Posts by Ross 12

Any software patches for Excel would be like a microcode update for the processor, I love it!

Gotta admit, I always liked Clippy. OK the 'help' was useless and irritating, but having that expressive little guy in the corner of the screen reacting to what you were doing was nice

So they're writing a new desktop from scratch, and it does look very neat and professional, but it also looks really really similar to gnome. Feels like a wasted opportunity to try something visually different instead of creating yet another flat UI

Most impressive thing

..for me is that they have a CEO who seems to have actual technical knowledge of what their company does, how they do it, and why,

Anyone else really bored with Space Karen's shenanigans? I don't believe he ever genuinely intended to buy Twitter, partly because it's too well established to be able to later claim that he founded it

Still using Evolution on linux here. Webmail is handy sometimes, but the interfaces *cough*GMail*cough* are usually atrocious

I get the feeling that a lot of the drive for this stuff is that the current generation of developers are using cheap chromebooks despite many users having desktops with big screens. Hence everything now is tied to keyboard shortcuts and 'command palettes' (because nobody likes using touchpads), and an app's entire UI is crammed into it's titlebar because the devs have little vertical screen space.

And as for theming - Linux and FOSS was always about choice and giving power to users. I'm all for having a really nice default look, but you can't even tweak the colours (apparently Ubuntu are patching in the ability to choose a single accent colour?) Instead of taking theming away, why couldn't they go the other way and design a proper, robust, theming API? In fact, a cross-DE or even cross-OS theming API would be amazing. Users could choose their preferences for colour schemes, rounded/square corners, shadows, transparency, mono/outline/full colour icons, etc and each theme can implement those preferences within its own style. The API could also generate contrasting or complementary colours as needed based on the user choice of primary colour, or pick from the background image etc.

'self-taught Visual Basic programmer'

When you hear those words you know you're in for a very bad time

It still blows my mind that I have a handheld battery powered internet terminal in my hand with an 8-core 64-bit processor, 8gb of ram, and 64gb of storage that I can do most of my day-to-day computing on. When I was a kid writing BASIC on my Speccy, those stats would have been absolutely incomprehensible.

It's hard to get excited about advances now because most of our needs are already met. Pretty much any device made in the past 10 years is 'good enough' to do your every-day web stuff, and most obstacles are in the software - abandoned or deprecated systems.

The gains we get now are really only significant for less common use cases, like video editing, graphics rendering, audio production, VR, etc. Gaming is probably the most mainstream use case that's still pushing hardware forward, but even then, the visible gains are becoming less and less significant, with the latest-gen consoles moving to SSDs providing the most noticeable jump in capability in recent years.

Why? Why do people still use Oracle?

Microsoft need to kill it off like they have with IE rather than just politely suggesting that devs move on to something new.

I think what's needed is

a foundation of foundations founded by successful foundations to found new foundations and help all the other foundations to run themselves and behave the way the foundations were founded to

slider

Why the hell don't they have a slider for 'user advancedness' or whatever you want to call it, with 'beginner/casual user' at one end and 'enthusiast/power user' at the other end and 'intermediate user' in the middle.

Then all aspects of the Windows interface can configure themselves around it. I.e. presenting simpler sub-sets of options, doing more hand-holding, etc depending on the setting. Allow applications to also access the setting.

"Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing, and its IA-64 instruction set"

Wait, is AMD's EPYC a sly two-fingered salute at Intel?

Backups?

If you shell out stupid money for an NFT like this, then surely you'll also make a backup or two of your 'valuable' possession? In which case you've just made another perfect digital copy. Every time it's transferred over a network, it's copied. The sooner this insanity ends the better.

WebAssembly, rust, webgl, canvas... just missing the blockchain element

Re-invention of the wobbly RAM-pack

Does it come with blu-tak?

Facebook

The thing about Facebook is that because of their size and dominance, people assume they're professionals and know what they're doing. But I get the distinct impression that they're mostly staffed by excitable but amateur coders who think they're pioneers and treat everything as an opportunity to 'do something cool' which amounts to badly reinventing the wheel. The bugs and weird behaviours at occur in facebook's mobile app and web front-end often suggest that the architecture is an unholy un-tamable mess

That was an article?

You may as well have added 'just do your research!!!' to the assertion that there's 'far more interesting stuff happening in tech that matters to everyone'

"If anything can impede the growing popularity of VS Code, it will be when the number and sophistication of its many extensions become a burden."

Ahh yes, the Firefox trap.

Some of these features sound like it's taking ideas from Rust

They still don't get it do they?

Nobody is going to port old code to a shiny new framework just because there's a new API - no matter how much nicer it is. That's simply not the reason anybody writes code. And for as long as Windows supports running win32 apps, people will keep win32 code around, and keep writing new apps in it to reach a wider audience than anything new.

There's 25+ years of Win32 code out there in the wild. Half the developers have probably died, retired, or changed career. Half the source code probably no longer exists. Just as with COBOL, there'll be Win32 code out there running that people don't even know about and that probably hasn't been looked at since Y2k was a thing. There'll be code propping up businesses large and small all over the world who's in-house developers and external vendors have long since disappeared.

Microsoft will never be able to rid itself of Win32 by trying to tempt developers to use something new. The only way they'll do it is to put their foot down and stop supporting it whilst making sure there's a clear and definite stable alternative - something that Microsoft are pretty much incapable of.

I really think that Microsoft need to accept the fact that they're a 'boring' business software vendor - not a hip and trendy brand. They got the corporate world hooked on Windows, Office and VS etc, and that means they're stuck with them for the long term.

CSVs

This is another great example of why CSVs are shit and need to be left in the past where they belong.

Xerox are such a weird company. Outside of the US, they're just kinda known as that american photocopier company. And then you find out that they invented the GUI, WYSIWYG editing, and ethernet.

Cloudless hot-desking? Great. Still, if it's just an option to be used by whoever it is that needs it, then that's ok. Really don't want it enabled by default though thanks

Jesus wept

What a mess. And why oh why did they use the name .NET Core for something that isn't the core of .NET?

Hmmm the shingling sounds like a kludge. It's clever and I'm sure they'll get it to work, but it sounds like reliability might become an issue and the write speed penalty doesn't sound good

Ever get the feeling that HTTP/2 tries to kill too many birds with one stone?

"My experience of the same chip in last year's BlackBerry was that it was fine to start off with but slowed down under strain"

Is it really the processor that's the problem here? Everyone always seems to ignore the quality of the internal storage, which seems more likely to be an issue when it comes to degrading performance over the life of the device

Crowdfunded projects are risky definition, because you're financially backing something, not merely purchasing an item.

But I don't think that's necessarily something to be scared of - just be cautious. And with that in mind, whenever you see a crowdfunded project by a **company**, run away, because it means they're not risking their own money.

Just compare this sorry Vega+ tale to the ZX Spectrum Next. Yes, it's running late, but the first stage of developer boards went out. There's been regular monthly updates from the team which actually detail and show photos of the production process and how it's going. And the team is made up of passionate people who actually care about what they're doing, and are doing it not-for-profit. There's no shareholders and directors siphoning off money and bickering with each other. And the community of backers are actively involved - helping out with documentation, OS and firmware, writing emulators and games for it..

Oh HTC, you always manage to thwart your brilliance with something stupid :(