* Posts by BobbyTables

17 publicly visible posts • joined 25 May 2021

Abstract, theoretical computing qualifications are turning teens off

BobbyTables

Please do not return to the noughties.

I was doing my GCSEs in the late ‘00s, a couple of years before the computer science GCSE was introduced. They were a complete joke and I really hope they don’t return to them.

For the coursework, we had to produce a children’s book (okay?), in the natural tool for the job, Powerpoint. When I immediately questioned this (we even had access to publisher, which I had used as far back as year 6), I was simply told to shut up and do it in powerpoint, which I did. My coursework (60% of the grade) was on track for an E and I had no idea how to improve it as the tasks were so fundamentally broken. I just wanted to get out of school, so I asked my teacher “If I get every question right in the exam, will I get a C”. He said “Yes, but don’t count on it.”

I did the exam in half an hour. It was all questions about dated hardware like floppy disks. (I was already years into building my own PCs at this stage, so the hardware side of stuff was child's play) I did it in half the allotted time and got my C in the end.

The IT GCSE was actually far less in depth than the IT skills I had done in KS2. (We were doing excel formulas back then, almost programming!) I still use those skills, it’s worth teaching in order to get familiarity with general computer tasks. However it’s not enough to really understand what is going on, just as primary school maths isn’t considered enough to get you into any job.

I accept the world is different now. A friend worked in IT at a school until a couple of years ago and he said as time went on, more and more kids lacked basic knowledge of computers and had to be taught things like how to use a mouse. They had all just had touchscreens only their entire lives and it wasn’t until secondary school that they sat in front of a desktop pc.

Not that it is an insurmountable problem, the first computers I used also had no mice, because they were BBC Micros.

I think the answer is to teach the basic user skills early, but by GCSE you should really be learning how these things actually work and how to write your own software.

A year after Broadcom took control of VMware, it's in the box seat

BobbyTables

I hope they suffer. Karma will get them eventually.

What a nasty, cynical, greedy way to run a company. Is Jabba the Hut the CEO by any chance? I feel really bad for all the staff broadcom laid off. VMWare may have had its ups and downs, but they did work hard to make a good product, and support it. They earned their market share, and without the staff to maintain it, it's all downhill from here.

Hopefully over time as more customers that can move away do; the newer companies that form will steer clear. Broadcom are well and truly another Oracle. Nobody would ever migrate to any of their products. They have reached the peak customer base they will ever see unless they buy more companies (RIP Sun!), and from here it will be a decline. Our company was considering VMWare for a few projects until last year. No way in hell will we go near it now.

Same deal with Unity trying the same business model and increasing prices threefold. We aren't married to them, we will migrate.

Microsoft flashes Win10 users with more full-screen ads for Windows 11

BobbyTables

I am not looking forward to having to "upgrade" to W11 at work. I lose so much of my time to Windows just being a poorly designed OS and not being able to automate basic tasks which would be trivial on literally any other operating system. I find modern windows such a frustrating experience that very high on list of things I'm looking for in my next job is lack of Microsoft.

And I'm fortunately at an employer which can at least provide us with (some) PCs new enough to run it. Maybe it's the state of the UK being a poor country now, but I know a huge number of businesses and institutions still running 15+ year old hardware with nowhere near enough money to replace them. That's to say nothing of those with hardware much newer than that and still perfectly adequate, but missing a TPM 2.0. Most of these companies have stopped putting their heating on, and now M$ expects them to replace all their IT equipment. Schools are probably the worst hit and will turn even more to google.

W10 was a total piece of crap too. It had major stability and performance problems, especially early on, and the spyware baked into it crossed the line. I'd been dabbling in Linux since the mid 2000s but finally ditched windows entirely on my own hardware once 7 no longer really became viable.

Arm lays down the law with a blueprint to challenge x86's PC dominance

BobbyTables

Re: The biggest problem with ARM...

No idea why this has been downvoted so much, it's the main reason that arm hasn't made nearly as much progress in desktops and laptops as it should have done.

Arm is great in how flexible it is. Like the 6502 before it. Also like the 6502, it can't tell if it's in a BBC Micro or a Pacemaker. Not good if you want to write an operating system that will run on many devices with an Arm cpu. Take chrome os, it has a fork with separate builds for every single variation of device it is sold on. There are scores of them. What a lovely task maintaining that must be. Imagine if Microsoft had to do that for every single make and model of Windows PC ever built. We wouldn't have had windows! Ah, utopia...

Now the PC doesn't have this problem thanks to having BIOS/UEFI and CPUID. Defacto standards so ubiquitous you would be hard pushed to find x86 hardware that doesn't support them.

What arm are doing here is a big step in the right direction, but I have to wonder in who will actually build hardware to this spec. The game has changed and we're back to hardware and software coming from the same companies. Looking at the big three, Apple certainly wont. Google won't make chromebooks adhere to it because they want you to run chromeos. Microsoft will want you to run windows. Any independent manufacturers will also likely only preinstall windows, of which people are going to want the x86 flavour. Microsoft still probably offer the best chance at it catching on though, if they can sneak it into the mainstream without anyone noticing.

Microsoft finally releases a direct-download Windows 11 on Arm ISO

BobbyTables

Re: Arm SystemReady

A small step in the right direction, however its not going to be enough. It might catch on in the server world where smaller players are the norm, interop is everything, and all the customers are technically literate, but the purveyors of consumer devices will never adopt it unless forced kicking and screaming. It is not in their interests.

This sentence is the problem: "The program provides a balanced approach to standards; too much standardization might restrict partner innovation and too little can result in high software maintenance costs for supporting fragmented products.

Unless forced, there won't be any standardisation at all.

If I'm wrong, and any of the three giants start being more cooperative, it would be Microsoft. They are used to existing on an open platform and aren't reliant on sales from their "Store". They are also less into tweaking their own hardware far from off the shelf designs and are more comfortable to let hardware made by other companies run their stuff. Apple would never dream of adopting it and have so much money and political clout they could sue arm out of relevance in a single suit (like they did to HTC) and Google are cut from the same cloth. They both want their walled garden (or mostly walled) and to take a cut of all sales on the stores they control. And that's your "innovation" for you.

So the catch-22 will carry on. No open hardware means nobody makes OSs for it, and no OSs mean nobody makes hardware to run them on. Yes, I say that with a little hypocrisy since I am using Linux on a Chromebook, but boy was it a challenge to get usable and I have a single distro choice! It just isn't good enough and unless something changes I'm going back to x86 on my next laptop despite the advantages ARM has. It's just too much of a pain in the backside unless you're happy with Apple's prices or Google's spying and forced cloud.

BobbyTables

Don't get me wrong, I like arm. I'm typing this on an Arm powered laptop, but it has a seriously long way to go before it supplants x86. In fact I don't think it ever will until the hardware stops being such a wild west of incompatibility.

The biggest problem is a lack of standardisation. On the PC you can download an iso, throw it on bootable media and be fairly confident it will work. Not so on arm. There's no bios/uefi equivalent to manage startup, nor is there an equivalent of the CPUID instruction, so the OS cannot see what hardware is available and configure itself to suit. This means a separate build is needed for every single individual device you want to support. Not only that, a lot of arm devices are locked down to keep you from even being able to boot an operating system the manufacturer doesn't also conveniently produce! Look up Linux for the arm powered chromebooks. It's a mess and must be a pain for maintainers.

I don't know what devices that ISO is targetting, but I'm willing to bet they're all pretty microsofty. It's not going to work on a chromebook even if they had the exact same CPU.

It's a bit like the 1980s when there were multiple competing incompatible home computers. The PC won out for a few reasons but by far the biggest one was that it essentially became an open standard and anyone could build one, and was free to run anything that boots. The Amiga, Atari ST and Mac all shared a 68000 CPU, but good luck getting AmigaOS to work on a ST! (Yeah, the ST and Amiga could run Mac as virtual machines, but that's an entirely different topic!). "ARM" just doesn't tell you much about any piece of hardware, whereas x86 essentially became synonymous with PC compatible.

To be a real contender for replacing x86, Arm needs that. It needs some form of standardised bootloader, and some form of standardised hardware reporting. I don't see that happening though while its not in the commercial interests of Microsoft, Google and Apple!

Mozilla's Firefox browser turns 20. Does it still matter?

BobbyTables

Happy birthday, I guess.

I've used Firefox as my main browser since 2007. In that time it's mostly only become worse. It peaked at 3.x and only went downhill from there. I have a love/hate relationship with it. I love that it still isn't (yet) chrome and gives me a less-google influenced option. I hate that it's been in a death spiral for years.

The foundation has made blunder after blunder, forgetting why people want to continue to use Firefox and instead spent the best part of the last 13 odd years focusing on copying Chrome, which if I wanted to use, I would use instead.

They started by copying the chrome interface, which I never liked. Hamburger buttons suck. It can be (Mostly) reverted, but it's still a pain.

They then added features nobody cares about like Pocket, Firefox Accounts, Suggesions... all more reasons to track you, but at least unlike chrome they are removable.

Then they copied the addon API so now Firefox addons are just as crippled as chrome ones. Support it by all means for compatibility, but don't make it the only option when we used to have better!

In recent years especially website compatibility is starting to become an issue. I don't know how much of this is down to Mozilla and how much is down to lazy "web developers" who have never even heard of firefox let alone test with it. Microsoft sure don't care, Teams openly refuses to work in Firefox. Almost made me late for a job interview!

Chrome is exactly like what IE used to be in the mid 2000s, only worse. It's got its tentacles in everything, forcing you to use it by being embedded into other things (Thanks Electron!) and it's actively spying on you rather than just enabling others to do it through being incompetent.

I'm keeping an eye on Ladybird. It's the sort of project we really need in the browser space. Fresh blood. Mozilla still make the best browser but they've been braindead as a company for a very long time and it's inevitable it will go the way of Netscape. They didn't learn.

Getting up close and personal with Concorde, Concordski, and Buran

BobbyTables

Re: Wonderful!

I'm British and was at a convention in Dayton with some Ohioan friends. None of us had been to the USAF museum, so with a day spare we went for a look. It's the only reason you could ever have to go to Dayton, but it's worth it. One of the best museums I've ever been to, and it's free! We just about saw all of it in a day, but didn't really get to stare too long.

There's some crazy stuff in there. I loved the 1950s attempt to make a flying car with fans. It looks like something straight out of the Jetsons. I asked why the military would have funded that, the response was it was to fly over minefields. It didn't work, sadly. The missile silo room is mad too. They're just standing up in there.

There's a whole big display about Trump's space force (sorry, Farce), with fancy big signs around it all, including the pen he used to sign it, which is itself signed by him... And next to all that bluster just casually sitting there with no fanfare is the Apollo 15 CM. It's sad, but also strangely poignant.

I've been to Sinsheim too. Both are great.

BobbyTables

Re: Transportation

When I went to Sinsheim I had flown to Suttgart for something else going on in Ludwigsburg, and went up there on the S-Bahn. It took a while but the museum has its own station which is nice, and it goes through some pretty areas once you get out the industrial bits.

Since then I go by car. Last year I drove and this year as a passenger. It's cheaper if enough of you go and split the cost, no dealing with airports or trains, you get to see more, and you can buy lots of cheap booze!

It works if you live in the south of England, can just about do it in a day if you don't hang around, but I wouldnt want to do it coming from the far North or Scotland. Aberdeen feels further of a drive than Stuttgart to me and I've done them both in the space of a few weeks.

BobbyTables

I went to Sinsheim in 2022. Well worth a visit, fabulous museum. The day I went by chance happened to be the day the Bertha Benz rally was there, so there was a lot of very early cars driving around through there.

You can tell when you go inside them just how much bigger the TU-144 is than Concorde, but also how rushed it was. I know which I'd rather actually fly in. Then again if I could chose anything to fly in it would be a Concorde, so that's not entirely fair.

A lovely part of the world too, one of my favourites. I go to Southern Germany every year. It is a drivable distance from England, done it twice. Go as a group and it's cheaper than flying.

Linux geeks cheer as Arm wrestles x86

BobbyTables

Re: ARM needs to standardize

Yup, arm is painful in the real world. I wanted an Arm laptop. I only use Linux, so it makes sense for me.

I use an Arm chromebook (an Asus CM3 Flip) which I bought hoping to get linux on. Chromeos is awful. I eventually succeeded (mostly), but it was a total nightmare. PostmarketOS is the only pre built option. It runs from a micro SD slot because installing to the internal memory is a total farce involving a customised usb-c cable, and has no support for built in audio or bluetooth. Also I had to set it up to swap on the emmc, because it really doesn't have enough ram. That said, I love it. It's fast, the battery lasts forever, I can draw on it, it fits in my handbag and it only cost £200, brand new!

Even amongst chromebooks, which should be the most standardised arm laptops available, there is no standardisation! You can't just shove any copy of chromeos or any old Linux Distro on there. It has to be specifically built for that device.

I think the design of the Linux kernel is partly to blame. It expects a lot of things to be statically compiled in via conditional compilation. Arm hardware is extremely variable, and the kernel seemingly isn't designed to load all these things dynamically to fit the hardware its on. Every single arm chromeos device I'm aware of has its own kernel builds. That's not entirely Linux's own fault, as compounding it (and causing it) Arm has no equivalent of CPUID. The kernel can't probe these things at runtime the way it can on x86. Even if it did though, the Kernel would need a lot of work to support it.

Some form of standard bootloader features, and hardware info all Arm hardware supports would go a long way. Sadly it's in nobody's commercial interests to support that. Google, Apple and Microsoft all make and sell Arm hardware and operating systems. They want lock in.

The PC took off because it was all off the shelf hardware except for the bios, which was easily cloned and became a defacto standard. The industry broke out of IBM's lock in and exploded. That experience is very noticeably missing from Arm devices when you try and use them in the same way.

Python tops programming love list – but if you want a job, learn SQL

BobbyTables
Thumb Up

Re: Feeling smug

Still use Fortran quite often unfortunately. Completely with you on Scheme. I make every excuse to use it where I can. It's such a beautiful language. Less is more.

Rarely is there a day I don't have to deal with a problem that just wouldn't have existed if the whole thing was written in a lisp to begin with. It makes me wonder where we'd be today if it was the standard language everybody used.

GParted 1.4: New version of live partition-manipulation tool

BobbyTables
Happy

Glad to see lots of love for GParted here. It's something I've sort of always taken for granted, it's been so handy and never let me down.

It's one of those really nice utilities that hasn't been ruined by feature creep, has a really obvious and clean interface that doesn't change (which is a must for something so potentially destructive), while still getting updated in useful ways, like bug fixes. Microsoft should take note!

The wild world of non-C operating systems

BobbyTables

Re: Ghosts in the machine

Lisp is the only truly beautiful programming language I've found. It's pure elegance. In the last year since starting to use it, I've learnt so much about being a better programmer from it that I missed in years of C-like languages, and I'm not even using it in an especially idiomatic way.

What really shocked me about it was finding out it originates from the 1950s. It's the polar opposite of Fortran, the only other language of the time. You're right that it was used as a test bed for just about everything modern languages have, and it had an alarming amount of it from early on. It's hard to think that garbage collection was being added to Lisp only a year or two after the modern "if" was invented (in Lisp, naturally). It brought so much innovation to the table all at once. Like the Citroen DS of programming languages.

I'm surprised AI has moved away from it. Its effortless self-modification capabilities would lend itself well to modelling ML concepts would it not? Not my field, not my problem.

I'm fortunate I'm able to use it at work, and it's been a real blessing. It's a shame I probably won't be able to use it more directly in my later career.

To err is human. To really screw things up requires a wayward screwdriver

BobbyTables

Re: A TV related bang!

I almost had this happen when I was 8 years old back in the early 2000s, but got away with it. Popped the back off a CRT and poked around a little. "It can't shock me, It's not plugged in...". It had been recently though! Very fortunately, I didn't get a shock, I was more interested in the area around the faulty aerial socket so didn't go too near the flyback thankfully. I may then have plugged it in for the hell of it which might actually have saved me, I knew not to touch anything with it like that.

I still shudder when I think about it. At least it wasn't a Microwave, the caps in those are even worse.

Later I had an 80s CRT which had the same fault yours had. White line. Give it a whack and you'd get the picture back for a while, but it kept getting worse.

BobbyTables
Unhappy

Done that too. Used a ratchet spanner somewhere else on the engine, accidentally hit B+ on the starter with the other end of it. Messed up the ratchet

Tesla owners win legal fight after software update crippled older Model S batteries

BobbyTables

Re: The overwhelming majority of the ongoing maintenance cost and effort is ... the ICE itself

Neglecting to change brake fluid causes problems due to the fact it is hygroscopic. The water it absorbs will end up corroding the pistons in the calipers, master cylinder and ABS module. Horrible to sort out when it happens, which I've seen many times because brake fluid always gets forgotten. That's going to affect electric cars just as much as any other car from the last 60+ years.

Most EVs also still have coolant in some form. That's something that will want to be changed every now and then, even if the manufacturer says otherwise. Anything else where there is lubricant, and it's bound to be there.

What really kills cars in the UK isn't mechanical failure, it's rust. My 34 year old, formerly abandoned Citroen still runs very well, but it's got some pretty sizable holes in it that are currently being repaired.