Posts by Charlie Clark

Re: Is this the same in other large corporations?

For example, I wouldn't be surprised if this was not uncommon in workplaces where the testosterone level was quite high

I know a few women who prefer that kind of environment to one where the oestrogen levels are high. There might not be any sexual harassment but women-only environments can be just as toxic: people can be real shits to each other.

Not that this is an excuse for the behaviour, because there isn't one.

Re: Don't Play Well With Others

It's Google's responsibility to maintain a professional environment.

Maybe — I'm not sure if this is legally definable let alone enforceable but be that as it may — the big problem is it can only do something if it knows about it. If you can't provide evidence that complaints were made and ignored then there is no case.

Also, going after the company in a civil suit rather than the individuals smacks of ambulance-chasing for a bigger payout. Sure, that's the American Way™ but it's hardly suited to changing behaviour.

FWIW recently a friend of mine received a fairly obscene image from a colleague. It was tasteless, uninvited and well beyond anything you can laugh off, ie. bordering on harassment, which is a criminal offence and should be reported to the police.

But I've no idea what to do when F1 goes to Sky full time next year.

Put a bag of angry wasps over your head?

I'd say it's age-old trope found in many comic sketches, though with an idiot savant or an animal.

Re: @ Charlie Clark

It exists to make trade flow freely, and with the lowest tarifs and taxes possible.

It patently isn't because that would exclude all the many free trade agreements that do exist. The WTO is a low common deominator arrangement with reciprocity and non-exclusivity agreements. For example, Trump's proposed increases on steel and aluminium import tariffs must apply to all imports, not just those from China.

But the fact that the WTO has managed little or no progress over the last twenty years is what is driving the regional trade and service agreement.

But, facts, who needs them when you got unicorns?

Re: @ Charlie Clark

So your argument against Brexit is that it will deprive British businesses of cheap foreign labour to exploit?

Research tends to show that the immigrants are not displacing local workers so the wage level is not the main factor in most situations. Many of the employers will tell you that they cannot find local workers to do the work at any price. It could be lack of skills such as doctors or nurses but it could also be that people aren't prepared to do some of the back-breaking work that immigrants will do.

Low wages are driven more by the "Walmart effect" of low prices driving wages down. If we want milk to cost 50p a litre (or whatever it is) we either expect people to earn a pittance or be replaced by robots. Hint, post-Brexit expect more jobs to be done by machines.

Re: Infrastructure

M60 - opened in 1960 as the M62

That'll come as a shock to the Scousers and Tykes who still use the M62 to between Liverpool and West Yorkshire. It was the M63 that got turned into the Manchester ring road but this did involve a lot of work just for the project as the M63 was initially tiddly.

Re: @ Charlie Clark

The amusement being that it is barely rising from an all time low.

Tell that to those who've been forced off the figures into low-paid, shit work. Unemployment is lower and so are wages.

the UK is years ahead of the EU in economic recovery

If you take the whole of the EU then you're talking shit, as usual. The non-UK part never contracted as much as the UK as 2008-2018 comparisons show. In some countries like Greece things got a lot worse, of course, a tragedy for those concerned but also a very Greek tragedy with land reform, ending restrictive practices, etc. continually being deferred. A big problem for all countries is poor wage growth.

Gove is just a Murdoch meat puppet.

I thought Lady MacGove, aka Sarah Vine, worked for that bastion of Britishness, The Daily Mail? Hence, the idea that subsidies for large landowners like Paul Dacre are such a great way to preserve the countryside. Along with fox-hunting, grouse-shooting and land-clearances, of course!

Re: @ Charlie Clark

why would the EU's stance on freedom of movement

Because it's part of the negotiations: if the UK wants vets, fruit pickers, nurses, doctors, plumbers, etc. it will have to give them the same rights to settle as they have under existing agreements. Otherweise expect the EU to play even harder ball with things like reciprocal tax arrangements, including making it even less atrractive to work in the UK that it will be already. For example, it'd be easy enough to make such workers pay tax in the own country on anything they earn in the UK. Course, there are a couple of million in sub-saharen Africa jumping at the chance to work in cold, wet fields in the winter.

But you know this already: "regulatory alignment" means keeping things as they are (except the UK losing voting rights) but just keeping it out of the Mail and the Telegraph. There isn't really any time between now and January 2021, when you're out the door, to do any of these negotiations, let alone by the end of October, which is when a transitional agreement will have to be done by.

The fuckwits in the government running have added to the handicap by pissing off a lot of the more talented civil servants who Whitehall, who are the ones you need to get the details.

But who cares as long as Johnny Foreigner fucks off and Bojo drives the magic bus round the country with cash and G&Ts for everyone. Oh, happy days!

Wasn't this the speech where he promised farmers would still have access to EU labour? I guess he just "forgot" to note that the EU has already said that freedom of movement is non-negotiable.

I like the idea that because Tim Berners-Lee is a Brit, it follows somehow that the WWW was British, conveniently ignoring the fact that he was working for CERN at the time. You know, one of those hated multinational bodies.

Still, if people are prepared to believe that the magic money pot will allow them to spend the same money on the NHS, better transport, farm subsidies and now broadband, then pillocks like Gove will still continue to tell them.

Re: Hydrogen is a terrible

I was surprised with the CH₄ reduction idea anyway. I thought the best candidate was CO₂ + H₂O to CH₄ which requires less power and is easy to store. You can then go from this to H₂ via methanol in a fuel cell if you want but basically LPG is good enough.

There are two problems with this: it requires energy input which makes it uneconomic at the moment unless you take duty into consideration but doing this would make it an ideal candidate for fraud. Mind you, electric vehicles are currently already heavily subsidised when compare with petrol due to the lack of duty.

But I'm not a scientist and haven't looked at this in detail for many years, so please do correct me!

Re: Wedded to Intel

The issue is not the cross platform nature - it generally worked well

All the way until 3.5 when MS moved lots of stuff into the kernel for better performance on x86. This effectively killed off support for other architectures because the microkernel was lost.

I would've thought the screen would swivel outwards so you could hold it with the screen facing you

The design was always supposed to be similar to the Psion 5. There are mechanical reasons for this not least a stable centre of gravity when typing with both hands. I suspect that doing a full swivel would have added quite a bit to the complexity. Might be done in a later model, but you might be better off with something like the I-Pad-Pro or the Surface that promise a 2-in-1.

Re: Far from complete

I don't agree with this assessment I think most of us want an Android with a keyboard fro e-mail, ssh, etc. It's only a vocal few who want a full Linux on this.

Re: They are pushing...

They specifically called out Edge and Safari as always last year's news.

When it comes to standards support there is a lot to be said for this. Apple does one major release a year and has been pretty slow over the last few years to implement some of the new standards, though happy enough to try and get the world to adopt its own hair-brained shit such as the notch.

Microsoft is still struggling with the shitty internals of IE but has recently got much better at feature implementation for IE. It's even release a version of Edge for Android.

And the features are important: having support for common use cases built in to browsers can significantly reduce the amount of boilerplate JS otherwise required.

Re: So Someone Learn me....

Seems like a lot for distribution, marketing etc...

The bulk of it is profit which is why Apple has such stellar results in comparison with other phone makers. So even when the numbers disappoint it's still minting it.

Seeing as Apple also switched to OLED for the Apple Galaxy 8 I'm not so sure that Samsung is going to be left sitting on 30 million odd screens even if it didn't have some kind of penalty clause. If the stupid notch fails, Apple will just move on with the slightly tweaked Galaxy X + in the autumn. The aura will be briefly diminished but as long they can keep selling millions of whatever at their current margins, they're laughing.

Re: Presumably Android would have to be tweaked...

Google is adding official support for notches in the next version of Android though, apparently.

Nice oxymoron.

Re: Everyone wants

You're saying that like it is a good thing ("good marketing").

I'm not really saying I agree with it as a principle, merely explaining how it works. We're all susceptible to difrering degrees and for different products. Remember when someone posted a link to some kitchen gadget porn? And my allen key wrench with torque setting…

Marketing itself doesn't encourage debt. It sets aspirations but also polices them so that people know they can only afford second or third class. It's credit that encourages debt.

As for me: I'm happy on my second, second-hand S5 though I was seduced by the Gemini and sincerely hope these start turning up any time soon™.

Re: Everyone wants

I wonder how many people actually have a use case for a phone that does absolutely everything?

Nobody and it's not how they're sold. It doesn't matter if it's a phone, car or handbag, good marketing of luxury items works on the emotional side, creating a desire or even a need for the object. The technical stuff is taken as given and provides post facto justification.

This isn't to say that the technology isn't important because it is. But nobody really wants it all. Some peope will love the slow motion, others will want something else.

I did this with my S4 and while the initial process was well documented

It's probably not for the faint-hearted but the process, especially updates, has a got a lot better. I guess it's legally a grey area (no warranty) but probably worthwhile to let someone in a phone repair shop do.