* Posts by Charlie Clark

12110 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007

Treaty of Roam: No-deal Brexit mobile bill shock

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Rory Cellan-Jones - naive or what ?

As you noted above, the companies' first duty is to there shareholders. I suspect roaming is less of an issue for many Brits as it is for, say, the Dutch so you can easily see new contracts being introduced that look cheaper for day to day stuff but with lovely £200+ bills for people on their jollies, just like in the good old days.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Draft statutory instruments

No, the statutory instruments are a lovely and undemocratic way to repeal EU regulations that are UK law. It's called "taking back control (by the government, because who needs a parliament)".

At least Sony offered a t-shirt, says macOS flaw finder: Bug bounties now for Macs if you want this 0-day, Apple

Charlie Clark Silver badge

He's obliged to provide the details

I think both DMCA and German law will oblige him to provide the details of the exploit to the authorities at least. A few years ago "hacking" and not just "cracking" became a crime in Germany.

Website programming? Pffft, so 2011. Python's main squeeze is now data science, apparently

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: If you like Python, learn Go

Go is becoming very popular in some domains. particularly engineering systems where the static typing allows for faster binaries, but is unlikely ever to gain as much acceptance as Python for precisely the reasons you give.

When it comes to the ML stuff, all the heavy lifting is done by specialised code running on the metal so no advantage to be gained by switching the scripting language,

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: “the surging popularity of Flask, a bare-bones web framework ”

Nah, they both use globals to make life easier to throw something together. Pyramid is the best framework if you prepared to write a couple of lines of configuration. It's also famousy not made by aliens.

Sure, you can keep Grandpa Windows 7 snug in the old code home – for a price

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Prevaricating?

Prevaricating means "beating around the bush" or "dodging the question", but usually with an implicit attempt to delay. I think in US demotic "temporising" is used instead.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Lucky Brits

How much Brits will pay will depend on numerous things including how big the deal is and the type of volume licensing contract they have

Also worth noting that if the UK ever leaves the single market, it can't expect to get the same terms as the EU: probably keep the same for the foreseeable future but no guarantee and, sans customs union, huis clos, so to speak.

Apple hands keys for retail to HR boss amid flagging iPhone sales

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: At least they're consistent

I can't speak for you, but I've bought a number of working cars for less than Apple think their latest iTat is worth

No need to, FWIW I'm on my second, second-hand Samsung S5 but I do have a full-fat 2016 MacBook Pro (before the stupid touch thing was introduced). I agree that the move to turn everything premium was a mistake – didn't they bring in someone for Burberry to do just that? But, obviously a lot of people are still prepared to pay a substantial premium for the perceived value of the Apple brand.

The worry for Apple has to be, that, spirals can be both vicious as well as virtuous: more suppliers are reporting big reductions in orders.

I was just making a general point about managers. Apple need ones with vision to drive innovation because even with the best branding in the world, Apple isn't going to become LVHM.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: At least they're consistent

Sure, but to be honest, a good manager will not necessarily be a subject expert. I always thought that Jean-Louis Gassée (once of Apple) got it right when said that managers are their to serve employees. Establishing trust with employees and listening to their issues and suggestions while being able to explain (and of course) develop company strategy (the sort that doesn't depend upon "waste" or "synergies") is the key attribute.

It's a bit dated but Lou Gerstner knew fuck all about computers before he took over IBM and he didn't do a bad job.

Congrats, Satya Nadella. In just five years, you've turned Microsoft from Neutral Evil to, er, merely True Neutral

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: "GPL is cancer"

what stops many companies is incurring in license issues, and there is no tech solution there

Except that MS Office on Android (on Linux) sort of disproves that. Google, of course, also understands the importance of imdemnification but the main thing for developers has been a single and, generally (post Android 4) stable API for the whole stack.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

I dumped it once it got bought by E-Bay…

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: "GPL is cancer"

but it's one of the reason most commercial - useful and needed - software is not ported to Linux

Much as I dislike the GPL, I don't think it's the reason for the lack of ports. This is more pragmatic: which fucking GUI toolkit (QT, GTK, etc)? and will people pay for it?

LibreOffice patches malicious code-execution bug, Apache OpenOffice – wait for it, wait for it – doesn't

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Of course

MS Office, Libre & Open, Softmaker, Apple's stuff, Google's online stuff, the Gnome and KDE toys. More importantly, toolchains are replacing Office for a lot of tasks (things like Jupyter + Pandas instead of Excel) so the need for MS Office to get stuff done is declining, though it's still used for reporting and interchange.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Of course

The only argument for the split was that it was unclear what Oracle was going to do with it. In the end it spat it out. When it comes to Office software packages there is quite a choice, not sure I really follow the logic of wanting to keep the split going for that reason. There might be other technical reasons for maintaining it but a common core with reciprocal licensing would be a good idea.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Of course

OpenOffice actually got some pretty nice stuff from IBM's Symphony project.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: And Microsoft just owns mobile

please excuse me when I say, 'wtf?'

To be clear: Microsoft owns Office on mobile. This is why they could afford to kill Windows Phone.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Of course

At least on MacOS I find LibreOffice to have more features but also lots more bugs, making it much less reliable. It also has an absolutely awful UI. The licence switch in LibreOffice has also made it much more difficult to share code which is a practical issue since LO has received grants for work that is supposed to be for both projetcs,

Much as it pains me to say it: Microsoft has got lots of things right in Office >= 2016, which I have for compatibility testing. And Microsoft just owns mobile.

Jammy dodgers: Boffin warns of auto autos congesting cities to avoid parking fees

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Short term problem ...

I think this is the idea. Self-driving cars will inevitably lead to more traffic as they will add to the number of vehicles on the road initially until they start displacing owner-driver ones. As soon as they become assets of a third party then the incentive to sweat the asset: move as many paying passengers as possible.

Cruising versus parking versus driving can be solved by road pricing, if necessary though companies will already have incentive increase the yield. The combination is designed to drive most owner-drivers out of the market.

I think the paper is perhaps more intended as warning of the unintended consequences of introducing autonomous vehicles, which are going to get preferential treatment in a lot of places.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Eh?

It's basically the same thing: arbitrage. But you also highlight why people are unlikely to by self-driving cars for themselves: the advantages are minimal.

Smaller tech firms just aren't ready for a no-deal Brexit, MPs told

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Piece of cake (and eat it)

And Monday ist April 1st… Maybe Theresa May does have a sense of humour after all?

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Incompetence where incompetence is due

Actually as a leave voter (stop throwing stuff at me), I'm looking at this whole process with the belief that the tory party fucked it up completely

What did you think would happen? We did tell you so.

then informally sent those ideas to the EU, come up jointly with a deal that benefits both sides

That was never going to happen, apart from the fact the EU could only really negotiate once Article 50 was invoked and had previously already negotiated with the UK, the genie was out of the bottle and the loons were screaming: let's just leave without any kind of agreement. It'll be alright, Dunkirk spirit and all that.*

* Dunkirk was, of course, basically a disaster, so we've form on this.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: SMEs in other EU countries have the same problem

In lieu of any clue as to what will happen, and due to contractual and legal constraints this is starting to happen.

BTW "no-deal" should be replaced by disorderly as there is now simply not enough time (to pass the necessary legislation, make provisions, hire and train staff, etc.) to make it orderly.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Wrong way round

Actually, currency risk in any direction is likely to make something uncompetitive.

Boffins debunk study claiming certain languages (cough, C, PHP, JS...) lead to more buggy code than others

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Impossible question

You often don't know that your code is buggy until it's exploited and while static code analysis may pick up some obvious flaws, most bugs are waiting to be discovered as we've seen over the last few years.

More important, therefore, is to list common gotchas: memory management, handling of untrusted data, equivalence tests, etc, and the strategies used to deal with them.

Also, things don't stand still. It's no accident that PHP has so many CVEs filed against it: up until a few years ago it was the goto language for web development and unattracted a lot of untrained people as a result. Many of them have since moved onto other languages (JS for web and app development, Python or R for data analysis). But threats have also changed: SQL injection is perennial but, hopefully, less of an issue today, but now we have more attacks on transport and handling.

Stop, collaborate, and listen: Microsoft Teams gets an Atlassian glisten

Charlie Clark Silver badge

With all that collaborative fun on offer, one might almost wonder why Microsoft doesn't simply buy Atlassian and be done with it.

Probably because it would almost certainly invite regulatory scrutiny due to consolidation. This kind of tie up, however, will suit companies already running both teams and Jira and will be broadly weclomed, except by Slack.

Apple: Good news, everyone – sales are less bad than we thought. Not amazing but not bad. $84bn is $84bn, tho

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Expectations management at work

Having got the market totally wrong at the last results call, Apple did the decent (and by the SEC required thing) by telling investors early that numbers were going to be down. So by the time they came to report the market had already priced in the reduced forecast. Would have been a shock if results had varied significantly from the reduced forecast but you can expect Apple did everything necessary to make sure they didn't.

And there's still a lot to like: margins are up and other divisions made more money than expected. The "wearables" section is interesting because it looks like Apple really is making money where nobody else can. Millions of people still love what they produce (they own the high-end tablet market) and don't mind the walled garden. And yet… there's no doubt that they're nervous about the much vaunted halo effect going into reverse. Expect plans designed to keep the sheep in the Apple fold with upgrade offers. And they have to hope that nobody else comes up with something really new.

Microsoft decides Internet Explorer 10 has had its fun: Termination set for January 2020

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Sorry, but if your product is "IE / ActiveX -only" in this day and age, you are failing at IT, it's as simple as that.

Sure, but you can also pity the poor mugs who've been given the job of maintaining whatever it is that was bought from supplier XYZ in 2003 because "as it runs in the browser, it won't need anything installing". Along with the software required to use the machine that goes ping or can the read the health insurance card…

It's really quite amaying that in all the hoohah we had about browser choice, not one government ever got tough with Microsoft regarding the restricting OS releases to particular versions of IE.

As IE 9 - 11 share largely the same codebase, shifting to IE 11 shouldn't in practice pose too many problems. And, there is also the issue of whether such a server should really be open to the internet at all, but that's a separate issue.

Requests for info, gag orders and takedowns fired at GitHub users hit an all-time high last year

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Copyright trolls running amok?

DMCA means that if anything looks like it can remove DRM then they can ask for it to be taken down. Oh, and software patents, like how your program calculates that 2 + 2 = 4 (or 5 if you're south of the Mason-Dixie line). American commercial history is replete with examples of companies strongarming their way to monopolies (Standard Oil, US Steel, NCR, IBM, AT&T, Oracle, …)

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Takedowns

Back in the day, I took the trouble to read the T&Cs of GitHub and Atlassian and they differed signficantly in this respect: GitHub would takedown first and potentially reinstate later, Atlassian would initially side with the user based on the contractual obligation that the code wasn't deliberately illegal. IANAL so I could have misread this but it is of the reasons I've stayed with BitBucket.

There is no reason at all for the gag orders.

Ouch, Apple! Plenty of iPhones stuck in tech channel. How many? That's a 'wild card'

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: What a surprise...

So? Apple is manufactured in China but most of the profits go to Apple

The same is true for… and the list is long of companies that "did the deal with the devil" when they offshored production. The manufacturing isn't coming back (to US citizens), but Foxconn got a great deal in Wisconsin for assembling stuff there! Tax rebate and hotline to the courts!

Listed companies rarely feel much loyalty to any particular country, hence the persistent lobbying everywhere over tax. Apple sales have declined for the same reason that nearly every other company's have: market mautration and saturation: people around the world are not replacing their expensive phones with even more expensive ones as often. In the American handset market Huawei is essentially displacing other non-US brands and is, thus, not so interesting. It's the "5G" and network equipment market that has got feathers so ruffled.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: What a surprise...

Finally, consider me a conspiracy nutcase, but I see this as the real reason behind the West's recent anti-Huawei actions

You're a nutcase: the manufacturing of consumer electronics moved to China years ago. The Huawei stuff is partly about companies like Cisco, partly a stick with which to beat China in the US-China trade negotiations, and partly about which agencies get to stick backdoors in network equipment. But the US is being so cack-handed about negotiations, using the threat of CPU supplies as a bargaining chip*, that it can't really win this one. Huawei also isn't necessarily the best company to go after as it's not directly controlled by the communist party and is, therefore, perhaps more open to negotiations.

*At the moment China can't do without US designed chips in some equipment. But it has been working on its own CPU design skills for the last few years and while, if it was forced to drop Intel and nVidia, this would be disruptive I suspect this would only be for a while.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: What a surprise...

Here in Germany the XS Max top capacity model is 1650 Euro...

Hence the continuing campaigns by Deutsche Telekom et al. to try and shift the shit. There's too much inventory in the channel and too many similar models (SE, 8, 8+, X, XR, XS).

Apple has at least prepared well for this by preferring to talk about margins rather than units. They also usually cull product lines swiftly and silently (SE, 8, X(S) is probably all they need for segmentation). But they also desperately need something new for the fanbois to gush about.

Whats(goes)App must come down... World in shock as Zuck decides to intertwine Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Signal

"the claim they wouldn't use the data was a lie. And so it proved."

The European Commission investigated the takeover and agreed to it on condition that Facebook would not merge user data from WhatsApp with Facebook. Facebook subsequently reneged on the agreement and was given a relatively small fine.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Telegram and Signal both have their share of security weaknesses too.

Sounds like whataboutery. This isn't about security but who has access to what data. That said, where's that long list of technical flaws?

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Strange

It's annoying as hell to include them in organising something with a group of people.

Social media is probably the most inefficient way to organise anything. At least from what I see of the various groups. Piss ups in breweries don't come near it. By all means use it for dissemination, but e-mail's just as good for that.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Google's angle is that *until there is a Google* messaging monopoly

And after the several Google failures to achieve one, it's better to have a "universal" one Google can tap into...

Agreed, but, overall, I think it's a good idea if carriers pick it up and don't go stupid over pricing.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Damn

But, in 2019 it shouldn’t be necessary to load one app to message one person, then another app to message someone else and a third app etc.

Agree but this is largely because the mobile networks couldn't agree on updates to the protocols. Google is pushing an updated and "universal" rich messaging protocol, which I think should be welcomed. Obviously not for reasons of privacy, though the protocol is designed to be essentially as private as SMS, which is reasonable, but for the attempt to create a protocol that just works. Google's angle is that if there is no messaging monopoly, then there will be less advertising money diverted toward any one network, which is what Facebook is aiming for.

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Stop

Re: Signal

There are VCs behind Signal, probably.

There aren't, there's a foundation that pays for hosting (pretty cheap) and development (less so). It also doesn't matter that much as the protocal and code have been open from the start.

There are other reasons why Signal is unlikely to rule the roost — multi-device support and group management are poor, partly due to the way the protocol works — but the sale of user data isn't among them.

Data flows in a no-deal Brexit are a 'significant' concern – MPs

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Scaremongering

Businesses are not unprepared and they can deal with whatever will be the outcome of the negotiations.

What is it exactly that businesses are prepared for? They might well be prepared for the outcome of the negotiations, just a pity then that parliament isn't.

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Facepalm

Agreed. Then I looked for where you might find one. The "responsible opposition" being the place to start: different clothes, haircuts and lapel badges but basically just as big a bunch of incompetents. Golgafrincham won.

A picture tells a 1,000 words. Pixels pwn up to 5 million nerds: Crims use steganography to stash bad code in ads

Charlie Clark Silver badge

var foo = JSON.parse(some_json_from_query);

Right, though at some point eval is going to be called by the parser internally. You just hope that the people who maintain that part understand the risks better than your colleague.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Then how does a JIT compiler work.

I'm not sure how this is relevant. The JIT is privileged, exec in incoming code should be on the naughty list, or it should go in a sandbox.

The Apple Mac is 35 years old. Behold the beige box of the future

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Apple was lucky that IBM was so office-centric its graphic cards sucked.

8086 + ISA + CGA was awful and IBM didn't intend to stick with it. But it was good enough for the wordprocessing et al. that customers were doing with it.

A bigger problem perhaps was that the PS/2 architecture wasn't good enough to justify the price. So we got stuck with the shitty bus and the shitty 8086 memory management and threw money at clock speeds and memory to overcome them. Oh, and there was the whole fiasco of outsourcing the development of the OS to Microsoft, who basically did everything to stifle development of anything that might compete with Windows.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Typical el Reg

"Assuming their pockets were deep enough." and other such comments.

It's largely irrelevant. All machines at the time were very expensive when compared with modern ones. And, if IBM had had its way, the PCs would have stayed that expensive before being replaced by equally expensive PS/2 based machines.

Apple obviously got the mix right enough to get a large enough customer base that it was worthwhile for third parties to develop software for it and customers who found sufficient value (having a GUI was enough for some) in the ecosystem to pay for it. It took years for the PC world to come up with anything remotely as good, all while the clones and Intel were producing increasingly beefy beige boxes for WordStar and Lotus 1-2-3, dBase, etc.

The comparisons aren't like for like, either. An XT even with 640 KB was an 8086 and ran like a dog. The 68000 was a much more modern chip design and could get more done with less. Owning all the hardware meant that the OS could be stuck in ROM because it didn't have to worry about different drivers, etc. And people only needed to run one application at a time. I'd argue that's still largely the case*.

But, and, you knew there'd be a but, over time the PC hardware got better and better and even with the limitations of the ISA bus, was better pound for pound than the Mac. And Microsoft evenutally came up with a GUI that wasn't completely awful, though some of the awfulness had to do with fending off legal challenges from Apple over a GUI design that it hadn't developed itself.

Apple's take it or leave it approach suits some people really well and for many the price isn't that relevant: they buy in it in the expectation that "it just works" and they're usually right, which is why Apple has sold so many devices. However, to say price doesn't matter at all is to miss an important point: functional equivalence. Apple ruled the GUI roost until Windows 95 got serious traction. At which point, for many, which the choice of which GUI to run Word in mattered less. It's the same now with phones. And to be honest, Apple only have themselves to blame. They come up with good ideas, implement them brilliantly, try and ringfence everything with lawyers and seem to fall asleep while the rest of the world doesn't. It is now hard to make solid case for a premium Apple phone over the one people already have or a well-thought out mid-range Android. Like many companies, Apple does its best work when it is in a competitive market.

* I've had MacBooks since 2006. In the first one I had I had to replace the CPU fan twice because it was a shitty plastic one. Fortunately, we have a local store that knows how to handle Apple hardware. The list of bugs in MacOS that have not been properly fixed within a release cycle is also distressingly long.

Human StarCraft II e-athletes crushed by neural net ace – DeepMind's AlphaStar

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: It's clever, but it's limited.

inhuman micro skills that will always defeat human players (but lets see some Koreans try too)

It should be possible to limit those to an arbitrary speed, though the current limitation is probably close to that of a human: see something, process and react.

Intel boss: Expect chip shortages into mid-2019, stumbling server processor sales this year

Charlie Clark Silver badge

The FANGs already get custom silicon. Google has for years been working with other silicon, including its own "TPU"s, Amazon has just launched its own ARM stuff.

I think the customers here will be the usual data centre crowd, plus companies ramping up their own virtualisation efforts where it is still very much an x86-64 world. The move to the "cloud" has been extensive over the last couple of years, but it will come to an end at some point, as Intel alludes to (presumably from fewer requests and orders).

We will, hopefully, see a competition server market at one point but the barriers to switching architectures will remain high for a couple of years.

Starship bloopers: In touching tribute to Tesla shares, Musk proto-craft tumbles – as Bezos' Blue Origin rocket lifts off

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: floating back to terra firma using three parachutes

As for economics? They speak for themselves.

Right, along with the slew of pink slips issued to Space X employees recently…

Space X has brought some much needed competition to the market, but that doesn't mean all its ideas are great. And it's just as dependent upon DoD contracts as the rest of them.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: floating back to terra firma using three parachutes

The craft can be steered with rockets, parachutes place you at the mercy of the wind

First of all, strong winds almost invariably make launches impossible. Then, manoeuvrability is still going to be largely limited to the area determined by the initial trajectory which is set to land the bits in known large empty spaces. Pinpoint landings don't matter that much as the support crew is at most minutes away.

Musk's landing by rocket is not about the position as much about wanting to reuse as much of the rocket and engines as possible. It makes great TV, not so sure about the science and economics given the extra weight and complexity.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: ...pretend to be astronauts.

To my mind the difference is between being able to pilot the device

How much piloting do you think the average astronaut actually does? Basically you follow the instructions from ground control, who have the computers doing the calculations.

Intel applies hobnailed boot to countries where its men and women workers aren't paid the same

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Ok, I give in

If we all say this is wonderful, will you go back to reporting the news?