Posts by Charlie Clark 12196 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007
Postgres started getting wide adoption after Sun bought MySQL and take up accelerated once Oracle got involved. Companies like Enterprise DB have long-targeted Oracle customers and have invested in developing the features and tools they need to migrate with as little effort as possible. This is borne out in the DB Engines rankings which show much stronger MoM and YoY growth for Postgres than for MariaDB. In summary, Postgres is the open source database of choice.
How it must gall them that their 'Snoopers' legislation keeps getting declared illegal
And that's by the British courts! Mind you other governments are just as shitty: the Bavarian government is pushing through warrantless surveillance. Fortunately, it's almost certain that this will also be struck down by the constitution.
We really need a scapegoat icon for commentards who favour whataboutery…
The rant was to counter the oft-held notion that the EU is some glorious club fighting tirelessly for the rights of the little man.
The bodies of the EU don't always work in concert: the Council favours national interests and champions; the Commission has to enable the single market; only the Parliament acts as a control and does have a reasonable track record here, when it can resist the dual yokes of national governments and populists.
Thanks for the update on Italian MEPs.
The unelected commissioners, though, get paid around €270K + allowances per year.
Unelected in the same way that the head of the civil service, the BBC, OfCom, etc. are unelected and probably remunerated about the same. Actually, inasmuch as the European Parliament gets a say on the commissioners, it could be argued that they are more accountable than QUANGO heads: I don't remember parliament getting a vote when the government decides which job to give to Sir Willoughby Todd Hunter-Brown!
The problem with the European Commission is less the manner of appointment or the level of pay, than the need for every country to have one and the stupid redundancy and horse-trading and patronage that goes on as a result. I'd much rather have good bureaucrats than the ex-politicians who've dominated recent intakes. 12 - 15 is probably sufficient and there should be a strict rotation principle, as there is with the ECB board and other similar bodies.
It's a marathon not a sprint.
It's was quite an achievement of the parliament to get Zuckerberg to turn up at all. He, and his lawyers, almost certainly wouldn't have agreed to attend any kind of adversial quesitioning so a hearing was all that was possible. It was the same with the US Senate except there the questions were much worse.
For Zuckerberg it was supposed to be a bit of PR (not that the users of Facebook, WhatsApp or Instagram seem to mind but the investors do) which he failed by dodging the bigger questions. What counts legally are the written answers that will be submitted by Facebook's legal team. Yes, they will have time to prepare them but they will also be legally binding and this was the aim of the hearing: Facebook has at least to some degree accepted the jurisdiction of the European Parliament.
While the parliament has its fair share of layabouts on expense accounts (Italian MEPs are fabulously well paid it turns out) it has also an impressive track record of expanding its oversight remit and has increasingly been able to distance itself from the relevant national governments, as we saw for example with roaming charges and more recently with environmental legislation.
Or is someone out there really still using or advocating the vile things?
They still tend to exist for signup services but otherwise have largely disappeared. They're a bit of a Catch 22 for signups because being able to create users is what a lot of attackers want to be able to do, hence they run lots of attacks and 2FA sort of needs bootstrapping. They are still evil but I can understand why some sites use them in these cases.
We need to stop mitigating and design a secure, stable infastructure
And what are we supposed to do in the meantime while the new secure and stable infrastructure is designed and built?
If you're running a business relevant website and worried about attacks than getting behind something like Cloudflare is one of the best investments you can make both for yourself and your customers.
Looks like this can be fixed with a firmware update
As all car companies can tell Elon, that won't wash in a US class action suit. Whether it's this or something else, it's just a matter of time until the software industry finds the legal limits of providing software updates instead of product recalls and massive compensation and legal fees.
I admire Musk but the financing of Tesla means he has absolutely no wriggle room for legal issues. But I suspect he'll still be able to sell the company at a profit to GM, Ford or Geely.
people can remember IPv4 addresses and they understand the concept of subnets and NAT
I can count the number of people I know who know what an ip address on the finger of one hand. This is the very reason for DNS or we'd all still be entering ip addresses for e-mail and gopher! I don't even need a hand to count those who know about subnets or NAT.
For the majority of home users, they don't need IPv6 (let alone want).
Speak for yourself because in many parts of the world there haven't been enough IPv4 addresses for years. It's infrastructure so people shouldn't really care whether it's IPv4 or IPv6, it should just work, but this pretty much does mean IPv6, with mandatory privacy extensions.
Hindsight is such a great thing…
Lots of the internet protocols have had trouble doing necessary updates because some of this stuff is hard™ and requirements have changed. It's a tribute to the quality of the original work that they're still in place and generally doing such a good job but you only have to look at the problems of securing e-mail transport (known for years to be a leaky sieve) to appreciate the difficulties of trying to maintain compatibility while introducing improvements. Sometimes you can't do both.
IPv6, like http/2, isn't perfect but it is in many ways an improvement over what we have.
IPv6 will be championed by the companies that want it or need it. For the rest it will probably require government legislation.
Here in Germany my understanding is that IPv6 is available from nearly all ISPs but, seeing as the majority of websites are IPv4 only, everything runs through a 6-to-4 tunnel anyway. Still, it means that the networks are ready for the rapid explosion in IP addresses that spy devices IoT will bring with it once every piece of kit we buy wants one.
I don't pay half that. (Which, by definition of averages, suggests that somewhere someone is paying twice that).
Your stats are off but I think you're ignoring all the I-Phone owners who have to spaff mucho quids a month as part of their hipster hire purchase agreements. Wouldn't surprise me to see the average monthly bill for an I-Phone household well North of £200.
I do still wonder, though, why configuration is random files of plain-text and not database-driven for almost anything.
Really?
Configuration is declarative for a reason. It makes auditing and testing a lot easier. Use databases to support deployment and maintenance and possibly to populate some templates but there some things that VCS are better suited to.
If you're willing to cede control to Kubernetes
For Kubernetes read also Ansible, Salt, Puppet, Chef, etc. But you should never cede control to these systems, you should always just be delegating.
Anyone using these systems without some form of VCS is going to be in trouble. But, of course, putting configuration information, including credentials, brings its own problems with it.
You can hardly blame him
Well, who should we blame for the favouring? I think there's certainly a case for sueing that most networks are probably too scared to take to court.
If he's only got shit to stay then he should shut up. And Congress should be on his back about this but the spineless chumps are too worried about the mid-terms to do their job.
Hasn't he fired people by tweet while president? If he has then his tweets kind of are policy.
Indeed. While some people like Scott Adams cling to the belief that Trump is a master communicator for many others it looks like what you see is what you get: Trump sees or hears something and comments on it, officially even if this contradicts previous statements or official policy. This does seem to be playing well in America as it bolsters the man of the people image that he's managed to create (a real estate billionaire who owes his fortune in no small degree to stiffing his creditors by declaring bankruptcy), ie. keeping the country in campaign mode is working. Unfortunately, government outside dictatorships such as Russia is about a bit more than campaign slogans and the pettiness of much of Trump's communications is doing lasting damage to US international and trading interests. For example, something that long looked impossible not so long ago, establishing an international payments framework with no US involvement, while still unlikely is definitely being considered. The dollar's hegemony is likely to remain unchallenged for some time yet, but expect bond yields to spike if the Europeans decide to keep trading with Iran. In fact, it was partly because Saddam Hussain talked about selling oil in Euros that the Americans decided to invade.
To date, what exactly has the Trump administration done?
Increased the national debt a lot
Pushed some people out of healthcare
Rolled back environmental and business regulations – lovely drinking water you'll have soon
Fawned to the Israelis and the Saudis
Played a lot of golf at Mar a Lago
Look at what he does, not what he says. Twitter is not policy.
Agreed but people are looking at what he does and it is an unholy mess, this is the basis of the article in the Washington Post.
The tweets always play to the base: a bunch of people either too lazy or too stupid to follow the news. But the problem is there is occasionally collateral damage as a result of his off-hand remarks and tweets, which do occasionally get given the status of official comments by the Whitehouse press department.
I think you mean cease operating but seeing as Trump has already reversed the commerce departments decision…
Still the toing and froing in the Whitehouse is only going to increase the likelihood of non-US companies hedging their bets and looking for alternative suppliers and quite possibly even opting out of dollar-pricing.
Product placement is horrible, as it destroys/damages the content.
I suspect content matters a lot here. Generic fiction is likely to attract companies pushing their high-margin brand.
But what do you think Top Gear is apart from product placement? Rinse and repeart for DIY shows. I know I'm susceptible to tips from people I consider to know what they're talking about or, influencers in despicable marketing speak.
Are you one of the same people that refuses to pay for any content on the internet too?
That's a bit of a strawman but it also beside the point: advertising is by definition wasteful. I have for years ignored all kinds of adverts especially for things like cars, which I've never owned. I'm not alone in this and this behaviour is factored into the model.
The solution isn't better targeting, it's better ads and particularly ones that don't disturb the flow. The targetting is a red herring pushed by media companies hoping that advertisers won't demand lower rates once they realise things are just as inefficient as they always were. This is one of the reasons why Instagram is doing so much better than Facebook's own ad networs, because, given a choice most sellers would prefer to be able to talk directly to the customer.
And if you're on a SIM only contract, it's *your* problem when that old phone no longer works....
A contract is still a contract, ie. one-sided changes by the networks can still be considered to be breaches of contract. But actually the networks are more constrained by the terms of the spectrum licences.
Networks used to hawk phones to pimp their technology: SMS, MMS, 3G, GPS, etc. It then used to use new phones to pimp renewals as way of keeping ARPU up. Now that so many of us have phones that are good enough, the codependency no longer makes sense. This should cause networks to start pimping their services as T-Mobile had done in the US by partnering with providers to promote an "unlimited" service with lower bandwidth. We'll see more of this with vertical integration and deals providing the cross and upselling for higher margins.
There's still money to be made in handsets, as the volume of high-end sales shows, but as the article points out, manufacturers may have to compete against themselves to make sure they get the customer.
There's still a lot of room for technological advances in handsets: better battery life, screens that cope better with ambient light, foldable, etc. but this may mean the risk of fragmenting the market. Still the ubiquity of the modern mobile phone highlights its importanct and, hence, sustained demand. It just won't be driven by contract renewals.
Decentralized always has strings attached: usually in the form of slow transfers and bandwidth overhead.
I'm not sure this applies to the reasonably decentralised internet infrastructure. Although it's by design, signing a new transaction using the ledger of every other transaction so far is bound to be slow. But the fundamental problem with a distributed system is that it cannot be relied upon to secure itself.
The current series of Silicon Valley touches on this quite nicely in the episode "Inital Coin Offering".
The internet did a pretty good job of providing a set of reasonably trustworthy DNS servers while giving members the chance to run their own. It's just such a pity that it failed to do something similar for encryption, but that was more down to politics than anything else.
Who wants an effin notch in the first place?
No one it's just that suppliers bet on it becoming standard so all the screens are being turned out with one. Remember 3D TVs? I hope it's going to be a like that and we'll have largely forgotten them in a couple of years.
Hope Samsung or someone else goes on the offensive about not having a notch as I think there might be mileage in that.
I want to know when they will be affordable for an average guy, like me?
Why would you want to buy one, when you can call one up at the snap of your fingers? Or even better get one to take little Timmy swimming and bring him back.
The economics for manufacturers of higher yields are compelling. The vast majority of cars are stationary for over 90% of the day and this is a huge drag on the economy because it means providing huge areas of concrete for the tin cans to wait on. I suspect we're likely to see charges for parking spaces to start rising in anticipation of this and this will favour cars that don't spend all day in the same place and/or have additional sources of revenue.
I think this a mix of supply chain realities, product lines and PR.
It will be difficult to source some components that come either from US manufacturers or from suppliers unwilling to piss off the Trump regime. ZTE doesn't just make phones, and in some markets there are not a lot of suppliers. This may mean dropping some lines to focus on others. ZTE is very close to the army so bankruptcy isn't likely. But there is no doubt political capital in China to be gained from portraying ZTE as the victim of fairly vicious sanctions. As with the withdrawal from the Iran deal, the message to the rest of the world that the US is sending is that it can't be trusted to keep its word.
While Trump will be able to spin this domestically as a demonstration of US power, it's almost certainly at least one nail in the coffin of US hegemony, particular in the Far East.
Project Treble is supposed to make future updates a lot easier but is itself a lot of work. LOS 15.1 has been officially available for some months now and will hopefully become the stable version over the summer. It would then not surprise me to see LOS 16 based on Android P becoming available before the end of the year, as a real test of how well Treble works.
I agree with Barry. Material Design has made things more consistent, true, but usability continues to degrade.
I can't help thinking there's a certain amount "who's moved my cheese" in these statements. For years, apart from occasionally having to search within preferences, I haven't had any significant issues with Android and have appreciated some improvements and attention to detail. I'm still on Android 7 / LineageOS 14, but have LOS 15 working on a backup phone and it looks fine so far. Have to wait for the proper release for my S5 for a real opinion.
The problems I do have are with apps with all kinds of settings all over the place and the increasing feeling that developers rarely use their own apps.
I doubt I am alone in finding that Google products in general, and Android in particular, become less user friendly and more irritating with every version.
Can't agree there I think that since Material Design Android has become more conistent and usable even if there are always things that I can find.
How do you intend to avoid colours similar to well known brands?
A good design agency will know how to check before they submit a pitch because things like the Pantone will pop up pretty quickly. In reality, this isn't much different to things like checking the name or typeface being used.
If you think this is stacked against small businesses then you'd be right but this is true for pretty much the whole area of IP. I'm not advocating this just trying to explain how it works.
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