Microsoft made something similar, years ago, at the presentation of their azure cognitive services. A camera randomly picked a live face from the audience, passed it through azure cognitive services and displayed the mood of the person in a video overlay.
You're more or less describing what happened to me when I changed from dev to dev team lead. I couldn't affort the time anymore to make code reviews, left that to my colleagues and only tested the resulting software. When it didn't work, I returned a bug task and then we iterated this until it worked.
No more joy in writing software. Instead my time is spend in writing user stories and specifications as good as possible.
Thanks for writing this. I couldn't agree any more.
We've worked with .NET for decades and it really just works or lets you debug easily.
Then we've started working on projects with Angular, React and Docker and it's just a nightmare to get a stable version.
There was a study comparing the “half life” of code in different codebases as a measure of “churn”. Linux unsurprisingly is pretty stable. Meanwhile Angular is the worst with code lasting just months before it’s rewritten. Then again months later. And again. And again.
What version are you using?
Click 'Settings' -> 'Profile' (huge button on top) -> 'Subscriptions'. I don't know how it could be easier than that. Ah wait, pull down on the home screen for search, type 'subscriptions' and tap on the result for direct access to the setting.
From there you can see and cancel any subscription made in the App Store.
I so badly wish we could change a big Windows business application to use PostgreSQL rather than Microsoft SQL Server just because of the licensing costs.
SQL Server is a fantastic product, but restricted to 128GB RAM and a few CPU cores or you have to start paying so much, that not even our biggest customers can justify it.
Migration isn't easy, as this venerable application uses ADO.NET Datasets with TableAdapters and plenty of stored procedures. The syntax is almost compatible though. But not enough unfortunately.
For our next product, we're sure to bet on PostgreSQL instead.
Yes, this is such a big challenge for commercial database products. PG is so great that it often makes the most sense to reallocate the money to more CPU/RAM/SSD, rather than licenses.
The syntax for this does come largely from Oracle.
"SQL/PSM is derived, seemingly directly, from Oracle's PL/SQL. Oracle developed PL/SQL and released it in 1991, basing the language on the US Department of Defense's Ada programming language."
In any case, I have thousands of lines of PL/SQL written by many people which are currently useless for SQL Server applications.
SQL Server should implement SQL/PSM. The sooner, the better.
For those trying to escape the licensing costs of SQL Server, Babelfish may be an option.
> An enormous flaw of Sybase/Microsoft SQL Server is that it does not implement the SQL/PSM standard.
Why is this a problem? I've always enjoyed T-SQL. Right from the start it had a "scripty" feel and stored procedures were easy to code with it. We thought about implementing PSM at Sybase in the 1990s but there was little user demand. (Unlike row level locking, the lack of which undid Sybase SAP implementations...) Internally many of the engineers thought PSM was pretty awful to use. I never liked it myself.
I evaluated this for our database and ran into many cases where it wasn't a 1:1 replacement, especially if you lean heavily on stored procedures. Additionally, our db library (it's a Rails app; the database was originally used with another language) needed features Babelfish didn't support. It may be worth another look for us, but I assume it still shouldn't be considered a 100% drop-in.
> I so badly wish we could change a big Windows business application to use PostgreSQL
This ^^^
A small businness I (no longer) work for was using Windows Servers, SQL Server, Classic ASP, .NET and other things. It was expensive!
I tried sooo hard to migrate to get them to realise the savings moving over to Linux and Postgres, and get their DATED software over over afterwards!
Well, it was Linux and MySQL/MariaDB but I have slowly grown fond of Postres over the last couple of years.
I will always remember (and find funny) when we purchased a server a third-party no longer wanted to support for us anymore (linux+php) and my boss said "they only pay £300 a year for that server" -- yep.
LLM's might be able to translate the stored procedure code without too much difficulty, and assuming you have test coverage. Might also do a good job of translating DDL code such as index definitions etc.
I too was impressed with SQL Server last time I used it (big note: SQL Server is one of the few commercial DB's that does real nested transactions; PG does not), but I get it.
> SQL Server is one of the few commercial DB's that does real nested transactions
More or less. The default ROLLBACK behaviour is to roll back the whole nest. You have to use SAVE TRANSACTION instead of BEGIN TRANSACTION and specify the name in ROLLBACK. If doing this in a procedure that may or may not be part of a nested transaction (an explicit transaction wasn't started before it was called) you have to test to see if you need to BEGIN or SAVE¹ and what to do if a rollback is needed (you likely don't want to ROLLBACK everything if you used SAVE, but have no option if you used BEGIN). Not exactly intuitive. And saved transactions can cause excessive lock escalation, impacting concurrent performance.
SQL Server is generally a damned fine product overall, both generally and compared to a lot of other things emitted by Microsoft, but it isn't even close to perfect in some areas.
I'm not one to compliment Microsoft software products, but Analysis Services and SQL Server, at least when I used them at the time over 10 years ago, seemed like darn fine products (which they purchased from someone else, I believe...)
SQL Server itself came from Sybase originally, with them and MS working on it as partners for a number of years when it was an OS/2 product, so it wasn't a purchase-a-working-product-and-rebrand-it deal. As Windows NT gained ground, MS & Sybase parted ways (amicably IIRC, when the partnership agreements expired MS licensened the source that Sybase owned and bought out exclusive use of the product name in relation to products for Windows – for a time MS's SQL Server still carried Sybase copyright messaging along with MS's own).
SQL Server v7 was a rewrite of significant parts of the internals, so from that point it is probably fair to call it an MS product quite distinct from Sybase's (which itself continued to be separately developed including significant but different improvements/reengineering of the internals), though still showing some signs of its heritage.
LLMs are not a great source for this type of information. This mess in no way articulated in what way savepoints and transactions are different.
Savepoints are fully equivalent to nested transactions with the constraint that only one is concurrently active. This limitation is just from the SQL standard programming model. At least in PostgreSQL implementation it would be reasonably simple to support multiple concurrent subtransactions. They are even called subtransactions internally.
Anecdata, but I agree. I went from a recursive CTE (that occasionally would take 1GB+ of memory for zero rows) to a loop and used AI to do it, and it did a pretty good job
Don't laugh, but we still have a big software solution based on jQuery Mobile up and running, used daily by hundreds of users on tablets and smartphones, and getting new features every few weeks.
(yes, a successor is planned, but it will be a huge amount of work)
I drive a Tesla Model 3 daily and agree to the critism about it's interface. On my last holidays I rented a Suzuki Vitara. Indeed it's much easier to find and operate the standard controls like for climate. Also cruise control with its 6 buttons took only a little learning.
The worst turned out to be CarPlay, a feature I always thought I'm missing with my Tesla. Occasionally it just didn't work, even though the phone was connected. So you get no navigation or you stop/start/wait until it works. And repeat that after every car stop situation. And when it works, forget about zooming or seeing anything more than the next step on this tiny display.
All in all I was happy to return to my Tesla again. But then I know all important controls from memory.
Anyway: Analog cars ruled indeed. I'd just use a simple phone holder too rather than anything like CarPlay.
I have great memories of downloading MIDI files found with Altavista, Yahoo or even something like midi.com, then putting them on a floppy and have them play back on my Technics KN-2000 keyboard.
Then MP3 happened.
I'm a huge XPS15 advocate at work and really love these machines as a Windows developer. But the standby just doesn't work. If I close the lid and throw it in my bag, then the battery will be empty and the bag will be hot as hell.
This is a huge failure and makes me shutdown my XPS15 every evening. Which is just nonsense.
I'm a Mac user at home and just never shut these laptops down ever.
Yes, standby is working fine. I don't have the machine in front of me now but I don't remember fiddling with any of the power settings either. It was all working after the install. I definitely run software update so that might explain why it's working so smooth too.
Meanwhile, my other machine from work is a Precision workstation running Windows 10 and it gives me all kinds of power issues, more invasive updates, random restarts, random high fan RPMs, etc. Dell has already serviced the machine, twice. What a mess.
FWIW I had similar problems with my X1, sleep on lid close was working about 50% of the time (which is probably worse than not working at all, because you genuinely don't know what is going to happen...).
As a quick fix I assigned Ctrl-Meta-L to Sleep (Meta-L is screen lock - I'm using KDE btw). It didn't take long for me to automatically press this combo before closing the lid - I got so much used to it that I had stop stop and think when I got a new laptop later and installed linux fresh on it. And of course I just set it up like before, even though this one works :)
In the last few years; Microsoft started pushing this "Modern standby"[1] thing, which lets the CPU run while suspended or something. IIRC it is so a PC can run background services, wifi and what not, like tablets + cell phones.
It is causing so many issues, because the common use case for a laptop is to close the lid, and then stuff it into a padded bag. If anything starts up the laptop for whatever reason, all that heat is trapped in there, cooking the device. Some system BIOS are removing the option to even disable modern standby mode (vs traditional standby where just the memory was energized)
The rumor is that this is a bug that happens when you close your laptop screen to put it to sleep BEFORE you pull out the power plug, so the laptop basically never realizes it stopped being plugged into the wall, and does work it shouldn't, like a windows update. I always remove the power before putting a laptop to sleep and do not have this problem anymore.
It happens on macbooks too weirdly.
A sleeping laptop, even "modern sleep" should not be doing enough work to create a meaningful amount of heat.
This should work much better than it does. Microsoft is right - Windows machines should be able to run background services as well as a tablet or phone.
Their Modern Standby requirements should have included a clause saying that the machines efficiency core (which I assume is what would be running in standby) should not be able to raise the temperature enough to require a fan.
No, Microsoft did not ask the users if they wanted this or not (or made this behaviour configurable). Just as they did not ask users if they wanted to see ads in their Start menu...
It works well on mobile devices because from the get-go, it is established that the operating system can aggressively suspend or halt processes. Laptops + PC's, on the other hand, have 40+ years of legacy that assume that the OS won't kill a process unless the user insists, or a resource disaster is imminent. They can deal with a pause, provided the processes external view of the state of the CPU + memory are not drastically changed.
Windows finally had suspend working reliably, where memory was frozen, and nothing else on the PC could change the state of memory or the CPU. Modern standby is Intel/Microsoft's effort to hoist that mobile-style of operating system management onto PC's, in an environment that was not expecting it.
They should have slowly rolled it out, with thermal protections from the get go to prevent disaster, and after a generation or two when the hardware + software are working correctly, made it on by default. It seems like they rushed it for Win 10, and then made it the default on Win 11 before it was really stable.
> Some system BIOS are removing the option to even disable modern standby mode
The CPU manufacturers have stopped providing support for developing firmware with an S3 (“traditional standby”) function for recent CPU generations, except for a couple of laptop manufacturers receiving special treatment.
I really hope this doesn't become a contributing factor in a future plane crash from an onboard fire in the baggage compartment. I could see someone throwing their laptop in a suitcase with a bunch of clothes and having that heat building up into a thermal runaway. It's asinine to me that there isn't a hardware thermal sensor that just shuts off power if the heat is too high. In addition to the tragedy of an accident, what will happen is they'll probably block everyone from bringing laptops with them.
Standby on windows just appears to be a cue for the OS that the user isn’t actively using the machine so it should use the time to install updates and restart itself 5 times.
The machine isn't waking from sleep, it's that the standby processing is intensive enough and the hardware is so poorly designed that the computer heats up which requires the fan to run.
> When Modern Standby-capable systems enter sleep, the system is still in S0 (a fully running state, ready and able to do work). Desktop apps are stopped by the Desktop Activity Moderator (DAM); however, background tasks from Microsoft Store apps are permitted to do work. In connected standby, the network is still active, and users can receive events such as VoIP calls in a Windows store app. While VoIP calls coming in over Wi-Fi wouldn’t be available in disconnected standby, real-time events such as reminders or a Bluetooth device syncing can still happen.
Macbooks also wake from sleep while closed and yet it doesn't destroy the computer. How is the computer supposed to do background checks / send its location etc if it can't wake up for a short while?
Connected Standby has worked on my devices for a decade. When I plug in my laptop to my dock in the office and it wakes up, it comes on pretty much instantly. Its already on the WiFi, which it joined when I walked in the building. My email has already synced. My chat has already synced before I even log in.
It has been doing this just fine since Windows 8 came out across multiple Thinkpads, Surface tablets, and other devices.
Even pre-Windows 8, sleep has generally worked perfectly fine for me. I'd have my computer on sleep between classes, open it up and pretty much instantly be right back in OneNote ready to take notes. Cheap Compaq laptops, expensive HP laptops, IBM Thinkpads, Lenovo Thinkpads, Surface tablets, no-name cheap Walmart laptops, all kinds of devices. In the last almost 20 years I've had less than a dozen instances of a hot bag running XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10, now 11.
I had issues with sleep on some desktops in the past, where it wouldn't want to stay in sleep. Every time it was some dumb app waking up the machine. Never due to some specific Windows issue, always something I installed.
I don't want my computer to do _anything_ if I set it to sleep, other than keep the memory contents alive for some time. Although these days even Ubuntu with KDE starts up so fast that the only reason for sleep (instead of shutdown) is to keep some programs running, with some mid-work state.
“How is the computer supposed to do background checks / send its location etc if it can't wake up for a short while?”
Why would I want it to do that? OTOH, coming back from pay of on modern hardware is fast enough that I just reenable hibernation and use that instead of sleep, now that MS has made sleep less sleep-ish.
