Posts by Charlie Clark 12169 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007
I think the breast movement is perfectly fine and nothing like as sexual as nearly all the music videos with women in them. The sooner kids get used to tits bouncing the less they'll obsess about them.
I'd be more offended by the weird pelvis and hips on the figure.
Care to explain how HMRC will charge me duty on the Leccy that I use charging my car at home or using the Leccy produced by the Solar Panels on my roof?
They can just introduce a toll based on how far you travel. This is essentially what fuel duty is anyway and increasingly favoured by economists due to all the stupid fiddling and exemptions for SUVs, etc.
But they could also make it impossible to charge vehicles with domestic supplies: this is bound to be the case for fast-charging anyway because the networks aren't built for it.
I think that targeting electric cars would cause quite an outrage
Differential charging for oil and gas is already widespread. It's the basis of the biofuel wheeze: synthetic fertilisers are used to grow maize which is used to make biofuel… The main side-effect has been to drive up the price of farmland and more small farmers out of business.
But I digress. Cars and fuel are easy to tax because people depend on them and governments will tax whatever they can if they need money. They're already looking around for replacements for tobacco duty as too many people have given up smoking.
Admiration doesn't require butt-kissing. I, too, admire Musk's ideas but I'm increasingly sceptical of his business practices.
All it would take is a single step-change development in the technology required to store and/or transmit electricity.
It could take a lot less than that: the financing for Tesla to come unravelled. He should never have bought SolarCity. Or installed his brothers on the board.
Electric cars will not take off until I can travel 300+ miles in a 5 minute recharge.
The vast majority of journeys are much less than 300 miles, so the limit is really whatever people consider the acceptable time for refuelling.
On the plus side, the ubiquity of electricity as the fuel means that you don't necessarily need a network of petrol stations: just a way to charge at both ends of a journey. But, yeah, energy density remains the achilles heel of the technology.
At issue is the knowledge. The company has access to privileged information and, therefore, it statements are considered differently and usually come with disclaimers. This is why listed companies are regulated by the SEC.
Any Joe can say that they expect the shares of company XYZ to rise or fall and there is no chance for redress unless they are actively providing investment advice. Otherwise it is just hearsay.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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,
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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