* Posts by Dan 55

15336 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jun 2009

Linux kernel 6.0 debuts, Linus Torvalds teases ‘core new things’ coming in version 6.1

Dan 55 Silver badge

"ancient Atari personal computers"

AKA Atari Falcon... this kind of information is very important to include for aging comentards.

Although would the rest of Linux even fit into an Atari Falcon, seeing as that's been collecting some middle-aged spread lately too.

Google kills off Stadia

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Landfill

What they should to do is push out an automatic update which turns it into an XBox-compatible controller. Only a small percentage of people will find an open source project and install it, so the majority of controllers will be unnecessary e-waste and they should be taxed for it.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Failed because failure was expected?

Google and Phil Harrison. What could have possibly gone right?

HDD Clicker gizmo makes flash sound like spinning rust

Dan 55 Silver badge
Go

Re: Voyage (back to my childhood) home

You can if you really want to.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Cool...

Just one floppy drive click when turning on? Luxury. Some of us had an Amiga with the floppy drive clicking every couple of seconds.

Wind, solar fulfill 10% of global electricity demand for first time

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Explosives do, what politics did not

Repaired to buy gas from a hostile power, who may even have blown them up in the first place?

The best thing that can be done with those is recover the metal from the sea bed and reuse/recycle.

OK, Google: Why are you still pointing women at fake abortion clinics?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Google should not rely on automation for this

Not sure if the invisible hand of the market is the right way to go about this, seeing as it can't even get the more basic things right.

Arm founder says the UK has no chance of tech sovereignty

Dan 55 Silver badge

Fuzix for the post-societal collapse win.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Not just tech

The UK's policy has long been it doesn't matter who owns it as long as they bring the money... that works until the government scares the people with money with crazy referendums and budgets.

Removing an obsolete AMD fix makes Linux kernel 6 quicker

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: The older the OS...

Did the Belle UI get uploaded or did Nokia keep that? I suspect it was the latter.

Rust is eating into our systems, and it's a good thing

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Yeah They're Wrong

If the programmer is really at a level where they don't know how wide an IEEE double-precision floating point value is, perhaps they might also be confused with what the "f" is in "f64".

Nor am I convinced by the ownership argument which wasn't expanded upon, unless by default all variables are const unless specified otherwise, which could be something to enforce better programming practice... or a pain in the backside.

You mention following good design patterns in C++ saves a lot of debugging time later. From what I can gather it seems Rust's main advantage is it doesn't have older design patterns which people fall back on so removing foot-gun opportunities. There are a tonne of paid-for static code analysis tools which can do similar for C and C++, but like code reviews, business is loathe to spend the money on them.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Yeah They're Wrong

So "const double x" in other words?

Why am I supposed to be impressed by "let x: f64" instead of "const double x"?

This is a genuine question.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: ALGOL, PASCAL, MODULA 2, ADA

You should probably check the date each thing you cite failed in the market, you'll probably find that it died when competing against paid-for Unix.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: ALGOL, PASCAL, MODULA 2, ADA

Unix was given away for "free", so it dominates to this day.

AT&T Unix was most certainly not free. Neither were Solaris, AIX, or HP U/X. And yet it still came out on top.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Something C++ can do that Rust can't

I'm talking about one variable, string, structure, or function at a time. Refactoring when fixing bugs over months or years that doesn't scare the PHBs and their budgets, because it's effectively free.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Something C++ can do that Rust can't

Backward compatibility.

From C/old C++ to Rust would be a big bang change, from C/old C++ to new C++ can be done piecewise.

That's quite a barrier to overcome.

Spotted at industry confab: Quadcopter equipped with Brit missiles Ukraine is so fond of

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Here We Go Again...

I am so looking forward to reading CNet-style articles. It's what made me a regular reader of The Register all those years ago, putting up with their article style but knowing that one day they would decide to turn into a copy of CNet.

Post-Brexit 'science superpower' UK still hasn't appointed a science minister

Dan 55 Silver badge

If markets require more STEM then salaries will rise, universities will add places and increase fees to pay for them and Eton will encourage its students to do physics instead of PPE.

Are you sure? That should have happened already, but it hasn't.

Soaring costs, inflation nurturing generation of 'quiet quitters' among under-30s

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Wrong!!

Back-to-office mandates, many of which do not mandate 100% WftO anyway, is merely putting effective pay back to what it was before the WfH mandates.

Because petrol or diesel is unchanged in price since before the pandemic?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: I had a different comment written, but....

Then why is knowledge and experience being lost?

Let's put aside office work for one moment. You can see it everywhere in service industries - bars/restaurants/cafes, hotels, airports, airlines. Reduced hours, slower service, issues going unresolved.

Presumably the calculation by management is that the profitability is the same nonetheless.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: I had a different comment written, but....

Right now employers are screaming for help.

They really aren't, they're firing people, not taking new people on, and expecting those that remain to do more work in the same time so they're run round silly every day or do more overtime.

I presume not falling into the trap is called "quiet quitting", as it sounds worse.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Managers beware

What are they up to? Not doing 1-2 hours overtime every day?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Wrong!!

Water, broadband, and mobile are also going up, they also run on electricity instead of pixie dust.

Expect the same for everything else (e.g. insurance) as yearly renewal time comes around.

Serious surfer? How to browse like a pro on Firefox

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Not for me, I'm afraid.

It's more and more difficult to use Waterfox Classic with web 3.0 in all its jquery glory. I'm not clear what the advantage of non-classic Waterfox is over Firefox ESR though.

Good news for UK tech contractors as govt repeals IR35 tax rules

Dan 55 Silver badge
Coffee/keyboard

Re: No fan of Bolsheviks

John Major got it spot on when he said "Fifty years from now Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers, and — as George Orwell said — old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist" didn't he?

You just need to look at the first three weeks of Truss' government and it's obvious Merry Olde England is in safe hands against the terrible designs of the extreme left.

Isn't that right Mister Flibble?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Excellent

Indeed. Few governments try to avoid borrowing to invest in public services/infrastructure while interest rates are low then suddenly shift to borrowing just to be able to cut taxes for the richest in society while interest rates are high.

I wonder why nobody's tried this since the 1970s.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Excellent

Those lefties are so frothing that they've battered the pound, bonds, and guilts in realtime while the new chancellor was presenting his special fiscal operation.

Oh, sorry, not lefties, I meant markets.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Wake me up

Sure thing, if the British economy hasn't collapsed by then and people survive by trading goods and services for goats.

Mozilla drags Microsoft, Google, Apple for obliterating any form of browser choice

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Mozilla is not a very good browser, convince me otherwise

The answer is an option called Chrome auto sign-in which has been around since version 69. The opt-out settings toggle was released in version 70, after most users had been automatically signed in in version 69. This also meant the opt-out sync option had synchronised their local Chrome profile with their Google account. Mission accomplished (for Google).

You might say you are on top of Chrome's opt-out privacy settings, in which case you are a fraction of a percentage of Chrome users.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Mozilla is not a very good browser, convince me otherwise

You don't really need a profile manager to separate cookies etc... now as there are containers.

Chome's profile manager is just a way of linking the user to their Google account.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: How about...

It might happen again... If you're in the EU (like last time).

Dan 55 Silver badge

I just played a video and I'm not even in Canada...

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Firefox sucks! Mozilla blames the successful products but, it still sucks!

I know Google tries to make rendering their websites on non-Chome browsers real heavy work. Perhaps that's the problem.

A match made in heaven: systemd comes to Windows Subsystem for Linux

Dan 55 Silver badge
Devil

It had to be pid 1 as was the init process for WSL.

I imagine Poettering's grinning because he's thrilled that the systemd knotweed has found another distro to take over, and the one with the greatest reach at that. If that won't make it the de facto standard, nothing will.

Meta, Google learn the art of the quiet layoff

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: employement tribubal.

The deal was the public sector could not compete on pay but competed on hours, flexibility, strict adherence to employment law, and pensions.

I would imagine that this is not happening lately. Can't think why.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: An old trick in the US

The Equal Pay Act 1970 was a requirement for EC membership, if it hadn't have been passed before entry it would have had to have been passed after entry to avoid breaking Article 119 of the Treaty of Rome.

The Sex Discrimination Act 1975 came before the 1976 Equal Treatment directive but it had to be amended due to a landmark case in the UK.

The HSW Act 1974 was a response to an explosion at the Nypro chemical plant in Flixborough which destroyed the plant and killed 28 people. Later EC directives were inspired by this and the Employment Protection Act 1975 so reflected the UK's interests. Once there were directives covering the same area it was more difficult to back out of them. Neither act came from Tory governments (if you can even call the current ERG and Britannia Unhinged-driven regime a Tory government).

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: employement tribubal.

If anyone believes that AC actually works in the UK public sector I've got a bridge to sell them.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: An old trick in the US

Your answer is the EU workers rights and labour law directives. The British government has said that it aim to remove all EU laws on the statue books by the end of 2023. Whether there are enough people in the civil service to achieve this by the end of 2023 is another question. Presumably a lot of this will be performative divergence, slight changes to be able to say changes were made, but workers rights and labour law will be one of the things that the government will want to be able to show has changed substantially.

Also this is your regular reminder that member states have government representation at Commission and Council and voter representation in the Parliament. If a directive happened it's because member states chose to make it happen.

Firefox 105 is here, and it's faster and more memory-frugal

Dan 55 Silver badge

None of that is possible with the mobile version.

The mobile version has a grand total of 16 "curated" extensions, it seems all work on making the rest work has ground to a halt.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Vertical Tabs

I still prefer the original Panorama/Tab Groups extension which got brought into Firefox and then unceremoniously dumped in Mozilla's continual efforts to turn the GUI into an empty interface with just one button in the middle.

There is a similar extension, but it's less polished than the original because WebExtensions is gubbins.

BT CEO orders staff: Back to the office or risk 'disciplinary action'

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: "If you want to fire people, just have the balls to fire them"

It's easy to argue that if your local office was closed in the meantime, you have to travel further to another office of their choosing, and now have higher commuting costs due to inflation.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Happy

Re: Agreed

buy-in to the company will diminish.

First you're going to have to show me a company where management buy in to their employees. No cheating, it's got to be an IT company.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Devil

Taking a leaf out of IBM's book I see

"We've closed down your local office. You must turn up at your designated hub (Land's End) three times a week or be dismissed."

If you want to fire people, just have the balls to fire them instead of this farce.

'Last man standing in the floppy disk business' reckons his company has 4 years left

Dan 55 Silver badge

I was convinced support was removed, but after searching around a bit when I should have been working it turns out the first Windows Insider builds did not support floppy drives but then support was brought back and I guess news of it going spread more widely than the news of it being brought back.

Dan 55 Silver badge

USB drives still work in Windows 10, but the classic floppy drives connected via a ribbon cable inside the PC case don't work unless you add the driver. Linus also talked about knocking classic floppy drives on the head. Unfortunately USB drives can't read anything that isn't a 1.44MB PC-formatted disk.

Meta, Twitter, Apple, Google urged to up encryption game in post-Roe America

Dan 55 Silver badge

They don't need to up their encryption game

They need to lower their data collection game... and then the problem solves itself.

EU puts smart device manufacturers on the hook for cyber security

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: I can understand...

Those selling junk that is insecure and unmaintained will not be in business for long.

Why's Vizio such a big thing in the US then?

Bad UI killed the radio star

Dan 55 Silver badge

Always follow the protocol

If it goes wrong then it's the protocol's fault, not yours.

Although if you followed the protocol and it went wrong and you wrote it in the first place then perhaps you don't have a get-out clause. But even then following the protocol looks better than just mashing buttons.

Arm execs: We respect RISC-V but it's not a rival in the datacenter

Dan 55 Silver badge

Not very much. They would probably need someone in Cambridge to answer the question for them.

But there's more than two decades of ARM SoCs in mobile phones, that history and experience counts for something as well. That doesn't suddenly get thrown out for RISC-V overnight.