or four functions calling each-other, with names that only differ by one letter (so knowing which one you are actually supposed to call is Russian Roulette). An entire thread just for managing the window size. Completely pointless derived classes (because at some point 2 years ago they thought there MIGHT be two versions that differed in a particular way, which there won't ever be, as evidenced by the fact that one of the derived versions stopped working ages ago due to changes in the base).

When I started my job a year ago, I was worried that my liberal arts background was going to be a problem. I no longer have that fear.

Re: Been there, done that, tipped the swear jar

In the source code the the original System Shock, the Gravis Ultrasound is referred to as the Gravis Ultrastupid. Fun fact.

10x prices, year-long delays... Life as an electronics engineer in global chip shortage

Re: Counterfeit chips

You mean those two devices which were invented and commercialized long before the invention of the IC :p

Maybe people will need to relearn the art of building things without MCUs in them. Perish the thought.

'Enterprise' browser maker Island valued at $1.3bn out of the gate

Right, so I exit full-screen mode on my remote desktop, open the snipping tool on my local computer, copy the data, take a nap.

DoJ accuses Google of training staff to make 'false requests for legal advice'

Re: Surely a contradiction?

Intent is a critical part of the law. If I drive a car into my deepest enemy on purpose, that is murder. If a traffic light malfunctions and I hit my deepest enemy because we both had green (lets say its night time and they are wearing all-black, so I had no hope of seeing them), that is not a crime because I had no intent to do anything either malicious or negligent.

If you can demonstrate (to the "reasonable man" standard) that an email was sent for no purpose other than gaining legal protection, I do not believe that deeming that email unprotected weakens the legitimate use of attorney-client privilege. It would be a very difficult thing to prove, it would probably be impossible for only a single email exchange. You would need a pattern of abuse...like this...

Microsoft Visual Studio: Cluttering up developer disks for 25 years

Re: Eight Megabytes and Constantly Swapping

I could never get into any of the "not being able to hover over the name of any variable and see its current value while paused during debugging" crap.

Or the "not having a single interface that shows me the call stack of all running threads, and allows me to jump to the code for any point in that call stack with one click" crap.

Or the "not having an intelligent renaming tool that actually does semantic analysis to see which instances it should rename instead of just doing text substitution against the whole file" crap.

Or the "only telling me that an #include cannot be found when I compile, instead of immediately when I write 'strign' instead of 'string' " crap.

I taught myself C++ by writing a networked program between an SGI Indy and Windows. Most of the time I wrote the IRIX code on the Indy using Nedit and the Windows code in VS. I learned a lot of stuff about build systems and translation units and stuff from the Indy, but I got considerably more actual work done (and learned more about C++ itself) on the Windows side.

I'd rather have a program that consumes a bit too much memory and does what I want than a program that does almost nothing very efficiently. I've got 32GB, I can live with it.

PS: VS code doesn't get a pass...it manages to do less AND be inefficient under the hood!

Re: @Richard Speed -- Wait...Wha'?

100 percent. Another article on here said that VS code was "closer to the metal" because it requires you to directly edit settings files instead of having a proper UI.

Yes, that's right, the electron program is closer to the metal than the C++ program because it doesn't have a GUI. Somebody doesn't know what "closer to the metal" means.

I like Visual Studio. It has lots of exciting tools that I use to actually get work done, and has organized the myriad of configuration options in a way that at least starts to be approachable.

An open-source COBOL contender emerges

Re: Scary

You are suggesting that they will be retired...

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

Re: Rambling

Ok, but I've been rambling about the same thing for a few years now. So...he's got a choir to preach to.

Re: The honeymoon is over

Yup. I have a perfectly good laptop but the battery is really bad. I even replaced the battery, so it is upgraded from useless to poor. This thing has a 1070 in it, so it's not even that old :/

Re: I saw the reveal presentation, and, while I'm no fanboy, I was amazed

I have done this many times, though I agree that 32 GB has done me for a long time. If I did more than casual media work, I would have upgraded beyond that and would probably be at 128 GB right now.

Re: I saw the reveal presentation, and, while I'm no fanboy, I was amazed

There is a mental exercise I like to do...at what year was there more memory in the world than there is in my GPU right now? When I have a 1060 6GB I worked out that it was probably around the second year(1983-1984) of the C64...the huge amount of memory in that machine combined with its sales.

Now I have 16GB...actually, it's probably still the same year. Exponential growth!

Yeah, I connect to work using an i5-2400S. I have to be very careful about tab management, and youtube is a constant struggle.

Fedora inches closer to dropping x86-32 support

Re: In other words...

Huh? Did x64 CPUs break x86 compatibility when I wasn't looking? Don't think so.

If Microsoft dropped support for 32-bit applications tomorrow, I'd be having a fit right now (and it looks like I would be forced to move to WINE to play Max Payne).

Startups competing with OpenAI's GPT-3 all need to solve the same problems

Three words to ruin your day:

Machine Learning Compiler

Study: AI detects backdoor-unlocking DNA samples

And if "external code" or "my code" includes an interpreter? For example, one that can accept requests from logging which include scripts to execute, execute those scripts using "my data" and send it back to an external device?

Your app deleted all my files. And my wallpaper too!

I more meant that I would check that the file structure had a signature that was at least kind of intelligible. Like in this case, the size was way out of whack. If we are expecting 2 MBs of files per transaction, lets flag up a 5 GB transfer as no-go. Without knowing exactly what kind of files were involved, its hard to say what the right signature to look for is.

But this is all with hindsight of having read the story, which is why I say I "hope" that I would have done that. But really, who knows.

This was an error in the program IMO. Programs should be designed defensively, so that a single misstep cannot cause disaster. This is triple-true where file handling is concerned. I hope that I would have added a "does this folder make sense" check before sending it to users, especially non-techie users.

Re: Concepts are hard to understand

Oh, did your office staff learn computing on a UNIX system?

Three major browsers are about to hit version 100. Will websites cope?

How

is

decimal

digit

overflow

still

a

problem

If you think you are a good dev, and you wrote customer-facing code that is affected by this issue, then you are wrong. You should not assume that a number you don't control will fit in X number of digits, especially if you know that it is just going to increase over time. Why does anybody even need to say that?

If you are looking at a number encoded as a string, your number one goal in life should be to parse it to a numeric data type as quickly and cleanly as possible. If you don't know for sure that number will fit in one byte for as long as the universe still exists (or at least until next time you can recompile your code), then use 2 bytes (and so on for 2, 4, and 8). This is both obvious and not hard.

JavaScript's silent type conversions strike again.

FPGA now means Finally, PRC Grants Approval: China OKs AMD's $35bn Xilinx buy

Re: hurdles <= hurdles - 1;

Ah, I was bringing my software engineering c-style prejudices with me. Thanks for explaining!

Toshiba reveals 30TB disk drive to arrive by 2024

That is 8 out of 8, some of which ran for several years before being changed to backup drives (at this time, 4 are in the NAS and 4 are used for a mirrored backup).

Re: And then I go & read ARS Technica...

You can get SATa adapters that just take a bunch of microSD cards. I don't know how the speed is, but I'm guessing it's very poor.

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/W/walking-drives.html

If you aren't fussy about speed and are prepared to shuck, Seagate has been selling $200 CAD 8 TB drives for yonks. Say what you want, I've got 8 still working...

I agree. For me, 8 TB has been the price/size sweet spot for way too long.

Microsoft offers 'open' app store to draw regulators away from Activision takeover

Re: Could we stop using "sideloading" for applications not coming from a store?

Installing? What installing? Is a program installed when I put it in a folder called "programs"? I agree, it's so easy to rephrase discussions by using a term like this. It's some binary, I'd like my CPU to execute it. THANK YOU VERY MUCH, GOOD DAY SIR.

Do you trust your provider farther than you can throw them? Cloud priorities shifting in post-COVID world – IDC

Re: Ha....."trust".....

You are right, it doesn't appear once. It appears twice.

Google Cloud started running its servers for an extra year, still loses billions

Re: Can't wait to get this

Same. I bought a Vero 4K+, even though technically the TV itself will technically do everything that I need. For any number of reasons, that thing gets connected to the internet (via LAN, don't want it to ever know my wi-fi) when I know there is a firmware update of interest. Never ever for another reason.

I do not want to hear "powerful stories" from advertisers. I doubt that such a thing exists, but whatever a marketing person thinks it is...has no place in my brain. I need those parts of my brain for thinking about dead kittens and the inevitability of death. I wouldn't want something depressing like an ad for air freshners taking up valuable space.

Bouncing cheques or a bouncy landing? All in a day's work for the expert pilot

Re: Serial to VGA? All you need is an adapter!

I've never gotten that far, but I once spent a couple hours searching every nook and cranny of a very disorganized workshop looking for every single SCSI thing we had, so I had the best possible chance of getting computers and drives spanning two decades to work together.

Centronics, 50-pin external, 50-pin internal, 64-pin, 80-pin, VHDCI, various generations of terminators, powered drive boxes...and in the end, I was just about able to get some machines to behave themselves and communicate with something.

In fact, I ordered a bunch of 50-pin external SCSI cables on Saturday so I wouldn't have to do yet another IRIX installation with the case open and an ODD hanging out, running of the internal SCSI connector...

Hands up who ISN'T piling in to help Epic Games appeal Apple App Store ruling

Re: Apple is getting shafted by very guilty parties

considering that Epic created a series of mega smash-hit games, then licensed UE3 to half the games industry for a decade, and now looks to be continuing to do so with UE4...I think the claim that they have never been profitable needs to substantiated.