* Posts by Charlie Clark

12110 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007

Holy smokes! US watchdog sues Elon Musk after he makes hash of $420 Tesla tweet

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Maximum Hubris

seem to have finally cracked this on Model 3

From Musk's statements you might think this but the numbers still don't add up yet. This is why institutional investors have been getting anxious as they can see refunding and equity dilution coming.

Also, competition, especially at the lower end of the market (Model 3) is starting to heat up so margins can be expected to come under pressure. The trade spat with China isn't going to help here, either.

Sync your teeth into power browser Vivaldi's largest update so far

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Good news

I'm still using Opera Mail and waiting for something equivalent to replace it but I ditched Vivaldi last year due to feature creep, the lack of the promised mail client and, most importantly, the trashing of my stored logins by one of the updates.

Android Phones are 10: For once, Google won fair and square

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: And because of the walled garden and interface lock down

Kindle is the iPhone of this market in areas you mention, but it has the lion's share of the market like Android does on phones.

In which countries?

Android devices are cheaper for those who don't want a top-of-the-line device

And also works on top-of-the-line devices such as the Galaxy Note and niche products like the Planet Gemini. We're going to see more devices in different markets using Android (several e-readers use it already).

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Apple was never number one by sales volume, and never will be.

This is revisionism. It certainly was #1 by market share in some markets such as the US for a while and Apple's pursuit of the competition over some of its more frivolous design patents was classic monopolistic behaviour. In the end it decided to trade market share for share of the profits and has done very well in this, even if it has essentially given up innovation.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Android won because it was "open"

Basically the same reason why IBM won with the PS/2.

Which didn't win despite MCA and OS/2 being better than ISA and DOS? Google through resources (techincal, fincancial and marketing) at Android to make it succeed and worked well enough with manufacturers for them to want to put Android on their devices. In 2008 there were other credible alternatives but nobody prepared to put enough into them.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

As long as people want to use those services, then Google does win. We know you hate Google but give them credit for understanding the value of "free" services.

As for enforcing technologies: Apple is far worse: you can have any browser as long as it's webkit but only Safari gets hardware acceleration.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

They put their money where their mouth

Unlike Microsoft, Google committed fully to Android and provided regular updates. Even if the updates often never reached the customers, the manufacturers appreciated them as the approach fitted the new phone every two years model. This is why "fragmentation" featured only in tech articles: people were used to buying new phones.

The AOSP model also worked for them here: while Google released a flagship every year, the other manufacturers were quickly able to follow up with their own phones. But if AOSP was great for the manufacturers, it was Play Services and Gapps wot won it as they provided compelling arguments and, of course, ad-supported apps using the world's largest digital ads platform appealed to lots of developers.

Google's commitment to AOSP shouldn't be underrated. All the time it was pushing Android it was also pushing "open", enabling technologies such as WebM and HTML5, which made moving between platforms (desktop, mobile, web, Android, I-Phone) fairly easy: a torus not a walled garden.

Mega-bites of code: Python snakes into 1st place for cyber-attacks

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: So, is this a surprise?

Got to love the list of popular libraries: urllib, requests and asyncio! Might as well highlight being able to read from stdin!

One reason for the popularity for attacks is that Python has for years been popular for penetration testing and has a heap of relevant libraries as a result. This meant that things like Low Orbiting Ion Cannon could be written and easily deployed by those with little or no skills in the language.

Swedish ISP spanked for sexist 'distracted boyfriend' advert for developer jobs

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Negative towards who?

If they swapped the guy for another girl, would there still be outrage?

There certainly would be from the girlfriend! Guys ogling other women is bad enough but goes with the territory, ogling other men is a whole heap more of trouble.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: I'm torn here

I might ogle occasionally, but I don't want a piece.

The ogling implies the desire. We all know it ain't gonna happen, and even were it to happen we'd hit the buffers of fumbling reality, not doing enough yoga and the shortcomings, ahem, of getting really excited.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: I'm torn here

I'm soon to hit my 52nd birthday and I do not tire of watching a beauty go by.

Why do you dress it up like that? It's lust and everyone has it: nubile thing walks past and we all want a piece.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Negative towards who?

The guy is also the prettier of the three…

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Ah, yes, but what about a company that gets its ads struck as being offensive by the nanny state?

Charlie Clark Silver badge

No such thing as bad PR

Let's face it, the ad is shit. Want techies to come and work for you? Then use gadget porn because proper nerds don't even have girlfriends to upset.

But running the cheap and shitty ad and then getting slapped on the wrist for its sexism is bound to get headlines and presumably more job applications from people outraged at the silly censorship.

Ich verstehe nur Bahnhof, as they say in Germany.

Building your own PC for AI is 10x cheaper than renting out GPUs on cloud, apparently

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Do Americans think that AWS is the only way?

Running on AWS gives you flexibility and means you don't have do as much admin: you're effectively paying someone else to do this and this should be included in the calculations. But, even so, if you're planning 24x7 load then don't bother with AWS, just rent the equivalent server somewhere else as that will be much cheaper.

You want AWS, or for ML, Google Compute if you want access to a lot of power for a relatively short time.

MI5: Gosh, awkward. We looked down the sofa and, yeah, we *do* have intel on privacy bods

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Nature of the Debate

"What level of intrusion on personal privacy is acceptable in the defense of things like personal safety, the Defense of the Realm, etc?"

Anything that cannot be done on the base of court order / warrant is illegal; black ops necessarily operate outside the law and under the terms of plausible deniability. Anything else effectively legitimises a police state, and at some point, we all have something to hide.

It turns out, and many who've worked on such things repeatedly confirm this, that there is usually an easier and legal way to get the desired information. For example, in Germany the heads of the intelligence service are in love with a trojan that they can install on people's phones. Turns out, however, that any evidence gathered this way can be deemed as inadmissible – you have to hack the phone to install the malware, so how do you prove you didn't plant the evidence? – and it's usually easier just to stick a microphone or camera somewhere.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Yeesh

It is the nature of intelligence services will always expand unless they are expressly limited. The bigger they are, the more suspicious and inefficient they become.

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Megaphone

Yeah, but won't somebody think of the children!

Who wants rights when imagined threat is scary enough?

Linux kernel's 'seat warmer' drops 4.19-rc5 with – wow – little drama

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Inclusiveness demands tolerance

China can and will dispose of its problems with supreme brutality.

It can't machine gun babies into existence!

By comparing the two (slacktivism and political-economic systems) you weaken the argument. Attack slacktivism and the codes of conduct for the value-signalling for the tokenism they are.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Inclusiveness demands tolerance

These virtue signalling cock wombles and their whole victimhood mentality will eventually drag the politically correct west to its knees

Why does it always have to be so apocalyptic? I agree that slacktivist slogans generally achieve nothing and are a distraction, but I don't really think it's fair to think of them as the proof of decadance. The West is facing challenging, most notably demography, but China has its own problems in that area.

Hashtags don't put food on the table, a roof over your head and your kids in school.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Who are these people

'You can and will be judged solely on your code quality'

This is still too subjective. There have been numerous disputes about what constitutes code quality: system d.

Sometimes you need an (designated) adult in the room who takes the decision as to whether some thing goes in or not and the litmus test is being able to accept the decision. In the world of open source, the fork is always an option.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

I'm not a fan of him personally but I am prepared to listen to his arguments.

Open-source alt-droid wants to know if it's still leaking data to Google

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: extensive hardware

If take up is sufficient to convince device makers to do some small-ish production runs then the hope might be that desire for a Google & Apple free

Difficult to see that appealing to manufacturers and we've already seen the Cyanogen model fail even with some companies happy to use it.

I can see the EU doing some kind of "provider selection" for phones, though it would be a mockery if this was only for Android.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Why?

Read the conversation in comments here

Not that convincing and very close to chicken and egg: you won't get "mum and dad" users without extensive hardware support and you won't get that by having a hard fork.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Lineagoes + FDroid?

suspect there won't be a version 15 for the G

Why do you think that? It's only a bit older than my S5s so the hardware shouldn't be a deal breaker. But getting Treble to run is quite a bit of work I believe.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Open source contacts, phone, and SMS apps?

Signal handles SMS just fine but does rely on some play services stuff for some things.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Lineagoes + FDroid?

The LOS installer uses the Google one to bootstrap and migrate accounts. But this can be avoided without a fork, as you're obviously doing. Running an AOSP fork is difficult as both CyanogenMod and Lineage have shown. Might make more sense to provide alternative build instructions for those that are interested so that whatever is different can actually run on a phone.

Big fan of LineageOS myself though I went back to 14.1 on one of my S5's last week due to problems with Bluetooth. At least the relevant bug has been assigned.

Apple's dark-horse macOS Mojave is out (and it's already pwned)

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: My iMac is too old

Not sure what the bottleneck is that prevents Mojave working satisfactorily.

Usually Apple being arsed to recompile the (video) drivers. Mavericks contained the major API changes to make it easier to develop for both IOS and MacOS with the same base.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: A Mojave new feature

But my point was that you can't modify a file (*) without opening it

Of course, you're completely right and it's poorly worded. It should say something like change something in a DOCX file directly in Finder or an e-mail* without have to start Word.

* Not sure about the practicability of this, to be honest. Perhaps when you forward something and want to remove pages… Just being able to print files would be nice: I note that I can "share" my log files but have to choose an app to open them in order to be able to print them.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: A Mojave new feature

You can make some changes to it directly from your email program without saving the attachment

Taligent and the much underused "Services" menu rebadged as QuickLook. Apple have definitely put a lot of work into QuickLook over the last few years. Of course, if you can work with the builtin tools then there's even less reason for you to access the file system and, say, put files where you want them. This is still fine on MacOS, but a mate of mine with an I-Phone and an I-Pad is preparing to go Android.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

No rush

As with most operating system updates it's never advisable to install them until at least the first set of fixes is available and MacOS is no exception. Invariably something is broken and "security" has changed.

Mojave looks singularly uninspiring, which is why the "dark theme" gets so much attention. Wonder if it's heralding some MacBooks with OLED screens? Not that the annual updates should be featured packed: slow and steady is fine with me.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Dare I dream?

IIRC Bluetooth was broken in Lion and the fix was only available in Mountain Lion. That fixed the problems I had with Lion but I've never found Bluetooth on MacOS to be particularly reliable. For example, music playback will stop unexpectedly after a couple of hours. Basically, Apple expects you only to use it for its keyboard and mouse and to buy expensive "Air" branded accessories for anything else.

How do some of the best AI algorithms perform on real robots? Not well, it turns out

Charlie Clark Silver badge

All the machine learning stuff is very domain-specific: subsystem is used for processing LIDAR data, another one is used for video, etc. AFAIK no one is using ML itself to orchestrate this, though no doubt certain combinations are probably running through ML controllers. But, of course, more data is always needed, which is why all the companies are keen to shift stuff as quickly as possible so that their customers (eternal beta-testers) can collect that data for them,

iFixit engineers have an L of a time pulling apart Apple's iPhone XS

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Slavish followers

Apple does research and develops products.

Apple has developed 4G standards, OLED and touch screens, Lithium batteries, Blueooth, wireless LAN, HDR imaging, near field communications, etc? Wow, that is impressive!

Nearly all Apple's plagiarism suits have been about design aspects: rounded corners and the positioning of buttons. It does employ a great deal of talented engineers and developers who've done a great job on chip and phone design and software development but all within a competitive environment. It buys components (memory, screens, etc) from its competitors and this is how it should be. Compared with other industries the mobile phone industry has developed incredibly over the last thirty years.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

You've been notched!

For the price of the phone and the size of the screen I reckon the battery is under sized. Not that will worry purchasers. Nor the potentially swingeing price of a replacement. Got to hand it to Apple they really know how to notch their customers!

Tech to solve post-Brexit customs woes doesn't exist yet, peers say

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Yesterdays news

So not all of it needs to be legislated for at national level. In fact probably not that much of it.

That's naive. It's been clear from the start that unanimous agreement of the 27 is required and that any deal will require ratification. Otherwise there would be no push to try and get stuff done by November and then hopefully railroad it through parliaments before the end of March.

I'm beginning to feel that the Commission have not been negotiating in good faith.

The Commission has been consistent throughout the period, which is more than be said of the UK, which for about a year had no position on most aspects. Presumably, the idea was that everything could be done at the last minute at a summit as previous compromises with UK concessions have. But this is a very different kind of negotiation and something the UK simply wasn't prepared for.

Legally, and I suspect also politically, it would have been fine to take the necessary time to prepare for negotiations before asking to leave.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Majority of trade already outside of EU

But someone trying to insult someone else in an online forum and failing is forever

I'll stick with my ad hominem and you can stick to your passive aggression, shithead.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Yesterdays news

But the EU currently say they will not allow Northern Ireland to leave the customs union.

An open border betweern Northern Ireland and the Republic is a requirement of the Good Friday agreement. This has been stated repeatedly all through the process.

EU negotiations only ever get agreed at 4am the day after the final summit was due to finish

Matters less this time: the real problem will be getting the member states to ratify any agreement on time. Personally, I think that trying to do this after October won't be possible before the end of March 2019 and that we're essentially seeing the motions that befor an acceptance of the transitional plan becomes inevitable. But no need for a conspiracy theory where incompetence and arrogance are to be found in such abundance.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Majority of trade already outside of EU

I was pointing out how sensitive the EU is to disruption to their exports.

Which country apart from the US isn't? But having a trade deficit doesn't necessarily give you the better hand when it comes to negotiations not least because the deficit has to be financed some way.

Like I said, better get back to your fox-hunting. You don't understand international trade and, worse, you don't seem to care about those whose livelihoods depend upon it.

The time for posturing passed when May sent the application to Brussels to leave the EU. Anything that doesn't preseve as much of the existing arrangements as possible is going to very disruptive for all concerned.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Yesterdays news

The current approach to leaving the EU along with the government's history of managing projects reminds me of this Smith and Jones sketch. Gets closer to the truth every day.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Majority of trade already outside of EU

Majority of trade already outside of EU

Falls at the first hurdle. Better stick to fox-hunting.

Never mind Brexit. UK must fling more £billions at nuke subs, say MPs

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Simplistic solution to two problems

Tidal, wind and solar power were shit in the past, are currently shit, and will always be shit.

Nonsense. In the right places they have great yields and are relatively inexpensive to maintain. The problem is, as you point out, baseload but this is as much a problem with the network as anything else. The larger the network, the greater the likelihood that conditions in one place will to some extent balance out those elsewhere. The move is from baseload to transitory backup, which can come from storage or gas.

Clean nuclear has been just around the corner for years. And still hasn't arrived. Meanwhile we have to deal with the legacy of decades of nuclear power and the, mericfully few but still very real, catastrophic accidents there have been.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Simplistic solution to two problems

if it's cost effective, make nuclear reactors. if it's not, don't.

Depends a lot on how you define cost effective. Historically costs have excluded decommissioning and processing waste because if they did private industry wouldn't touch it.

A spot of Python in your Azure automation? Step right this way, sir

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Python 2 support

True! So I'm still using Python 2 ...

Time to start planning your migration. I will be dropping support for 2.7 in future versions of my libraries and I suspect others will, too.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Python 2 support

MS is nice to support Python, but doing 2-only is an odd choice

You'd think so but I think Python 2 is still standard for lots of the infrastructure stuff (openstack, et al.) Probbably won't make a lot of difference when Python 2 is no longer officially supported for this kind of stuff.

It's only about 250 lines of code and I've tried hard to wring any performance I could out of it. 3.6 surprised me by cutting Python2.7's time pretty much in half.

That does surprise me because 3.6 isn't noticeably faster as far as I can tell, unless you can take advantage of asyncio. 3.7 has faster dictionaries.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Python 2 support

It's taken a long time for Python 3 to provide reasons to switch but 3.7 finally includes speed improvements on top of things like asyncio.

But, yeah, I want my print statement back, too.

Now here's an idea: Break up Amazon to get more shareholder cash

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Stuff market analysts - Bezos can do what he wants

It IS his company

Which sort of highlights some of the problems with Silicon Valley companies going public: the boards are supposed to run the company.

Of course, everyone's happy as long as the share price keeps going up but that is no excuse for poor governance.

Put your tin-foil hats on! Wi-Fi can be used to guesstimate number of people hidden in a room

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: CCTV

CCTV isn't used for footfall, you can just use motion detectors for that and you can passively detect mobile phones fairly easily.

However, there are apparently tests using cameras to read behaviour and interests…

Charlie Clark Silver badge

more useless as a radar.

Except for rain. I thought there was research being done using base stations to get very granular data on humidity?

Charlie Clark Silver badge

It’ll be a while before something like this is practical, but there are obvious areas where it would be useful.

I can't think of any areas where this would be more useful than other existing approaches. In particular, the example of bodies in a building shows a lack of understanding of how the technique works: you can't just point a wifi beam at something, you need a baseline.