Posts by AndrueC

Re: It's a sign I tell you...

They did but it went off the rails somewhere.

Re: The only way now?

I introduce you to a book written in 1952.

I read that when I was a teenager in the 1980s and have done everything I can since to avoid advertising. It should be compulsory reading in schools.

I have to admit that very much puts it in to perspective. My #1 reason for wanting nothing to do with JS is because of the plethora of libraries and how so many are created, developed then dropped because the developer got bored.

Re: Anyone sees an apology anywhere?

I don't actually have a dog in this fight but I'm confused by your post.

Them: 'This move was a mistake' means 'we did something wrong'.

Them: 'The board deeply regrets that this happened' means 'we're sorry.'

So to me that reads like 'We're sorry that we did it'. And yet you have commented 'Nothing about being sorry, nothing about "we did" anything.'

"The .NET Foundation violated the trust of project maintainers because they were under the impression.." - All their fault, no?

This part of your post seems ambiguous, are you implying that the board is blaming the maintainers? To me it seems that they are accepting blame for violating the trust of project maintainers and accepting blame for not communicating their reasons at the time to the same people.

Time will tell - that I agree with. But this whole cock-up might be the result of communication failure ;)

I doubt very much that the latest Windows will alllow you to skip loading ten dozens of "services" for which you have no use, and will just bloat the RAM and diminish performance for nothing.

What a strange comment. Why do you think Windows doesn't allow you to disable services? Just launch services.msc and disable whatever you don't like the look of. Or if you prefer the command line:

I've disabled probably over a dozen services on my personal computers (all running Windows 10). Microsoft has done nothing to stop users disabling services and we remain fully in control of our operating system. Just because you don't know how to do something doesn't mean that it can't be done. It's not even hidden information - it's an official part of system configuration.

Anyway we were talking about power consumption not performance so loading RAM up with chuff is fairly irrelevant. But even if we were talking about performance it's an axiom of IT that you address that through hardware. There are still game companies targeting the Windows platform so it appears to have no serious performance issues

Re: Remember when ...

..and using Visual Studio and ReSharper it sometimes feels like that's what I'm actually running on instead of an i7-6700 with 32GB of RAM.

Re: TGV software woes

I remember the lights going out on a Chiltern Train once. The train kept going. After a couple of minutes the driver apologised for pressing the wrong button. That left me feeling somewhat uneasy...

The trouble is that the customers in this case are not 'paying for the bandwidth'. They are paying for a fraction of it. Unless you have a leased line you are sharing your ISP's bandwidth with other customers. You might think that having signed up for a 1Gb/s residential connection you are paying for 1Gb/s of bandwidth but you are not. Not even close. Somewhere in the contract it will state that it's a best efforts, contended service.

It's quite surprising just how high contention can be before customers start to complain. Very few customers run their connection flat out 24/7 and a lot of traffic is bursty. Even video can tolerate pauses in transmission as long as the connection is fast enough to catch-up before the receiver's buffer runs dry.

However it's not magic and given the right (wrong?) circumstances ISPs can get caught out. Then they have to invest but when it's for something fickle like a TV show that's a tricky proposition. Personally my view is that SK should invest, increase their prices and tell their customers to lump it. Too many people think that network bandwidth and connectivity is easy to provide and overpriced. A little dose of reality would be a good thing :)

Re: Targeted ads

Good job (haha) that it's not running iOS:

"You're holding it wrong"

Why isn't it running as 'nobody' with access to two sockets and nothing else? Fucking Windows piece of shit.

That isn't a requirement and hasn't been for quite a while. That article was first published in 2007 and refers to kernel mode printer drivers as 'dinosaurs'.

The article also states:

"With the release of Windows 2000, the printer drivers moved back to user-mode."

Unfortunately some printer manufacturers are a bit slow to update their drivers. Probably the usual story of hardware manufacturers not investing in the supporting software.

Sadly some sites seem to treat this is an error.

Re: Pluto

I get the feeling that we're all going round in circles here.

Re: The reality is that it's happening now

Yet another misunderstanding what is being talked about here. It has nothing to do with the physical connection. It's purely the cessation of analogue services.

It just means that over the next four(ish) years everyone is going to have to switch to a VoIP solution. Whether that's VoiP over copper, fibre or pigeon is irrelevant.

Re: I wonder if fecal matter could be used

Eggsactly right.

Re: Squid

Was there an ink jet printer attached?

Re: Warnings are usually there for a reason.

Yup, been there very recently. I was reworking some code and after initial testing was surprised to see R# underlining a field and offering to remove it. I must have looked at the declaration for ten minutes before spotting a typo. It turned out I'd declared two fields with subtly different names instead of just one.

In this case I caught it during initial development but it proves your point.

I've also had cases where R# tells me a condition is always false or true and upon investigation those have turned out to be bugs that needed fixing.

At least you'll be safe from Koala Bears (although that's not actually a pleonasm). That is just wrong because they aren't bears :)

Eyes too close together (sometimes have a patch over one eye), untidy hair and go by the name of 'Lefty'.

Re: Naval budgets mean the crew must eat three square meals a day for £3.61.

It's not all that tight a budget. I live alone and seem to be spending about £7 a day on average. But that's a single adult shopping at a well known national grocer's online site, includes some luxuries and non-food related items. I also don't bother looking for bargains or cheaper items and mostly buy ready prepared stuff rather than raw ingredients.

I reckon an organisation as big and important as the RN can negotiate some damn good deals on stuff and cooking from scratch is saving money if you ignore the staff and facilities costs.

Re: iFixit

After the traditional ten minutes of following the instructions I ended up "gently unhooking" it with the aid of a large flat-bladed screwdriver and some bad language.

To be fair a lot of things can be fixed with bad language. Although Visual Studio is still a work in progress for me.

Slightly quicker to build as well. Just leave some skin off and half an oxygen tank.

I know how these things work.

Re: Whats going on with .Net Core ?

to prevent confusion

It didn't really work. Or perhaps there's just too much confusion already :)

No long term consequences you say? Trying to go to the US is one.. Just being arrested anywhere in the world makes you ineligible for an ESTA for the rest of your life

Alright then, no negative long term consequences :D

But of course what I meant is that there are no consequences for Britons living their lives in Britain. It doesn't affect your job prospects or your standing in society. Contrast that with the US where being arrested and released without charge can blight your life for years and require you to pay money to have the record expunged. Utterly disgusting.

The British legal system cannot be held responsible for restrictions imposed on its citizens by other nations. The US reaction just sounds like another example of its warped legal system. Anyway you can still visit the USA if you really want to. You just have to apply for a visa as someone I know had to.

Re: Who creates the hash?

Several organisations have created them. I used them at a previous employer over 15 years ago when they were all MD5 (the issuers were just in the process of rolling out SHA5 versions). Even back in the early 00s the list was perfectly manageable.

Our forensic software used it to highlight various categories of files including:

* Known applications.

* Known operating systems.

* Known installers.

(All the above it treated as chaff and by default hid it to avoid wasting the investigator's time)

* Known 'bad stuff' which it highlighted in red.

I was quite surprised just how performant the lookups were (obviously generating the hashes locally was a CPU hit but they were generated during the initial prep stage and stored the result in metadata).

But such hashes are easily defeated by changing a single bit and Apple's seems to be something more powerful. I'm guessing the DBs that we used (mailed to us on CDs, lol) have likewise moved on to something better.

Whoah, folks! Not wishing to be subject to the wrath of my fellow commentards for mentioning a well known e-tailer and their home grown digital reader but if you were to do a search on that well known web site for 'Hugh Walters' you'd find you can get a lot of those books electronically for around £4 each.

No idea when they became available but they weren't there a couple of years ago.

I think nostalgia is worth £4 a book :)