Posts by Dan 55

Re: Peter Bright

Not sure where the misattribution is, you just need to look for the words "Foley wrote" and "Bright wrote" in the article.

If you wanted a smoking gun "MS is doing everything right" cheerleading quote, you could try this:

The integration of testing and QA into part of the regular development process, instead of the old test and stabilization phase, means that the code quality is always decent and always shippable.

That's why they've just released the operating system equivalent of a car crash.

The layoffs were even flagged up in that article:

one victim group appears to have been the dedicated programmatic testers in the Operating Systems Group (OSG), as OSG is following Bing's lead and moving to a combined engineering approach. Prior to these cuts, Testing/QA staff was in some parts of the company outnumbering developers by about two to one. Afterward, the ratio was closer to one to one

But then absolutely no thought was made to what this meant about the quality of the operating system and, in the context of the whole article, it doesn't really matter because Agile.

The entire gist was Agile is great, MS can release faster and more often, Devs can somehow do better code if they test it by themselves, QA can somehow test better when they don't have to do automated testing but just "real world" testing (i.e. click and hope for the worst), and the party poopers holding everything up aren't needed as much any more because Agile. Under that methodology, testers got fired because they're less important to the process and we know they got fired because MS announced it.

Whilst it might work for Bing where they can do fixes in production, it's useless for an operating system where every upgrade means a one-time installation process that irrevocably changes users' data. I bet you could have counted the number of devs who unit tested running just one update scenario with the latest build on the fingers of one hand and QA didn't go through all the possible update scenario combinations because they're only doing "real world" testing which misses a load of stuff because the real world is much bigger than Redmond.

Re: Regressions

I'm not sure that firing the marketing folks will fix that. But, what the hell, it might be worth trying.

The six months release cycle is entirely marketing driven.

Re: Good luck

32-bit code is useful for IoT stuff as 32-bit ARM chips are still a thing. It'd probably be wise not to throw it out just yet.

Re: I expect to be flamed

I honestly can't see how they're liable, since I can't honestly see how they could have prevented this.

Encrypt it with a password/secret that he didn't know.

Re: Worst software ever...

And yet I'm more productive than using Jira.

I'm surprised anything more complicated than Pong ever came out on the Atari as the thing only had one one-line background sprite and five player one-line sprites which were positioned just in front of the TV's scanline. Which explains Pacman.

Re: Modern Interface, and other stupid comments

What makes an interface, “modern”?

1. Complete lack of immediate visual discoverability so you have to mouse over everywhere to find out where the widgets are.

2. Doesn't follow the platform style guidelines (which doesn't matter any more as they've probably been a shitshow over the past 5-10 years anyway).

Re: Is there a Firefox setting for this ?

You can check what your browser will support here.

Some other useful settings for about:config:

security.ssl3.rsa_aes_128_sha;false

security.ssl3.rsa_aes_256_sha;false

security.ssl3.rsa_des_ede3_sha;false

security.tls.version.max;4 # TLS 1.3

security.tls.version.min;3 # TLS 1.2

Re: There's always an excuse to increase prices, but...

Several issues. Firstly selective editing is fun. Secondly those people don't speak for all leavers.

They were all prominent people linked to the Leave campaign talking before the referendum.

Thirdly remainers like to get hung up about what was said in the campaign - all those things weren't.

They were the Leave campaign's vision of Brexit before the referendum. Or are you saying 65% of leave voters were mistaken?

Leaving the EU means leaving the single market and customs union

You've not heard of the EEA? There's even the EEA + CU option that isn't there if the UK wants to take it. The problem is May's red lines, otherwise this could be over tomorrow.

Re: Commerce

If I said I didn't like Windows development because the Microsoft C Compiler is limited and only runs from a DOS prompt, I guess that would be silly too.

Re: Sage 50!

Despite turning off every sound option, and leaving the external speakers switched off, it still insisted on also sending the keyboard beep via a piezo sounder on the motherboard.

Isn't the problem that you turned every sound option off and disconnected the external speakers, so Windows decided that meant you wanted to hear the PC speaker?

Re: The "Smart Home" crashed?

They designed it wrong, the app should work on the LAN with cloud for those who really must control things outside their house (if they enable the feature first).

So far I think only Ikea's done this.

Also, what does "unexpected load" mean? DDoS?

Re: Well that's weird....

contracts go to companies located in countries where their government contributes money towards ESA budget

Note, by the way, that ESA membership is nothing to do with the EU

Therein lies the problem, who knows what the British government is doing tomorrow, let alone in the short or medium term? Least of all the British government. Some good old-fashioned political stability would be nice, and it just ain't there in the UK.

ESA and the EU aren't the same, but there was an EU-only clause for the Galileo project put in after lobbying from the UK. Now the UK is leaving they could cut ESA funding because ESA is following the rules and not allowing them to bid for Galileo.

Re: TANSTAAFL

As well and the ones in the Wikipedia link, there's also Vivaldi.net and possibly posteo.de (not sure if it's got IDLE).

Protect your email the German way

Re: 128GB?

You can...

I think it was an ECJ ruling which prompted this change.

The ECnHR can be made much more difficult to access by rescinding the 1998 HRA so British courts won't have to take it into account in its rulings. Anyone who wants to argue something using the convention will have to escalate it to the top in the UK then go to Strasbourg.

The Tories said in their 2017 manifesto that they'd keep the HRA... during Brexit.

Re: "replete with a hidden ribbon cable"

Language is important and I expect professional wordsmiths to use it properly.

It's the third definition in the link.

Are you going to stop here or carry on digging?