Posts by Charlie Clark 12184 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007
Pandas uses Numpy for all its data structures but it is terrible at indexing, which is why it's usually better to create new dataframes. Polars (written in Rust) uses Apache Arrow for dataframes, which means no memcpy(). The API looks a lot cleaner than Pandas all singing and dancing one.
VBA may have been well-intentioned but it's probably one of the worst decisions Microsoft made with Office. Too difficult for the Office-scipt kiddies and too much of a toy for the programmers. The limitations are one of these reasons why tools like Pandas were developed. Since then Excel has become less and less of a runtime and more and more merely a reporting format.
Someone from Microsoft has already been in touch to let me know that the Python code will be serialised as text in the files. This will make it possible to share whatever is required for the report. Need to decide whether I'll expose this or just preserve it in the Excel archive.
While Pandas is an example of feature creep it has helped millions of people to do things they struggled to do, usually in Excel, before. R may have its fans but I know a number of people who've dropped it for Python because of the other stuff they need to do.
Pandas itself is getting a rewrite but alternatively there is Polars (written in Rust) which has the same idea but without the cruft.
As posts on Twitter are public by default, the whole blocking thing was always a bit weird. If I make a statement that is then publicly available, why should I then try and restrict access? Muting always made more sense (so people don't see some of the sometimes very hurtful comments about what they've written) but wasn't implemented. This still begs the question as to why go on a public forum if you're afraid of the comments? However, I don't think engineering will be the reason for this decision, not least because most of the engineers have left.
Telegram lets you do both, though, as it doesn't default to a telling the world everything, has less of a problem with trolling.
The age of the lanugage isn't important but I'd agree that Java isn't a great target language. Then neither is Rust. Python might make a better fit conceptionally and for users though it's even "older" than Java. However, IBM/RedHat wants to make money through it's awful JBoss environment.
When was the last time the US bothered about cartels? Electricity market? Nope. Rail freight? Nope. Telephony? Nope. Content Creation? Nope. Airlines? Nope (and you have two-way cartels there because of the monopsody of the owners).
ARM already effectively as a cartel but it could be argued that the open licence model is an example of a well-managed cartel industry body as opposed to say MPLA or the USB consortium and the rest.
Unless Softbank is prepared to offer a majority stake, I don't see the big players biting. What Son maybe hoping for is private equity and hedge funds willing to bet that they'll be more successful with the same trick.
The risk is that, in order to keep the price high, he offers too little stock for anyone to want it. Post-launch prices and volumes will probably be a good indication as to whether more sales will follow.
Your statement is essentially one of hindsight. 20 years ago there was plenty of opportunity for a Roscosmos to expand in and beyond satellite launch and this could have driven a new generation of engineers as has happened in both India and China but also Japan and South Korea, and eventually even the US. But politics meant that "no one will ever need a rocket more powerful that 640 kBa Proton".
It's the same in other fields: medicine, software (Yandex, Vkontakte, Telegram are expections), munitions, drive trains, avionics. Even essentials things like oil pumps and gas turbines can't be developed and maintained by Russians.
While I think sanctions are working, I don't think this failure is evidence of it. Russia has been losing well educated engineers for years: Putin has never really cared about science so there's no money in it and fewer people study it. They're technology has hardly moved on from Soviet stuff which is why, for example, they're importing drones from Iran.
Yes, I have used phones as a hotspot, which is why I don't think they're that suitable for this situation which is suggesting multiple devices, just watch your throughput go down when a couple of juniors start watching their TikTok shit. But in addition to data, you've also got the problem that the device has to be around all the time. Again, if this is for a family on holiday, you can't take your phone with you.
I was thinking of the Amazon Prime stick or similar, for which HDMI is their only screen. Don't use one myself but can still often connect the phone for a few services, though the "second screen" detection bug seems to be spreading. For a while I could run stuff from Samsung's DeX which mirroring was banned. Doesn't really cause me too many problems for time- or geoshifting but annoying all the same.
Running a phone as hotspot kills the battery and is pretty impractical in this theoretical situation, 4G/5G routers make more sense.
But I'm trying to think what this offers over a simple monitor perhaps with one of the myriad HDMI sticks and power from a good old 12v car battery. I guess the only challenge is the voltage regulator so you give the monitor what it wants. Worked for us in the 1980s (well, without the internet).
I don't understand the point you're making: you think it was right of Microsoft to remove the option? You then agree that without this add-on the change is difficult to manage? And why can't users disable automapping themselves? In IMAP I regularly choose which folders to subscribe to.
I'm used to both but actually thing this would be trivial with a series of checkboxes in a GUI and shared mailboxes is not necessarily a bacth operation. One of the reasons we have GUIs is because people cannot remember text commands very well. I do a lot of work with keyboard shortcuts, but if I don't use something at least once a week I'm likely to spend more time trying to remember the shortcut than doing it with a mouse.
As it happens I have a couple of Pi's in use, think they're great but consider them totally unsuitable for this kind of task. And the company I work with also hosts most of our applications including, at my request, a Gitlab server. So, I understand quite well what's required.
Not just Teams, but the other hosted alternatives really aren't much better. Microsoft is doing a fine job of destroying the competition through its tried and tested tactic and giving it to corporates as part of their office subscriptions and waiting for network effects. It's another okay service but has the distinction of being able to get my machine to lose it's local ethernet connection! ifconfig can't help me there, have to suspend the machine and wake it after a minute.
You can on to tell us how smug you're feeling? Really?
I had to use Zoom for somethings but did it in the browser only. Quality was okay and it had some nice features, so I can understand why it became popular. But I agree that the "the user is the product" was clear from the start. But, what are the alternatives for those not able or willing to host their own server?
Indeed, companies like this are probably the rule rather than the exception. There are a great many US companies that owe their continued existence to dupes and/or financial engineering. One of the advantages of a return to real interest rates is that it makes some of the schemes harder to keep going, which is why investment companies are screaming for interest rates to come down again.
The sophistication of the bot correlates almost directly to the expected reward on the site. This is why the overwhelming majority are simple CURL (or similar) scripts looking for login pages and similar. These can be spun up to operate at scale to find potential targets for more sophisticated attacks that will use more reasonable IP addreses, credible referrers and timings and even real browsers. For the people running the attacks it's often worthwhile finding out which kind of protection is in use. Modern AI-bots can simulate human interaction enough to avoid detection but the costs of doing this are real.
To their credit, Google realised fairly early on that CAPTCHAs were being beaten by fairly simple OCR and/or terminal monkeys. This is why ReCAPTCHAs use different heuristics that simple image recognition to differentiate between meatware and software. But they're all annoying and will generally drive legitimate users away. They tend to come in waves for me and, when they're too many I use the NopeCHA extension to solve them for me, or I give up on the service. As I do with anything that tries to force me to use one of the Kraken to log in.
The Raspberry's pricing policy put it at the back of the line when supply chains collapsed. Reduced supply by constant demand means higher prices and the demand remains high for the reasons you give: projects that started on RPi 1s can run largely unchanged on RPi 4s and take advantage not only of faster processors but, more importantly, better IO. This kind of stability in essential in any industrial supply chain, and industry is probably the biggest buyer of RPi for prototyping the myriad of embedded devices in consumer and industrial equipment.
Not really. The last 50 years or so have shown that subsidies rarely end up being good policies: they don't really protect jobs and the money tends to disappear. If your neighbours are engaging in such policies it's often best to buy from them (and help them ruin their budgets) and put some of the money that would have been wasted in subsidies into other schemes.
It can make sense to support new developments, and social programmes are essential during industrial decline. But things like the current German plans, and even more the various recent US programmes are lunacy. And I say this as Keynesian.
You can see the attraction for off-grid use but it becomes a real "tragedy of the commons" / "beggar thy neighbour" as population density increases. I saw on WDR last year that they're going down to 15 m near Dormage on the Rhine!
We don't have a well here but I think they were common when the house was built, but the drainpipes do run off into the garden. This means we need to do hardly any watering (but also be careful) of what we plant, and we're also doing "our bit" to prevent the sewers overflowing or backing up during a downpour. Meanwhile more and more front gardens are being paved, though it's technically now illegal, and people continue to plant things that require a lot of watering. It's not unusual to see both things practised on the same property.
The recent announcements have all been in areas which have declared water scarcity. Ground water, like many resources, is significantly underpriced in Germnany. In fact, it's usually free. I expect this to change dramatically as the water table continues its long-term declined in many areas. Though it could be worse in many countries: Spanish agriculture could come to an abrupt halt when the aquifers run dry.
Not sure it would have been much different under Labour to be honest. The lesson they "learned" from the disastrous industrial policy of the 1970s was that government should stay out of industry. There's a lot to be said for this but regulators must then be given sufficient tools.
It was mainly a corporate service, though pricing was competitive. It was good enough, which meant it didn't really offer enough over the competition to be worth keeping. One thing it didn't have when we dumped it was an easy way to share files, ie. PDFs referred to in the discussion. Easy enough to implement but if you don't have it when the customers need it, you'll get dumped.
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