* Posts by nintendoeats

692 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Aug 2020

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

nintendoeats

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.

nintendoeats

Re: Unhelpful comments

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

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

nintendoeats

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

nintendoeats

Re: Fuck that

I hear they are big on hovercrafts there.

nintendoeats

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

nintendoeats

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 >_>

nintendoeats

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

nintendoeats

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".

nintendoeats

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.

nintendoeats

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

nintendoeats

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

nintendoeats

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'

nintendoeats

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

nintendoeats

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!

nintendoeats

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

nintendoeats

Re: Scary

You are suggesting that they will be retired...

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

nintendoeats

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.

nintendoeats

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 :/

nintendoeats

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.

nintendoeats

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!

nintendoeats

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

nintendoeats

Re: In other words...

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

nintendoeats

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

nintendoeats

Three words to ruin your day:

Machine Learning Compiler

Study: AI detects backdoor-unlocking DNA samples

nintendoeats

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!

nintendoeats

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.

nintendoeats

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.

nintendoeats

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?

nintendoeats

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

nintendoeats

Re: hurdles <= hurdles - 1;

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

nintendoeats

Re: hurdles <= hurdles - 1;

I can't tell if this is a mistake (it should be hurdles <= -1) or the implication is supposed to be that there are always more hurdles.

Toshiba reveals 30TB disk drive to arrive by 2024

nintendoeats

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).

nintendoeats

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.

nintendoeats

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

nintendoeats

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...

nintendoeats

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

nintendoeats

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

nintendoeats

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

nintendoeats

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

nintendoeats

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...

nintendoeats

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

I was in a quasi-technical program at a college, and one of the younger students showed me this image: https://cdn.quotesgram.com/img/28/67/1517862763-funny-picture-there-is-always-a-way.jpg

He insisted that this would work, and would merely be very slow. No amount of "but you are connecting a serial USB device, via a PS/2 adapter of unknown construction, to a parallel SCSI interface" would convince him.

He wasn't that bright.

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

nintendoeats

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.

Watchdog clears 90 per cent of US commercial aircraft to land in low visibility at nation's 5G C-band airports

nintendoeats

So you are complaining about the fact that they did their job, by bringing up a time when they didn't?

The monitor boom may have ended, says IDC

nintendoeats

Re: Impressive???

Addendum:

A couple weeks ago I replaced my top-end 2007 Sony XBR2 television with a top-end 2021 Sony A90J.

Yes, the new TV is clearly superior in all areas (except in brightness and burn-in concerns, because OLED) and I am happy for the upgrade. But is it 13 years better? Probably not...certainly not in the same way that my 6800XT is superior to a 2007 GeForce 8800 Ultra, or a Ryzen 5000 is superior to a Core 2.

Those PC upgrade examples are comical, the old parts would now be considered effectively unusable for anything (power and heat concerns basically invalidate them for any use they would still be capable of). OTOH, this change between TVs for me has merely been "a nice improvement". And the old XBR? Going to a recent grad, who will undoubtedly get many more years of high quality, trouble free service out of it.

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

nintendoeats

I have messed with some Linux IDEs a long time ago, including QT creator (which seemed fine, but it was quite some time ago). But really, I'm just trying to talk about VS code here.

nintendoeats

I am in the "wow I want a Linux version" department. It would really promote my adoption of Linux as a primary platform. In what universe is being built in JavaScript a good thing? (unless your main goal is being cross-platform)

Aside from the overall feature set of VS being so substantial for C++, I don't really like the philosophy of CS Code. I am capable of working a terminal and JSON for commands and configuration, but I don't want to. Since I don't use each individual command or configuration very often, I'm not going to have memorized a lot of the things I will need these tools to do. Hence, I'm often going to wind up having the manual open on another monitor so I can know what values are appropriate for a setting, or what command does what I want.

Here's a thought: what if I wrote an add-on that allowed me to link the IDE with the browser, and when I clicked on the text for a particular command it would be automatically executed by the terminal? Saves me from having to type it, keeps the click/keystroke count down. The add-on would just tell the command to park it's butt on to the terminal.

Joking aside, I appreciate having terminals and raw config files AS AN OPTION. However, unless I do something frequently enough to have memorized it, a GUI makes more sense. Try sitting somebody down with a C64 and no manual. Ask them to load a game from a disk. That's going to be a long and painful experience (LOAD, 8, 1 obviously!). This is why we invented the WIMP interface; humans prefer to learn through the UI, rather than through reams of documentation. People want to get things done, not read docs (I should know, I used to write docs).

Cue the downvotes.

Arm rages against the insecure chip machine with new Morello architecture

nintendoeats

Yes, optionally. I look at (and in fact write) a lot of C++ code that does not have bounds checking.

nintendoeats

The problem with C/C++ is that it doesn't runtime bounds/pointer check.

The good thing about C/C++ is that you don't have to pay the performance cost of a runtime bounds/pointer check.

Even if there were dedicate hardware to bounds/pointer check, that would still consume power and die space, so in effect there is still a cost. Hopefully it would be a low cost, low enough that high performance computing applications can feel good about it.

Pop quiz: The network team didn't make your change. The server is in a locked room. What do you do?

nintendoeats

Re: Been there, done that.

You didn't recently publish a book about Commodore did you ;)

Edge computing set for growth – that is, when we can agree what it is

nintendoeats

Re: Rebranding exercise

This is exactly what I was going to say.

http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/W/wheel-of-reincarnation.html

I suppose it is a useful term, if it weren't so mired in marketing. It's basically what we used to do, just recontextualized to big data speak.

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