Posts by claimed 368 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Jan 2021
But looks like USA tech hegemony is toast in less than that. A billion people market, with integrated trade routes globally, and all you have to do is use software that’s slightly more efficient than the latest emissions from US tech companies like MS and you won’t notice any difference…
Tariffs won’t stop this train. I am absolutely fascinated, watching this, as a Brit. Come on EU, get some home grown kit off the ground and let’s heat up this competition!
Your post without the final sentence would have been fine, but now you’re a victim blaming douche. I suppose you think woman walking alone at night deserve to be attacked because they are putting themselves at risk.
Yes, better controls is the protection to CEO impersonation, no, it doesn’t “serve them right” to be conned while trying to do their job, potentially costing them their jobs.
So the editor of El Reg has no ability to write articles, because all they are doing is taking the output generated by the authors and doing the final pass checks?
I think there will be plenty of space for thinking, critical thinking especially, and just as good authors tend to have read a lot of books, the skilled humans will be reading more than writing, and that’s ok
Ah yes. People who disagree with me are stupid. An excellent argument to present, the “other side” absolutely won’t use it to immediately dismiss any argument they don’t agree with, or understand.
Don’t you want people to change their minds? How can we move forward if we just dig deeper ruts for people to get cosy in.
Come on, be smart, they are not stupid - there is more nuance to this phenomenon
Ok… so once “coding” is a solved problem, we can spin up apps and process data in a breeze… then what?
Someone still needs to articulate (pretty exactly) what should be done, which is the hard bit! Juniors right code, seniors convince stakeholders which bits of code they should pay for.
Let’s say, again, that this is now solved… I’ve rarely seen a business stakeholder be able to correctly articulate what they need. We will end up with a huge pile of code that mostly works, and businesses will spend huge amounts of money to pivot from one burning tire fire to another, every couple of years.
So, same shit. We will need to come and have careful conversations about what might work better, engage stakeholders and understand the various scenarios.
In the meantime, none of this is solved, and this is all just a big waste of time as far as I can tell. Copy and paste development has never worked well, be it stack overflow or ChatGPT - without proper application of critical thinking, it’s all just busy work
Have you not read anything about how rust works? The type safety guarantees are done using logical inferences from some mostly simple rules which the compiler enforces, this makes the language a little more fiddely until you know why it’s doing things, but means everything compiles down to the same as efficient C code, with very little “stack getting in the way”. You’re thinking of Java, python etc, not Rust. The only example I can think of for stack overhead is smart pointers maintaining lists of who has a ref… so they can unwind the stack when no longer in use - you don’t have to use a smart pointer to do zero copy buffer stuff, just pass ownership of the buffer on, and you can certainly preallocate memory - so I don’t get the complaint.
The whole point of Rust is to be as close to safe as possible, with as little abstraction and runtime costs as possible. It’s specifically designed to prevent classes of bugs, by not breaking general rules, and if you want to optimize then you can. Also, if you want to write unsafe shit and put the ego on the line, go nuts. Literally no downside except learning a new thing, the trade off is amazing for what you get in return.
The borrow checker is the big one, but there are some other bits like not being able to alias a mutable reference (avoids multi threaded weirdness):
https://doc.rust-lang.org/nomicon/races.html
They were talking about age - so if you were way better than a fresh faced grad ( here you’re doing the same thing and assuming 21/22 ) - how would you stack up against a 16 year old?
I think it is you that may want to go back and think about your comment. Your self proclaimed skill at work may have benefitted from brushing up on your reading comprehension exercises.
I’ve seen this advocated for at fewest 100 times. I care less and less…. ;)
It’s not a rule, it was just proposed by some guy 400 years ago. If I use it, and you understand it as I intended - then the language has done its job.
You can correct people about using the wrong tense, or even the wrong word - but if I’m telling you there is a Sabre tooth tiger behind you, you should probably just act on the information received, rather than fuss over the delivery of it; that is, of course, entirely up to you
Safe rust code does not have memory safety bugs, because it can’t.
Some C code does, and when it does, it’s bad. How do you know if your C code is going to have one of the bugs that an attacker can exploit? “Trust me bro”?
They’ve identified the subset of language features that they can auto translate from “maybe it’s safe?” to “for sure, this will be safe (from these really common, really bad class of errors)”, without refactoring.
It seems to me that having the ability to know where in the program are the bits that need refactoring or block this sanity test, should be a good thing.
Converting to safe rust is step one, you’ve missed the second bit: actually compiling it and getting a safe program. You can write safe rust and the compiler will reject it, because it isn’t actually safe… so even if you are not using any of the incompatible features of C, this process would still add safety and validate the code.
So, rather than convert trivial code, this shines a light on complex edge cases - which is where all the problems come from.
Don’t like Rust? Cool
Don’t see the value in Rust? Hubris
The quality trend of the El Reg over the last few years is a result of the general news media decline, with competition from social media reducing ad spend and forcing this site to run more intrusive ads and not be able to pay for as much content. (In my opinion, I’m not affiliated in any way).
I still find some gems here and continue to return - while I’m inclined to agree that the on call stories are a bit weak, that’s generally due to the changes in IT over the last 30 years and the aging out of the commentards, meaning the stories are now only going to work for a small niche of the readers, and are inevitably scraping the bottom of the barrel. Still, don’t bitch about the format, it’s a nice call back to reader write ins and rare to find these days. If you have any stories, why not try to formulate them into something people might be entertained by and go ahead and submit them?
As for AMFM1… congratulations on your right of passage: mistaking that account for a comprehensible debate partner. It’s not.
Happy New Year. Try not to post when you’ve been drinking, and if you weren’t, try to re-read your online posts to reduce your rage. We’ve all been there, but keep it civil, the emotion shows and it doesn’t make you any more likely to persuade.
By this logic, any app used by service members - which has permissions for location, should be not only banned but forced to sell to US companies….
Also, if the location of a “secret” base is the issue: then you’re fucked since China put satellites in orbit. I think the secrets of secret bases are really their capability and not headcount. Anyone with a bird in the air can find movement and determine a base.
It’s completely crazy that the US will not allow a foreign company to operate within their borders, they should have adequate controls from the last 200 years of global trade….
This is all bullshit
Does log shipping not count as incremental backup? What about streaming replication? Pretty sure real time recovery has been possible a couple of ways for a while… is this incremental restore from backup or just a shiny layer slapped on top of the pre existing features (very welcome, not saying it isn’t going to be useful!)
What is this new feature, hopefully there will be an El Reg article that answers these burning questions at some point. I miss the frequency of technical writing articles
Does this sort of thing only affect American companies?
Software patents are not valid in Europe, right? So if I want to start a software business, do it in a Europe, and then can’t be sued for a patent titled: “System and Technique for Diagnostic Evaluation and Network Recovery Through Controlled Power Availability and Interruption”… otherwise known as Turning it off and On again…
In the same way that there is no “full evidence” that the Earth and other planets came from an accretion disk around the nascent star we call the Sun.
We just look at what’s here now, and “guess” that’s what happened.
Glad you understand what science is… weird place to push this. Must be a bot…
Been seeing comments like “moop moop, you can do this in C++, Rust is for babies”, “Rust is a fad, that’s what they said about swift”, “Java is also memory safe and it’s crazy”… for YEARS
Glad some solid numbers are coming out. The combination of conceptual and architectural approaches in Rust is a step change, and it’s so good for the world to improve what we do. Yes, Rust too will die one day, but I’m pleased it exists as I’m sure it will stand as a significant block in the wall of human technological evolution.
No I’m not AI, yes that paragraph is trash, no I’m not rewriting it :)
If they don’t know what they're doing, they shouldn’t be fucking about under the hood of the car. If they can avoid that, Linux wont freeze frequently. I have multiple Linux computers, I don’t fuck with them, they just work.
I have Windows for work and my Mrs has Apple. They all work, just don’t fuck about with them, it’s really easy.
If you do want to change stuff, make sure you know what you’re doing.
Which article were you reading? I was reading the one where a suggestion was made that the wellbeing of workers and a boost to the economy could be achieved by allowing people to do what they can already do thanks to Article 8 of the Human Rights act.
I can only assume that they want to get rid of that act (because that’s been said by politicians and that’s why the immigration issue is being hyped up), so we might lose that protection - but for now, this is pointless.
I was making a suggestion for what might actually help. Keep up, old timer.
Tax the rich, close loopholes allowing parliamentarians to soak up free shit and walk into speaking engagements where they’re paid small fortunes. Anybody should be able to do an MPs job, they should be replaceable, not us workers.
Increasing tax on rentals year on year, so if you want to rent out your second home while you and your new spouse are consolidating your lives, great, but companies should not be profiting off basic human needs. It shouldn’t be a business model to hold on to property and rent it, get it back on the market so we can buy a fucking home.
While we’re here, break up the monopolies, stop allowing 3 fucking companies to own every product in a supermarket, oh wow there are 10 shops to choose from… all the products come from umbrella companies…. That is crazy
I don’t know if this works, it feels so much like we’ve shown that this “secret passcode” being the way to interact with service providers is a shit system.
Back in the day, you lived in a village, and everybody knew everybody’s name/where they lived etc
Can we construct a system that allows us to validate identity, and therefore entitlement to service, when all PII is essentially public? Without this, I think it’s chicken and egg trying to hide PII and it inevitably leaking through one avenue or another…
You need to be able to prove you are who you say you are when presenting yourself (MFA is pretty good for this), and you need to be able to demonstrate entitlement to service, so either the provider needs a record, or you need to posses some redeemable token that was acquired earlier.
I don’t think it’s convenient, but I don’t see how we do this without some kind of Account system, which seems like a great way to lock people out and create a new class hierarchy, so I don’t like it either.
I think the security adage that obscurity isn’t protection needs to apply, but I don’t think an account assigned at birth is great either, how would you configure MFA for a child, or if you lose your possessions in a house fire. I am *not* advocating for DNA tests but it seems there isn’t another way right now to move away from these secrets… I’m sure DNA tests could be faked under the right conditions.
It seems our choices are either this mess, or 1984… any other ideas?
If you can’t tell users they can have a 30% discount by going to your website, how is that a choice?
Users have to guess that they need to go there? Then you can’t give them a link so 1000 fake typosquatters set up epic.dodgy.com sites ready to take credit card details.
How the living shit do you think that’s reasonable?
This thread is very pessimistic. The technology for diesel generators didn’t exist when we started pissing about with oil. Demand and capability develop hand in hand. I don’t doubt hydrogen is hard to store today, but the same has been true for other things in the past. First there is a problem, then we solve it. This seems much easier to solve than global conflict and poverty so I have high hopes for the hydrogen fuel cell future. It’ll get there.
Artificial frog. Whip a sticky tongue out from one of the pacific islands and snare a 20k kph snack of debris. Bring it in for recycling, yum.
All we need is highly accurate tracking, a powerful propulsion device and a really long unroll-able tongue that’s got some flex.
I volunteer to help research this approach, all I need is a few million quid and encouraging words.
Tables are useful, general formatting. Images are very useful, and I don’t mind them displaying but I want them in the message so they can be scanned and don’t call out to let people know I’ve opened the email.
I get that there are downsides, but all this attitude does is cause people to look to third party tools to send the messages they want, which then means more attack surface.
I want to use emojis, I want to use tables, I want to use images. If email can’t do it, I don’t want email.
You might not understand it, but it’s easy for me. Not only do I know how it works, I’ve got a whole team of people who are even smarter than me (would you believe?), and we’re all just so excited to help you! Yes, little old you! You can get a piece of this power, come this way my friend and I’ll explain some more, or even better, just sign right here and you’ll understand in no time!!! :)
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