* Posts by Charlie Clark

12110 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007

UK has data adequacy issues? Oof, that's too bad! says Isle of Man

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Coat

Re: Not sure they can offer that much

Given that the Isle of Man will be behind Cornwall and Scotland in the queue for food supplies

Let them eat cake, surely?

All is swell at Dell: Look, first storage share gain since closing EMC deal

Charlie Clark Silver badge

VMWare remains the most valuable part

Approx. 33% margins compared to less than 10% on everything else.

As with all other US companies sales in non-dollar markets have benefitted over the last year from the weaker dollar.

FYI: Qualcomm hasn't given up on Arm-based Windows 10 slabtops

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: But can it run Linux?

Given how compelling these devices look, I suspect full Linux builds will be available soon enough.

The lack of a need for binary code compatibility or emulator make these particularly suitable for non-Windows machines. As always, it will be the quality of the drivers, especially power management, that make or break them.

Apple WWDC: There's no way iOS and macOS will fully merge as one

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Dark Mode?

Maybe it's getting buffed in anticipation of OLED screens for MacBooks?

UK Foreign Sec BoJo asks tech firms to save endangered species

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Tech as the cause

A lot of the problems with habitat's can be attributed to tech: mining directly, obviously, and indirectly because it provides a livelihood, and I use the term advisedly, for people who then go onto to compete for resources with the local wildlife.

You know what your problem is, Apple? Complacency

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Just more BS

But my favourite OS is still Snow Leopard

I found that to be awful initially with lots of issues related to switching to x86_64 as standard and it seems they've continued to fuck up Bluetooth since then on a regular basis. The few releases have been pretty smooth except for the dumbing down: I switched to BusyCal atfer Calendar became too clever and the Disk Manager thing has become a toy.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Quality, not features

Why can't I just type in 01234 567 890 or 010 56 52 58 and the app accepts the spaces for what they are instead of deleting them.

It doesn't actually delete them, which I would understand and it definitely does some normalisation so that it can check them against I-Message (which I never use because I'm never logged in). But more control would be welcome: options for as entered, country standard, personal standard would be my preference.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Quality, not features

Mac contacts auto formats phone numbers to US format.

You can at least set this.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Just more BS

All they want to do is make as much margin for as little cost base as possible.

Is true of pretty much any manufacturer. But you forgot to throw in the walled garden, where they have even higher margins.

But the hardware is generally excellent. Last year I bought a new MacBookPro and went with the 2015 model which isn't full of stupid. At the time, there was nothing with comparable hardware specs (particularly battery and weight) for the price and I currently use all the ports with the HDMI suprisingly producing a signal good enough to survive transition via a DVI KVM to drive a 4K monitor. It's the hardware and the UnixOS without a relatively stable UI that makes it an attractive proposition for developers.

But I've never had and I-Phone or an I-Pad. I love my Kobo Aura One, my Samsung S5 and my new Planet Gemini, even if the latter could do with some of Apple's fit-and-finish.

I do think that Apple does need to up their game and get back to innovating, but with the money they're making they must be doing something right.

Microsoft commits: We're buying GitHub for $7.5 beeeeeeellion

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Alternatives?

I've ben using BitBucket for years (before there was GitHub), initially because it was the service I was recommended and it used Mercurial, which I prefer but YMMV, but later on because I compared the T&C's and business models: BitBucket always had a revenue stream which gave it focus and less of a need to pimp user data; GitHub's business model was always hoping to find a way to monetise user data. And now it looks like they've succeeded. You can do a back of an envelope calculation as to how much MS thinks your code and programming metadata are worth for when they fold the service in LinkedIn and try and sell metrics to employers.

GitHub used to have the richer ecosystem for things like CI but these are now generally available for any (git) repo and BitBucket has continued to add its own features such as Pipelines.

Half of all Windows 10 users thought: BSOD it, let's get the latest build

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: They say history repeats itself.

XP and everything after still has the NT spaghetti-code kernel

NT's kernel wasn't that bad until they decided to put all the drivers in it so that it would run faster on x86 hardware rather than get Intel to make better chips. Still, it's not the kernel that's the problem but the multitude of APIs they've added, changed and broken over the years.

Charlie Clark Silver badge
WTF?

Re: They say history repeats itself.

By allowing the core components of Windows to be open source, it'll help to create unofficial 'bare bones' forked editions of Windows which is fully legacy-compatible

This contradicts your initial in two ways: firstly, the unofficial versions would either be licensable, in which case they would compete with revenue; or not, which would make them useless for most users. Anyway, adding stupid UX shit to Windows has been common practice by OEMs for years.

More sense might be to open source the kernel, like Apple has done with Darwin. But seeing as Microsoft did make the whole source code available to selected users und the "shared code" initiative, it might be a bit moot as to whether this would be beneificial.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: They say history repeats itself.

Windows update comes along and it will fix some bit of bad code…

Drivers have had to be signed since Vista so the old excuse of blaming developer isn't really available. For the customer it doesn't really who broke what but that something is broken. If this was because developers did something that they could get away with then Microsoft is just as much as fault for making this possible in the first place and presumably not by documenting correctly and signing the driver.

I suspect security versus is at the basis of this particular issue, as it is for so many.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: They say history repeats itself.

Plenty of issues going from XP to 7

Not something I commented on, I was referring to updates over the lifecycle of the OS. Anyway, strictly it was XP to VIsta, which told you your hardware wasn't good enough, to 7. If the hardware was good enough for Vista abysmal presentation manager then 7 should have been a breeze.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: They say history repeats itself.

Windows 10 seems to have had a lot of problems. I don't remember Windows 7 being so difficult. I only run it in a VM but it seems pretty stable.

The most recent Windows 10 release was a pig. A friend of mine spent some considerable time trying to find out why she could no longer scan using her Samsung/HP All-in-One. Eventually HP's support admitted that the scanner driver was broken by the Windows 10 Update.

Uber 'does not exist any more' says Turkish president

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Stop

Re: Good. Lyft, Uber & their ilk suck arse.

Most mini-cab and taxi drivers are also self-employed. No different to Uber, etc.

Except for the small matter of being able to set their fees: Uber drives fees down by encouraging more drivers. It's good for Uber and possibly good for passengers, unless they suffer at the hands of one of the unlicensed drivers…

The practice of auctioning taxi licences is iniquitous but Uber and co is not the solution.

Experts build AI joke machine that's about as funny as an Adam Sandler movie (that bad)

Charlie Clark Silver badge

I thought research was suggesting that laughter fulfills a social function and is not restricted to primates.

Certain forms of humour do rely on fear – Feydeau said that the difference between farce and tragedy is timing – as exemplified in slapstick: we anticipate the custard pie or the anvil… That is laughter and humour are related but not the same.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

A couple of series of The Infinite Monkey Cage debunked this when one of the panelists discussed laughter among her lab rats, including things like anticipatory laughter when she entered the room. So, yeah the premise of the research is flawed: humour == laughter.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Ben Stiller's stand-up can be very good. But the translation to film often fails.

Artificial intelligence... or advanced imitation? How DeepMind used YouTube vids to train game-beating Atari bot

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: overfit?

A true AI would look at one video, then play the game several times to get the hand of it.

Have you ever seen kids learning like that? I see lots of very basic repetition.

Just as we don't need to overvalue Machine Learning, there's no need denigrate it at every opportunity. Personally, I can lots of opportunities for this kind of technology in taking over routine and repetitive tasks currently performed by people.

Foolish foodies duped into thinking Greggs salads are posh nosh

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Wait a minute

I think it might have been someone working for SugaRape magazine.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: No coffee I bet

The competition for shitty coffee at a high price is incredibly strong:: basically most places use beans that are not suitably roasted.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

I once watched somebody deep fry and eat a lettuce.

In Glasow University Students Union you could get deep-fried pizza! No, I never tried: frying in batter is strictly for fish. And spam!

Telegram crypto-chat chap says Apple has 'restricted' its app updates worldwide

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Bye bye Apple?

Moving to apple's platform itself

What if your contacts don't have that option? And what about the encryption? I thought Apple only ensured private key encryption on the devices themselves?

Don't read this, Oracle... It's the rise of the open-source data strategies

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Groan

There's also the performance issue. Mongo & pals are fine for small DBs

Size isn't the limiting factor: it's whether you're getting transactional and data integrity. This is what companies need and what they pay for. NoSQL is okay for stuff you don't need to access Right Now™

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Groan

It also misses the growth in $s of things like SAP's HANA and Oracle's equivalent. Yes, the do the oldest trick in the book and stick everything in memory but companies don't care how it works just as long as it works.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: 'Nuff Said

It’s a quite.

Nice typo, but I think that Asay does work for the MongoDB company. Or has at least in the past. I do wish El Reg would stop carrying his articles and give more space to the guy who does at least seem to understand how DBMS actually work.

Charlie Clark Silver badge
FAIL

'Nuff Said

When I joined MongoDB

So this is a puff piece to pimp your employer? That explains the complete lack of reasoned assessment of different technologies and other unfounded assertions, such as open source databases requiring less hardware.

Internet engineers tear into United Nations' plan to move us all to IPv6

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: how IPv6 address and parameter configuration follows the KISS principle?

Yes, ITU is probably wrong. So is IP6, we need an IP8, with security & privacy designed in.

This brings two things to mind: the ilusion of sunk cost; and the illusion that the next version will solve all the problems of the current version.

There's no doubt that IPv6 isn't perfect, but, as the implementations show it does at least work and we have worked how to have both protocols working together.

Regarding going back to the drawing board I suggest that not only would this lead to the same kind of delay that we've seen with IPv6, but also that it wouldn't get traction. IPv6 installations are already big enough to dominate the near future, ie. industry will enforce IPv6 as a de facto standard. Much better to be thinking of ways of updating the protocols in the future with less disruption.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: The reason for lack of IPv6 adopton

Hm... faster by design? Or a separate stack which is practically empty all of the time?

The "stack" is conceptional only – you're still moving electrons, photons or radio waves through the same propagator, with the same constraints.

It is certainly possible that a pure IPv6 setup could be faster due to better routing, but I suspect anecdotals comparisons are likely to have other causes.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: failed, not

So v6 can continue to grow at that rate

This is a dumb assumption. I think the only safe thing you can say about IPv6 adoption is that it will be erratic. Some carriers and countries will adopt wholesale while others avoid it. At some point there is likely to be an (or many) inflection point where adoption picks up significantly. This could be for technological (end of the road for NAT), regulatory, or financial (it becomes cheaper to run only IPv6 kit), but the important thing is minimal disruption to users.

Samsung escapes obligation to keep old phones patched

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Odd judgment

Declaring that the suit cannot cover future actions seems a bit of sophistry and to fly in the face of other consumer protection legislation. Does anyone know whether it's possible to appeal against the decision? Otherwise I suspect an initiative to improve consumer protection legislation in the Netherlands is the way to go. This is going to happen sooner or later as software gets into more and more products. Giving manufacturers a get out of jail free card like this isn't going to wash forever.

Cold call bosses could be forced to cough up under new rules

Charlie Clark Silver badge

And isn't Lord Ashcroft against this kind of regulation? Not that he has any kind of influence…

Charlie Clark Silver badge

But there is literally no solution

Au contraire there are well-established ways of dealing with this kind of abuse, see previous post for an example.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Follow the money...

Indeed. And you can include the telephone networks in there and make them potentially liable for providing access to the network for known offenders. This is done in Germany and is surprisingly effective at blocking even international dialers.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Money owed to the ICO is just a debt and debtors are protected by bankruptcy law. Do you think the lawmakers knew this when they drafted the law? They surely wouldn't want a toothless regulator, would they?

Russia to Apple: Kill Telegram crypto-chat – or the App Store gets it

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: I do not imagine Apple will take long.

As I understand it Russia's GDP is about the same as California's, or Belgium and the Netherlands combined.

More significant is the very poor distribution of that GDP, much of which finds its way into overseas accounts pretty quickly. This significantly limits the disposable income of many.

Going after Telegram is about the signal (sic) it sends to other rich ex-pats: we know where you live.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: I do not imagine Apple will take long.

The most recent stats show decrease of alcohol consumption per capita by a factor of more than 2.

Last stats I saw showed that the average life expectancy for men was still in decline and significantly below OECD norms. But this stuff is all relative. Putin has weathered the double-whammy of lower oil prices and sanctions reasonably well and most Russians still compare their situation with 1990 – 2000. The cloud on the horizon are those born after 1990, but they're still a tiny percentage and, of thouse, a signficant number are of the usual nationalist persuasion.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: What about iMessage?

What about an app that simply encrypts over other's channels

Not sure what you're suggesting but SMS runs over systems controlled by the networks. I suppose you could shard an encrypted message like this but you've still got a problem of distributing the keys. I suspect it's only a matter of time until Telegram manages to put the necessary components on something like TOR which is more or less unblockable.

But this has never been about the technology. Russia is a mafia state and the people who set up Telegram refuse to kowtow to Vlad. This usually means a holiday in Siberia along with special bank account.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: I do not imagine Apple will take long.

Russia is China and the Russian market is not that big. Russia has a few very rich people and the rest are musiks. Apple can probably get more from the PR of not going along. After all, unlike Android, there is no replacement store so if the App Store gets pulled, there is no store and no way to provide updates.

Activists hate them! One weird trick Facebook uses to fool people into accepting GDPR terms

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Wonder what would happen

I don't think that will happen as the stockholders will have a fit about the drop in income/profit for even just a month.

Handy then that Zuckerburg has a perpetual controlling interest in Facebook. This is the case with most of the Silicon Valley darlings.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Wonder what would happen

Are there european social networks that would explode over night?

I'm not sure there needs to be. Growth over the last couple of years has been in messengers, particularly WhatsApp, and fashion-darling Instagram. WhatsApp is currently limited by use of the Signal protocol as to what Facebook can mine it for, though that is changing, but there are numerous drop-in replacements. For YouTube there is Vimeo.

Basically, it would be bad business to let users find out that they can live quite well without the snooping.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Big-Tech vs Big-Tobacco vs Banksters

GDPR is a mere experiment, no one knows how the law will shake out...

Hardly an experiment. It's EU law with the ECJ as ultimate arbiter. It's been drafted based on cases with non-EU companies, which is why fines can be turnover based. Previous ECJ judgments against non-EU companies have been upheld.

Seeing as how easy it is to persuade people that "they've nothing to hide" I don't see why companies aren't being smarter about this.

USA needs law 'a lot like GDPR' – says Salesforce supremo Marc Benioff

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: It already has a law a bit like it

The funny thing with the US is that there are reasonably strong controls over what the government can do with the data of US citizens but virtually nothing about companies. Hence, the idea that several companies like to tout about personal data being a tradable commodity. They always neglect to say that individuals will never be told the true financial value of any data they provide. Handy that.

Trump’s new ZTE tweet trumps old ZTE tweets that trumped his first ZTE tweet

Charlie Clark Silver badge

What's really funny is if he makes a deal with North Korea he will claim it is great

That, and getting Mueller off his back, is pretty much all he cares about. Rounds 1 and 2 already went to Kim Jong Eun and China is making a packet running the book but if Trump gets a summit and a promise to disarm out of it, he'll be off to the next photo opportunity, probably on the Mexican border…

Charlie Clark Silver badge

fucked the Paris agreement probably irreperably which will likely result in billions of deaths over the next century; fucked the Iran nuclear deal which will probably result in major wars in the middle east, possibly including nuclear war

Looks like you've been sucked in.

Trump's main actions have been tax reform and regulation repealing. So, expect a resurgence of dodgy financial products, wildcat oil and gas exploration and a return to 1980s and 1990s levels of water and air pollution.

Most of the international stuff has yet to come fully into effect. For example, withdrawing from the Paris accord doesn't happen before next year. The Iran thing will only cause problems if the US decides to enforce secondary sanctions. Shouting at China and North Korea has handed them the initiative (China has already lifted some energy restrictions on North Korea). Not that I think Trump gives a shit where golf clubs or Make America Shite Again caps are made.

Chief EU negotiator tells UK to let souped-up data adequacy dream die

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: The Thing With Brexit

And cake, don't forget the cake!

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Irish abortion referendum.

The French only voted 51% in favour of creating it.

Fortunately, this meant that the French government didn't have to offend sensibilites by pointing out that referendums have no legal force in France.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Well, duh

Can't be done. Not in todays world where countries need to work together. Total exit is unrealistic.

In that case, which idiot signed the request to do just that without a plan b? Nobody in the EU would have given a shit if the UK took ten years or longer to work out what it was going to do before enacting the clause to leave the union. But the Tory press would have gone ape shit and that's all that seems to matter.

As things stand the request was made, and the UK has about five months to come up with a workable arrangement for a transition period that is acceptable every single of the other 27 member states.

Businesses brace themselves for a kicking as GDPR blows in

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Even more incentive to bury it.

Companies that suffer data protection breaches don't tend to be very good at keeping stuff quiet, sort of goes with the territory. In many cases seecurity breaches must already be reported and failure to do so can come with harder sanctions than those the ICO can offer, starting with a couple of nights in chokey.

What GDPR does, as with much recent EU legislation, is establish the principle of being responsible for the behaviour of suppliers. This is going to be painful for many to set up but makes a great deal of sense because large companies will find it hard to wheedle their way out by blaming poorly chosen suppliers.

If only we'd such principles in Seveso or Bhopal…