maximus1983

Brexit, without the whole concept of targeted ads and the data collection that goes with it would have not been possible.

However nobody mentioned all the people that didn't bother voting because they were at Glastonbury which was on at the same time.

I very much doubt that is true. The UK has been a bad fit in the EU and there has been a sentiment for years that we don't want any EU interference. For example many don't want "The EU monopoly money" (not my words mind you) and generally the public is Euro-sceptic.

The papers and politicians were trying to find a scapegoat because quite frankly it didn't go the way they wanted. Much like Trump's victory claiming that Russia hacked the election (there were like a few thousand placed on facebook, which paled in comparison to the Democrat's budget).

Many of the people that voted out were of older generations that don't pay attention to tech. So I find it dubious how much influence the likes of Cambridge analytical really had.

Actually I disagree here. When you look at the consequences of the technology in countries like Myanmar, The Philippines, Brazil, Cambodia and others and the likes of Mr. Zuckerberg and his ilk giving exactly zero fucks (unless it becomes bad PR) I'm afraid you're definitely wrong on that one.

Like exactly what? You haven't qualified anything here. You just claimed I am wrong because of what? What adverts, what is happening? This is a very vague claim.

I suspect much like the vote to leave the UK it will be very spurious evidence.

It hurts the non-scummy businesses as well.

So the regulation causes problems for people that haven't done anything wrong.

A lets be clear here. People aren't dying, it mostly ads and shitty data collection. I think it might be better to actually educate the public (which govs are doing) as to some of the pitfalls of the internet rather than regulating the crap out of it.

Adtech will die once people start paying for things on the internet. When that will be who knows.

Alex Jones is a meme. Everyone knows he is a nutcase.

As for danger, the mainstream media is just as bad. In the UK we are having people Milkshaked, including veterans.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/9144116/ex-paras-turn-up-to-gu...

Because some publications has deemed the likes Nigel Farage to be a "fascist". So saying that Alex Jones is worse than anyone else is crazy. Just watch CNN and their conspiracy theories about Trump, they do the same but they are never mentioned because they are deemed to be "on the right side" whatever that is.

"I happen to know quite a lot about GDPR because I dealt with it at a client I was previously working with,"

There we go. You already done the time investment at someone else's expense. So thanks for proving my point.

My comments weren't about GDPR but about regulation in general. Any regulation requires more work which makes it difficult for smaller players. You had to do the extra work.

The problem is any regulation is that it increases the startup costs for smaller businesses.

So as more regulation comes in it will just end up cementing the large players in place as they can absorb the costs of any regulation, while smaller businesses will have higher startup costs (which lets face it were next to nothing).

So while you maybe rejoicing now that shitty companies have gone for now, regulation will just make it harder for these massive companies to be toppled as it makes it harder for smaller companies to comply.

The EU are trying to have article 13 pushed through and any site that has user generated content will have to have some sort of upload filter to check for copyrighted content. That is going to cost money to implement and since Youtube hasn't really be able to achieve it, the only people that will be supplying the software will be the likes of Google, Microsoft etc ... So again it will just make it harder to the small business and help the large businesses.

Also a lot of these regulations make are making the web a shittier place. Every time I go onto a site now, I have the stupid cookie and GDPR notice plaster in front of what I want to look at. I already protect myself and don't care about their attempt to track me. It is just an irritation that nobody pays attention to and it achieves the opposite of what it was intended to achieve.

The whole fake news / conspiracy stuff gets me.

I find conspiracy theories to be almost like some sort of sci-fi / fantasy lore.

I love watching stuff like Ancient Aliens, I know it is complete nonsense but it is fun laughing at all the begging the question they do.

My other half believes in some super natural stuff such as horoscopes etc and she gets a bit annoyed at me and my brother taking the mickey out of it but that is about as far as the "harm" goes with most of this stuff.

Trying to stop people believing in crazy things just isn't possible and actively trying to suppress it online will just make it worse.

You miss the point. The system is going to collapse anyway and long term thinking is needed

And then the immigrants stay and get old and there is increased strain on the strained social systems. Most immigration systems in Europe assumed that the immigrants would go home once they have made some money.

At some point it is going to implode anyway. The UK in the last 25 years has completely changed due to immigration and our health system is basically about to fall over, there are massive cultural tensions between natives and immigrant populations that are on the verge of exploding in poorer areas (North of England) on almost a daily basis. None of this gets covered in the news but there are plenty of videos on Facebook, Youtube etc of clashes.

I suggest you read the "Strange Death of Europe".

I stole them from Code Project :D

Totally disagree and I am rather dismayed by people conflating their bad experiences with people over-engineering with these principles.

They are like anything else a good they are good rules of thumb when scaffolding your projects.

Understanding IoC with DI has cleaned up my code soo much and I know it works as I can Unit Test easily.

I don't like car analogies.

A software engineer is like a plumber you link up lots of small components, weld them together and then the data flows through the application (at least that is the idea).

White collar crime is still crime.

Oh comon. We know that most of the fanatics would like to see Gates in Chains.

Anyway, I think we've seen the whole repertoire by now, whataboutism, name calling, strawmen, I'm out of here.

LOL. I always find it funny once you call out Linux fanatics on their nonsense they run away by claiming all sorts of things of their opponent. I didn't name call you, I just said you fit a pattern of a stereotype that I seen before, that isn't an Ad-hominem attack that is pattern recognition.

You provided no evidence other than the usual nonsense of pretending that Microsoft don't have a right to protect their IP and the conspiracy theories that Microsoft are this all powerful entity.

Yeah. There are quite a few ways to do it.

You can even get TCP/IP stack and a Web browser running (though things are very slow and many sites do not work).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svTDHiBePyM

I've done the same with my Amiga 600 / 1200 with a PCMCIA Ethernet Card and Miami.

http://www.retro-commodore.eu/network-installation-on-the-am...

The author uses the more complicated definitions of the SOLID principles.

These are much simpler to remember:

* Single responsibility principle - A class should have only a single responsibility, that is, only changes to one part of the software's specification should be able to affect the specification of the class.

* Open–closed principle - Software entities should be open for extension, but closed for modification.

* Liskov substitution principle - Objects in a program should be replaceable with instances of their subtypes without altering the correctness of that program.

* Interface segregation principle - Many client-specific interfaces are better than one general-purpose interface.

* Dependency inversion principle - One should depend upon abstractions, not concretions.

A lot of these principles also tie into other principles such as DRY (Do not repeat yourself).

TBH this is the pareto principle at work.

Sure you can get a car roughly driving around the city autonomously (there are basic self driving cars back in the 1950s that drove on a wire track) but getting it perfect is where the vast majority of effort is going to be expended.

So, to summarize: vendor lock-in is a thing and the best way to get there is to create closed stuff that open source then has no chance to properly deal with. You can use this to strong-arm all kinds of entities to deal with you on your terms.

No. Please don't put words into my mouth.

The problem is that there is no specs / documentation for anything generally. Most of my time in dev has been spent dealing and finding work around for all sorts shitty bugs in applications when dealing with either web browsers or generating documents.

This is partially because of deliberate vendor lock-in and partially due to nobody being given time to actually produce specs as these are often an after thought. Customers don't care about me making proper documentation, even when they do other developers that do integrations DON'T RTFM and I have to guide them through it anyway. Customers don't pay for specs / docs etc, they pay for the product that lets them get shit done.

Fanatics of Open Source (and they are that) always argue about cost of the software, vendor lock in etc. The costs of the software are almost nothing compared to hiring people. I was on a team of 6 people doing a major rewrite (which shouldn't have been happening IMHO) and it cost the business about £500,000 just in staff. Licenses for SQL Server and Windows server was a small percentage of that and were about 1 man months worth of cost. These costs are nothing for large councils / businesses that will either recoup that cost from the software itself or will just raise taxes to cover the shortfall (which is what Gov always does).

The really good reason to use Open Source software is security, privacy and being able to run what you want on what you have purchased, but that never gets mentioned, it always the bullshit cost angle because £400 sounds a lot to the kids in University which are broke.

Also vendor lock-in is the norm for a vast number of reasons other than "M$ is the evilz, stop using Windoz". Just look at the 8bit/16bit era, almost everything was lock-in and much more expensive than today (by factors of ten). The free PC ecosystem is NOT the norm in computing.

I really don't think I speak for the Linux community but I do think that MS is still the big evil, just in slightly nicer packaging. Fantastic PR, crappy company.

LOL. Google, Facebook, Paypal, Twitter are far more powerful than Microsoft and are much much more evil, you know why? Because they think they are the good guys. Microsoft are basically like IBM these days, they sell loads of proprietary stuff that office use because they have won in that sector, they are dominate almost nowhere else.

A great deal of the internet is now hosted on a about 5 or 6 providers, the largest being Amazon's cloud. That is far more frightening to me than Microsoft. Every single competitor (except Microsoft) uses Amazon's Object Storage API because they are the largest.

This isn't the early 2000s where Microsoft were a monopoly they simply aren't anymore because the market has changed so drastically in 20 years.

What's next? Chauvanism is the reason we believe that men can lift heavier weights than women?

I know you are joking to make a point but there are actually people that believe that.

So you link a biased source against Microsoft to prove that Microsoft were conspiring with the council. They're reason to exist is to make Microsoft look bad.

Yes different file formats are big deal. I've run into problems with just Doc files if they have forms embedded. I've had to deal with quite a lot from different councils in the UK.

A lot of gov / HR departments etc have embedded forms in things like word documents and PDFs. The same problem with alternative PDF viewers, they don't do PDF forms well if at all.

You don't know the requirements of the different departments and saying "this free alternative works fine when writing a doc" doesn't cover their use cases.

The Linux community like to think that Microsoft is the "big evil" that is trying to thwart them at every turn. I know quite a few people in Microsoft and they tell me that the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing.

So sorry I think it is a conspiracy theory and as someone that earns his living processing documents from Office I know that incompatibilities exist between Libre Office (which is a fork of Open Office) and MS Office.

That is a flat out lie.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/13/munich_committee_sa...

Hübner said the city has struggled with LiMux adoption. "Users were unhappy and software essential for the public sector is mostly only available for Windows," she said. She estimated about half of the 800 or so total programs needed don't run on Linux and "many others need a lot of effort and workarounds". Hübner added, "in the past 15 years, much of our efforts were put into becoming independent from Microsoft," including spending "a lot of money looking for workarounds" but "those efforts eventually failed."

https://www.neowin.net/news/munich-germany-realizes-that-dep...

https://www.neowin.net/news/munich-germany-realizes-that-dep...

Looks like the open source equivalents for the software didn't deal well enough with different file formats.

It will be either one of these or a combination of these.

* Windows has been approved by management to be the only OS allowed on the computer network * The software for showing the static images / videos and whatever manages it will have been written on Windows or even DOS * The manufacturer of said machines whoever wrote their software was Windows Developer and it is cheaper just to ship a copy of Windows Embedded then to rewrite the software , QA and integrate it.

I have a piece of software that I get small support contracts for. I tell clients it is Windows only. There is nothing stopping me from deploying to Linux or even one of the BSDs (I think). I just can't be bothered to deal with differences in distros, going through a QA process etc when it won't really get me many more sales.

There are studies that say that EVs are worse than Diesels as well.

http://brusselstimes.com/business/technology/15050/electric-...

I used to live near a train track. When I first moved there it bothered me quite a lot. When I moved out it was more like "what trains"?

There is noway I am going to buy a new vehicle. I already have a car that is economical and reliable.

EVs are great if you have the money for one but I am not putting my hand in my pocket when I have like a house to pay off first.

This sounds like I was like about 10 years ago. Wrapped up in a company. I don't do "work friends" anymore.

The font size would have been fine in the 2000s. The site is made of tables and it is obviously quite old.

"Thinking hard" is about trying to isolate the problem. RMS famously said that you should try to only debug the code that is broken rather than trying to debug the code that isn't broken (this is especially true in big systems). Where is the error happening? How are these things connected? Etc, etc. When you write very tight unit tests around the sections of the code, you have to do exactly the same thing (and I would argue that writing those tests is a good tool for "getting into" the code).

Except it doesn't help you find the code. With a debugger I can stick in some breakpoints where I think the code is going to get hit and then walk myself back from there on what is called and in what order. I work with some terrible systems where it isn't obvious how the code is even executed because "senior" developers have abused IoC / DI, Reflection and Delegates in such a way to obscure what it is actually doing.

As for writing Unit-tests around sections of code. In quite a few areas I have been barred from doing it (for political reasons) and other times you realistically can't because your test setup would be just too complicated.

Single stepping is fine when you've got 100 lines of code, but when you have thousands or millions of lines of code, it's not going to work

Yes it does work. I did it on Friday. I stick a break point on the entry point (in this case an ASP.NET MVC controller) and F10 and F11 my way down through the stack. I learned more doing this for 30 minutes then I did the previous 2 hours of looking at how the project was structured.

This "think harder" is akin to telling a man to dig harder with a shovel when they have a JCB excavator sitting round the corner.

I use print statements, but seriously, what's the difference? You use watch points in the debugger. Same thing. Once I have tests I find it easier to run them and look at the output of my prints as opposed to stepping through the code.

Maybe I have been spoiled by Visual Studio but as you said there are plenty of options in the debugger for winding back execution, changing execution, inspecting Objects, inspecting the state of the stack at the time, I can debug other people's assemblies, I can debug machines remotely.

Writing out to the console / log is my last resort.

Stepping through the code requires you to remember what you have done before and what the output was (granted debuggers that allow you to go backwards are helpful).

No it doesn't require you to remember what you have done before. Even relatively basic debuggers such as the JavaScript debuggers in most browsers have a stack trace with what has been called where.

If you can do that, then it's all good, but I find that it's easier for me to essentially create a log and read through it. It's just a bit more structured, but in the end it's exactly the same thing.

I don't understand why you would claim an inferior tool is better when a far superior one is available. It would like saying that a Impact Wrench / Spanner and a Spanner are the same thing, technically they both undo bolts, however one makes it far easier than the other.